In January 2022 the world was struggling out of its second pandemic winter, Omicron was filling the headlines and sport was trying to picture its future between health protocols, new markets and the great promise of the metaverse. Back then we wrote this article to line up the challenges facing sports marketing. Today we are republishing it as it was, as a record of that moment, followed by a review: what actually happened, four years on.

Updated September 2026.

In short, the review goes like this. The pandemic ended as a global emergency on 5 May 2023, and crowds came back to fill circuits and stadiums to record levels. Sport’s new geographies, from Qatar to Saudi Arabia, have consolidated, with their opportunities and their fragilities. Cryptocurrencies and the metaverse kept only part of their promises: some brands stayed, many vanished as quickly as they had arrived. And the simplest prediction, that everything depends on what happens on the track and on the pitch, turned out to be the most accurate.

The January 2022 text

We are living through interesting years. Above all, we are living through years of significant change, full of constant shifts in balance. In this perpetual redistribution of weight, in the endless search for a regularity that is frankly hard to define today, the world of sport has also turned emergency into a new everyday reality and has had to redefine itself before it could rediscover itself. As the old advertising line goes, today we have to ask ourselves, in sport as everywhere else, whether the search for normality is not itself the new normal, and whether the secret of success does not lie precisely in the constant chiselling of rules and smoothing of edges. Adapt to survive, as Darwin would have it, or better still, adapt to thrive.

The person writing these lines probably suffers, and it is rather obvious, from a fairly marked perspective bias. From Italy’s win at the European Championship to the most extraordinary Formula 1 season in living memory, from an incredible Olympic saga to a stunning year of MotoGP, the 2021 that has just left us was, in sporting terms, one of the most memorable years ever. The lesson that stadiums, tracks and arenas have left us is, in a nutshell, fairly simple: transitions, even the most painful ones, can be positive, as long as they are managed with foresight. Sport must keep changing if it wants to remain one of the entertainers par excellence in a world that is changing ever faster.

It is as intuitive as it is counterintuitive. Neither sport in general nor the galaxy that revolves around it, from sponsorship to TV rights and ticketing, is particularly fond of revolutions: change is tiring, full of surprises, and decidedly expensive both mentally and financially. Nevertheless, when it is imposed, change lights the fuse of a series of mechanisms that, although sometimes painful at first, generate largely positive results.

The COVID years and the years of fighting COVID

Make no mistake: the pandemic is obviously not the only variable in the equation. The virus has taken centre stage worldwide, thanks to the extraordinary and enduring popularity of our own and other people’s misfortunes in newspapers and magazines, but there is more to the world than COVID, and the transitions mentioned above should be understood as a general principle rather than a specific one. Just as the very recent “Don’t Look Up” with Leonardo DiCaprio is not really about a comet about to crash into our planet, COVID is at the same time the problem and the prototype of the problem itself.

Sport and sports marketing know full well that the virus has not finished its race and will keep coming back, cyclically, to the top positions of the global agenda. In essence, if the COVID years are over, the years of fighting COVID are far from disappearing for good. Health and safety protocols, bubbles, and of course the arrival of vaccines and a substantial organisational and control machine, have meant that the coronavirus is today slightly closer to an injury than to a transnational disaster: players, riders, drivers, mechanics, coaches and staff move in and out of virus-imposed quarantines on a daily basis, but the show has learned to go on.

From a sports marketing point of view, on the other hand, the pandemic has had the merit, if we may put it that way, of resetting the compass on an issue that was slipping away from professionals in the sector: the content matters far more than the container. For years, probably also because of easy enthusiasm driven by social networks and revolutionary forms of engagement, we had somewhat lost sight of the main road, which required putting sporting performance itself at the heart of sports marketing: the sporting event, the match, the race. The cancellation of races, the reshuffling of calendars and the sudden disappearance of some events have contributed to an important triage of priorities, with the staging of sport itself at the very top.

Sports sponsorship itself, in a little game worthy of Aesop in which the author of these lines is also complicit, has lately overemphasised the idea that the result is not central, in favour of a holistic view in which the return on the deal lies simply in being there at that moment and being able to activate around it. This is true, provided we do not end up saying that sponsoring Liverpool is the same as sponsoring Norwich, or that being a partner of Red Bull Racing is the same as being a partner of the Haas team.

In particular, 2022 will not be different from 2021 as far as the pandemic is concerned. The winter surge and the diabolical Omicron call for caution and are still calling the tune, but organisers have learned the score and are ready to keep time with the music. There will certainly still be a few empty stadiums and a few sparse grandstands, but in the year of the enigmatic World Cup in Qatar it is easy to imagine that a few terrace tickets will be sacrificed, rightly, so that the action on the pitch can carry on.

New physical, political and commercial geographies

The World Cup in Qatar is obviously a 2022 story, as are the Winter Olympics in Beijing, capital of the China where, two years ago, the beginning of the end started. The Arab peninsula state is not only the smallest country ever to host the planet’s biggest sporting event, but also the definitive and most tangible sign that the engine of the sports system is moving east. This does not mean that Europe has lost its relevance on the chessboard, but that markets and clients belonging to the new order have officially made their presence felt at every table that matters.

A very clear sign of this is the calendars of motorsport’s top international championships, which between MotoGP and Formula 1 include as many as 20 races away from the old continent. The reason, clearly, is the financial muscle of certain territories which, while lacking Europe’s heritage, now have the capital to become the stage for the events that matter.

Not even this tectonic shift is free of controversy, some of it well founded and some less so. The ethical and social concerns about the conditions of the workers tasked with building the stadiums and infrastructure that will host the World Cup certainly belong in the first category. Doubts remain, instead, about the recent uproar over the alleged “stitch-up” the sheikhs supposedly arranged at Italy’s expense, which would allow the phenomenon Ronaldo to take part in the tournament instead of the team that won the last continental championship. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff and sift carefully through the endless flow of information that floods our computers, phones and gadgets every day.

From the point of view of our profession, sports sponsorship, the most obvious implications of these new geographies have been clear for a long time. The top sponsors of the world’s most important properties often come from the East, Middle or Far. We should not be fooled about the reason for these partnerships, though: they are not aimed at “conquering Europe” at all, but at a positioning that is much more global and much less local. Sport has become too important a communication asset on a planetary scale to think that Saudi or Chinese groups care only about European customers: Italians, French, Germans and Spaniards are too few in number and too stagnant in economic growth to still be the object of desire for every company on the globe. To drop the metaphor, Etihad is not on City’s shirt to win over Mancunian or British fans, but to reach quickly everyone who takes even a vague interest in football, wherever they are.

It goes without saying that the activation system is also changing, and this is already happening, splitting more and more into two macro-systems. There is that of the super-sponsors, interested almost exclusively in exploiting name, image and fame rights and in top-tier visibility, and then there is that of lower-tier sponsors (an ugly phrase that deserves a worthy replacement), who will increasingly benefit from small but intense local activations including hospitality and one-to-one presence.

On cryptocurrencies and metaverses

Physical borders are not the only geography being called into question by modernity. The arrival of cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, blockchain, NFTs and other players from the financial and technology sectors has taken hold in sport with a speed the sector was not necessarily ready for. Just a few days ago Scuderia Ferrari signed a deal with Velas Network, a powerful new player in the NFT and digital wallet market. In a few years, sometimes months, brand-new companies made extremely rich by the popularity of bitcoin and the like have set out to conquer the world of sport, signing multimillion-dollar deals that have redrawn the landscape: for some they are the new tobacco, or the new banks, but the difference is in fact substantial.

Unlike more “traditional” companies (another ugly, imprecise term that gives a negative connotation to something that actually has nothing negative about it), these big new investors are deeply, and in every sense, dematerialised: they do not have a precisely declared physical headquarters, they address an often hidden and very young target audience, and they have lean structures which, despite the budgets they command, allow them extremely fast operations and sudden changes of direction. They are, in essence, a fairly unknown animal that we are still sizing up. These companies are opening the field to new types of partnership, sometimes based on the creation of dedicated NFTs or cryptocurrencies, at other times on pure brand reputation activities (as in the case of Crypto.com buying the naming rights to the Los Angeles Lakers’ arena, after sponsoring the F1 championship) and brand development, in order to stand out in a market that is rapidly becoming crowded.

Despite the doubts of some insiders and the initial cautious approaches to these little-known objects, digital finance already represents the present, and no longer the future, of sports marketing. Tomorrow, which is quite close to be honest, clearly lies in the metaverse, the mega network of connected networks that offers virtual worlds but absolutely real experiences and economies, and that represents digital’s next big thing. While big names like Meta, Amazon and Apple started gearing up for the metaverse years ago, a great many have already built, and then speculated on, the internet of tomorrow, as is happening for example on Decentraland. Big sports properties promise not to be left behind and to give their fans and stakeholders a new world of 3.0 opportunities to enjoy in the metaverse (or metaverses, depending on definitions), managed through proprietary blockchains and NFTs.

The issue now is connecting the two worlds: the hyper-virtual, highly digital world of the metaverse and the real world of sport, so closely tied to the here and now. Many see in the metaverse a new way to watch races, matches and games, thanks to virtual reality technologies, big data and real-time statistics, but doubts about the state of the technology remain, especially given the enormous amount of bandwidth some platforms would require. The metaverse instead seems a no-brainer for esports which, after surprising media exposure during the first wave of the pandemic, continue to enjoy a golden moment thanks to a constantly growing base of gamers. Video games, as we have understood for some time, are not only the medium of the future, but also the evolutionary basis for many of the technologies everyone will use in the coming years.

To conclude the reasoning on metaverses, and to put in black and white a concern that came up in a recent conversation on the subject, the hope is that there is some substance behind the smoke. The impression is that many people talk about this internet of the future but few have really understood what lies behind it and know how to manage the huge number of conditions needed to access it, such as owning a digital wallet and the like.

Back to basics

To end this perhaps somewhat disjointed overview of the themes of sports marketing in 2022, it helps to take a step back and try to grasp the big picture. As we said at the start, the pandemic lifted the lid off Pandora’s box and made many of the superstructures that modernity had placed on top of the sporting event evaporate. The months without sport itself put the emphasis back on the foundations of the sports system, namely sport itself. If there is no playing, no racing, no competing, everything else is useless. Everything else, from social media to metaverses, from geographic expansion to next-generation activations, rests on the emotion and moods generated by the champion’s performance, the beautiful piece of skill, the joy of victory, the thrill of a memorable event.

So if what happens on the field is the heart of everything, and naturally it cannot be otherwise, then competitiveness becomes extraordinarily important again and is the first thing to safeguard as we look not at the sport of 2022 but at the sport of the whole future. Those who work in sports marketing need to find mechanisms to ensure that unpredictability, spectacle, uncertainty and the duel (a sporting one, of course) are always the ultimate goal of those who organise championships, series, events and tournaments. Marketing of sport, mind you, and not sports marketing: without launching into yet another discussion of the dichotomy, suffice it to recall that the former promotes the sporting product, while the latter uses sport to promote third parties’ products or services.

It is actually a very modern theme, even if it rests on ancient foundations. Will MotoGP survive Rossi’s farewell? Can there be a World Cup without Messi or Ronaldo? Can the NBA prosper if the winners are teams far from the big markets? Clearly the answer is yes, as long as ways are always found to guarantee a great show on the track, on the grass and on the hardwood respectively. In this sense the 2021 Formula 1 championship was especially illuminating, won by Max Verstappen but above all decided on the last lap of the last race. The same sport that for years was branded a boring circus this year bewitched the world with its thrilling battles and the clash between two great champions.

The year ahead

In conclusion, the year ahead, 2022, has in fact already arrived and sets out with reasonable clarity the challenges, complexities and key issues for sport and sports marketing. Many of these challenges have been listed in the lines above, and many would deserve further analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic and the rampant Omicron variant will still be the main headline in the newspapers, but the centrality of the Gulf countries, the role of cryptocurrencies and metaverses, and the need to put competitiveness at the heart of future competitions represent the future of our profession and of its many facets.

The bottom line, as people like to say these days, is that sport and sports marketing cannot afford not to adapt to change and to the many transformations modernity presents. Indeed, they must first align with and then anticipate these trends, these difficulties and these innovations, if they want to keep the leading role they play in everyday life. Over these two years sport has led the way for the whole of society, showing that even in the middle of an emergency a way could be found to keep functioning. As everyone knows, sport is much more than a simple form of entertainment or a pastime: it is a complex social and cultural object, with a myriad of practical, concrete and vivid applications and implications.

Understanding, governing, communicating and managing these implications is probably the most important mission for the coming year and for those that follow.

Four years on: the review

Rereading an article full of predictions some time later is an exercise in humility. This is what actually happened, theme by theme.

COVID: from emergency to memory

On 5 May 2023 the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 no longer constituted a public health emergency of international concern. The prediction that the fight against the virus would last a long time proved too cautious: within a year, protocols, bubbles and empty grandstands had become a memory. The crowds came back, and in numbers never seen before: in 2025 MotoGP passed 3.6 million spectators at the circuits and Formula 1 counted 6.7 million, both records. The underlying intuition, which saw the real value in sporting content, held up well instead: streaming platforms and docuseries kept growing precisely because they had something authentic to tell.

The new geographies: consolidated, but fragile

The World Cup in Qatar was played from 20 November to 18 December 2022, the first ever in winter, and Argentina won it. Italy was not there: on 24 March 2022 it was knocked out in the playoffs by North Macedonia, and the alleged “stitch-up” talked about at the time remained one of the many rumours to be separated from the facts. The eastward shift of sport’s centre of gravity, on the other hand, was fully confirmed. Saudi Arabia launched the LIV Golf tour in June 2022, backed by the PIF sovereign wealth fund, and on 11 December 2024 it was awarded the 2034 FIFA World Cup, while Aramco has been a Global Partner of Formula 1 since 2020. But 2026 also served as a reminder of how fragile this geography is: in March the situation in the Middle East forced Formula 1 to cancel the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix.

Cryptocurrencies and the metaverse: substance and smoke

Here the verdict is harshest, and the concern expressed in 2022, the hope that there was “some substance behind the smoke”, proved well founded. On 11 November 2022 the FTX exchange filed for bankruptcy, dragging its sponsorships down with it: Mercedes suspended its Formula 1 partnership, Miami-Dade County and the Miami Heat ended the arena naming deal, and MLB dropped the FTX patch on umpires’ uniforms from the 2023 season. The deal between Ferrari and Velas, announced on 27 December 2021, was ended early by the Scuderia on 12 January 2023. The NFT market collapsed: according to DappRadar, trading volumes fell from 57.2 billion dollars in 2022 to 13.7 billion in 2024, a drop of 76%. As for the metaverse, Meta’s Reality Labs division has accumulated operating losses of more than 80 billion dollars since the end of 2020, and in January 2026 it cut more than a thousand jobs, around 10% of the division.

Not everything evaporated, though. Crypto.com, cited in 2022 as an example of investing in reputation, is still a Formula 1 partner, with a deal extended to 2030, and its name remains on the Lakers’ arena thanks to a twenty-year contract worth around 700 million dollars. The lesson is the one that applies to any sponsor: those who invest to build a brand survive, not those who ride a bubble.

Competitiveness: the simplest prediction was the right one

The question “will MotoGP survive Rossi’s farewell?” got a clear answer: in 2025 the championship reported a fanbase of 632 million people, up 12% on the previous year, and the story has moved on to new protagonists. Formula 1, after the 2021 finale, kept living on duels: the 2025 title was decided in Abu Dhabi by just two points between Lando Norris and Max Verstappen. We have also covered this in our pieces on Valentino Rossi’s last race and on cross-audience marketing between the NBA and Formula 1: the show on track remains the foundation on which everything else rests.

What it taught us

Four years on, the thread linking the four themes is the same one the 2022 text pointed to in its simplest passage: if there is no playing, no racing, no competing, everything else is useless. The pandemic made it obvious by taking sport away, the return of the crowds confirmed it by giving it back, and the crypto bubble proved it the other way round, rewarding those who had something concrete to offer. For companies that look at sport as a communication tool, the conclusion is practical: fads pass, platforms change, but the value of a sponsorship always comes from what happens on track and from how well you tell the story. If you want to understand how to apply this today, start with our guide on how Formula 1 works and our page on MotoGP sponsorship.

Sources: UN News, WHO declares the end of the COVID-19 emergency; FIFA, World Cup Qatar 2022; FIFA, hosts of the 2030 and 2034 World Cups; Sky Sports, cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian GPs; Fortune, FTX’s sports sponsorships; ESPN, Ferrari ends the Velas deal; The Block, NFT trading volumes; CNBC, Meta Reality Labs job cuts; CNBC, Reality Labs cumulative losses; CoinDesk, MLB and the FTX patches; Formula 1, Norris’s 2025 title; Formula 1, Crypto.com partner through 2030; MotoGP, the record 2025 review; BlackBook Motorsport, F1’s 2025 numbers.