It feels like there’s more discussion than usual right now around sponsorship in sport, and whether it’s “OK” for a certain type of business to partner with a sporting property e.g.
🚴♀️ British Cycling x Shell
🏏 Cricket Australia x Alinta (energy)
🏀 Netball Australia x Hancock (mining)
And I’m sure there are plenty of other examples out there.
For the governing bodies it highlights the tension they often face between their joint roles in running (governing) the sport, supporting grassroots participation and creating successful elite teams.
This all takes a lot of money and the funding they receive from Sport England and UK Sport (or their equivalents) isn’t enough on its own, so commercial partnerships are needed to help plug the gap.
And in the current global economy, guess who has plenty of money to throw around? The list above gives a bit of a clue.
So the sports need money and companies with money have their own objectives around awareness, positioning, image etc…(call it sportswashing if you like, but it’s just what sponsorship has always been about).
This is a moral maze and in an ideal world these sports wouldn’t need the money, but we’re not in an ideal world…
It comes down to a judgement call from each sport and each partner, but as a starting point they should be aware that people who watch and play sport are significantly more interested in social issues than the general population.
I pulled some stats from GWI comparing people who watch, follow or play sport (sports fans for short) with all 16-64s, across 48 global markets. This is a total sample size of over 900k so it’s going to be pretty representative.
On every measure of caring about the environment, social responsibility and equality, sports fans are several points ahead of the general population (although still under 50% in some cases…).
This partly explains why we tend to see such strong opinions when sports do decide to partner with businesses that appear to run counter to these values.
Each audience will be different of course, but this gives us a starting point (if any rights-holder or potential sponsors want to dig deeper into the data to inform their strategy, give me a shout 📣).
