Sports

Sport has customers, a product, a price, and distribution like any business, and yet it differs in everything marketing textbooks take for granted. A detergent maker guarantees that the detergent will get clothes clean. A club can’t guarantee that it will win. That’s the core: uncertainty of outcome isn’t a defect of the product; it is the product itself. If the result were known in advance, nobody would watch.

The second difference is loyalty. A customer whose washing machine lets them down switches to a competitor. A Baník Ostrava fan doesn’t switch to Sparta Prague when Baník is relegated. They stay, because the club is part of their identity, their family, and their town. For a marketer, that’s both a gift and a trap: you have an audience that can’t be poached, but also an audience that can’t be fooled. They know the club better than you do.

Third: you sell an experience, not a thing. The value of a ticket isn’t in the seat but in what happens on the pitch and in the stands. The product only comes into being when the game is played, and it’s created together with the audience. An empty stadium during the pandemic was a different product from a full Eden, Slavia’s stadium.

Fourth: the dual objective. A company optimizes for profit. A club wants to win and to survive at the same time, and the two goals often pull against each other. Some successful brands don’t win: Tottenham went 17 years without a trophy (2008–2025) and stayed in the top 10 of the Deloitte Football Money League the whole time; in the ranking for the 2024/25 season it is ninth with €672.6 million (overview on GOAL). And some winning clubs have gone bankrupt. What the dual objective costs is shown by the numbers for Barcelona and the Premier League in the section on the 8Ps. That’s why the whole lesson revolves around one sentence: in logistics, you fight for margin on predictability; in sport, the chaos is the asset.

Fifth: values as an asset. Fair play, emotion, and competing under the same rules are the whole point of sport, and at the same time goods that brands borrow, because they can’t make them on their own. The IOC sells its TOP partners the Olympic rings and values, not advertising space: the Olympic Charter bans advertising at the venues. Judo has an eight-word moral code: politeness, courage, sincerity, honor, modesty, respect, self-control, friendship. For the federation, it’s a ready-made brand manual that no strategist had to write. The reverse is also true: doping or a fixed match destroys value faster than a losing streak, because it takes away the one thing the product can’t buy: that the game is played for real.

Sport as an industry has no single boundary, and so it has no single number. Statista estimates the size of the global sports industry at roughly $417 billion in 2025; other agencies count over $500 billion, because they add apparel, footwear, betting, or sports tourism. Pick the number that fits your purpose, but always state the definition. For scale: the world’s 20 richest football clubs together brought in €12.4 billion in the 2024/25 season (Deloitte), almost 40 annual budgets of the Czech National Sports Agency, the NSA (CZK 8.2 billion for 2026).

Four segments:

The Czech Republic isn’t small here. In fixed-odds betting, Czechs wagered CZK 145.2 billion in 2024, a tenth more than the year before (betting operators’ figures via Echo24). That’s roughly CZK 13,000 for every resident, babies included, and almost eighteen times what the state gives to sport each year through the National Sports Agency (CZK 8.2 billion in 2026). That’s why betting companies are among the biggest sponsors of Czech sport: the football league is called the Chance Liga, and the ice hockey Extraliga carries the Tipsport name. Betting partners and the rules for their advertising are covered in the Sponsorship chapter.

The segments overlap. Strava is participation, but it sells data and advertising. A betting company belongs to segment four, but it pays segment one. A good sports marketer knows which segment they stand in and which segment the money flows in from.

No other industry brings so many people to one screen at once. According to an IOC report, roughly 5 billion people followed the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, or 84% of the planet’s potential audience (an estimate from a survey in 18 countries, not a measurement). The organizers sold a record 9.5 million tickets for the Olympics. The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar had 3.4 million spectators in the stadiums, and FIFA reports 5 billion people who engaged with the tournament in some way. EURO 2024 in Germany: 2.7 million spectators in the stadiums and another 6.2 million in the fan zones.

Czech benchmarks: the final of the 2024 Ice Hockey World Championship, Czechia vs. Switzerland, was watched on ČT sport (the sports channel of Czech Television, the public broadcaster) and on its online platform iVysílání by 3.74 million viewers aged 4+, with a 76% share (ČTK, the Czech News Agency, citing ČT). It is the most watched broadcast in the history of ČT sport and Czech Television’s second most watched sports broadcast, after the Nagano 1998 Olympic hockey final, Czech Republic vs. Russia (4.16 million). Three out of every four TVs switched on in the country were showing hockey. Different methodology, different number: ATO-Nielsen, the official Czech TV audience measurement (viewers 15+, TV only), reports a 74.36% share (MediaGuru). During the Paris Olympics, ČT sport, with an 18.6% share, was the most watched channel in the Czech Republic overall, ahead of the commercial channel Nova (MediaGuru).

Reach like that makes sport political. States buy prestige by hosting (Qatar, Saudi Arabia), boycott diplomatically (Beijing 2022), exclude rivals (Russia and Belarus, after February 2022, kept out of most competitions on the IOC’s recommendation, and in Paris only as neutral individual athletes), and use national teams as a symbol of the nation. For a marketer, this means that a partnership with sport is always also a partnership with its controversies. Sponsors of Qatar 2022 had to deal with human rights; the Super League clubs (see below) ran into a revolt by their own fans.

Five types of organizations, five missions, five kinds of marketing:

Around each of them stand stakeholders with conflicting interests. Fans aren’t just customers; they are watchdogs, critics, and evangelists. Sponsors want visibility and aligned values. Athletes are both employees and celebrities with their own brand. The state subsidizes and regulates, because sport is both prestige and public health. The media pay for rights and want stories in return. Owners want profit, prestige, or influence. Sometimes the motivations line up; often they don’t.

And the most important thing that sets sport apart: competitors have to cooperate. Toyota doesn’t need Volkswagen to sell a car. Slavia needs Sparta to have a derby. A league is effectively a cartel: clubs agree on rules, schedules, the sale of rights, and often on revenue sharing too. Rivalry sells; coordination sustains it. A team that’s too dominant weakens the product: PSG in France, Bayern with eleven titles in a row (2013–2023). American leagues deal with this through salary caps and the draft (the selection of new players, where the worst team picks first); European leagues mostly don’t.

What happens when cooperation is abused was shown by the European Super League in April 2021. Twelve of the richest clubs announced a closed competition with no relegation. Within 48 hours, fans outside the stadiums, players, coaches, UEFA, and the British prime minister had turned against them; the six English clubs backed out, followed by Inter and Atlético, and the project was suspended (Fortune). The lesson for marketers: in sport, it isn’t the owner who decides, but legitimacy among the people who co-create the product.

The features of the sports product from the first section (uncertain, perishable, co-created, dependent on the opponent) have a practical consequence: the classic marketing mix isn’t enough. Rivalry sells even without form: El Clásico sells out regardless of the table.

That’s why sports marketing extends the classic 4Ps (more in the Marketing chapter) to 8Ps:

Hanging over all of this is the dual objective: victory vs. viability. Fans reward emotion, not a balanced budget, so clubs overspend. FC Barcelona, one of the strongest brands in the world, was €1.35 billion in debt in March 2021 (ESPN), and in October 2021 a Deloitte audit concluded that the club had been “technically bankrupt” at the time (Front Office Sports). In the 2024/25 season, Premier League clubs spent 65% of their revenue on wages and together lost £948 million before tax, despite record revenue of £6.8 billion (Deloitte). The wage bill correlates with the league table, but it doesn’t guarantee it: Leicester won the league in 2016 with a budget from the bottom half.

For a marketer, only one thing follows: never plan a campaign around the result. Plan around a story that holds up in both victory and defeat. The slogan “Going for the title” after three defeats hurts. “We’re here, for better or worse” always works.

Sports organizations combine traditional and new revenue, and each stream has a different risk profile. At the elite level, broadcasting rights rule: Premier League clubs had revenue of £6.8 billion in the 2024/25 season, roughly half of it from TV (chart, Deloitte). The league sold its domestic rights for 2025–2029 to Sky and TNT for a record £6.7 billion, roughly CZK 50 billion a year (Sportcal). The Czech top flight got roughly CZK 430 million a year from its rights tender for 2024–2029 (MediaGuru), about one hundredth. The media side of this is covered in the Media chapter.

The individual streams and their profile (scalable, predictable, controllable):

The Olympic model shows the top of the pyramid: the IOC took in $7.7 billion in the 2021–2024 cycle, 12% more than in the previous cycle, mostly from broadcasting rights and the TOP partner program, and it distributes 90% back to federations, national committees, and organizers (Sportcal). The opposite end, a star’s individual package, is shown by Messi in the section on the athlete as a brand.

The Czech top clubs live differently from the Premier League. TV brings the whole league more than CZK 430 million a year, split roughly 85 to 15 between the first and second divisions and, in the first division, by final position (Médiář); that works out to about CZK 23 million per first-division club on average. Sparta, meanwhile, got CZK 710.8 million from UEFA alone for the 2024/25 Champions League, more than half of its revenue of roughly CZK 1.3 billion, and ticket sales brought in CZK 233.9 million (Sparta). The second leg is transfers: Slavia earned CZK 565.6 million from transfers and loans in 2023 (E15), and in summer 2025 it sold Malick Diouf to West Ham for a record of roughly €22 million (Seznam Zprávy; the fees come from Transfermarkt, clubs don’t publish them). The other clubs rely mainly on money from an owner or the city.

Through the National Sports Agency, the state mainly supports federations, youth sport, and facilities, not professional clubs. The agency has roughly CZK 8.2 billion for 2026; the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of parliament, raised the government’s proposal by CZK 800 million for sports facilities and school sport (Czech Ministry of Finance). The football association received CZK 577 million from it in 2024, CZK 228 million of that for talented youth. For a small federation, the subsidy is often its main income, so federation marketing is partly aimed at officials and politicians, not just at fans.

Tickets are the only big revenue stream that club marketing controls on its own, from price to communication. In the 2024/25 season, Sparta Prague took in a record CZK 233.9 million in ticket revenue (Sparta), and average attendance in the Chance Liga, the Czech top flight, was 6,177, the third highest in the history of the independent league (Deník, LFA data). But in the 2025/26 season, stadiums were on average only 61% full, leaving roughly a million empty seats over the season (Football Club). In Czechia, prices follow match categories: Sparta has four categories, A to D, and single tickets cost between CZK 350 and CZK 1,200 depending on the opponent and the date (sparta.cz). Dynamic, demand-based pricing like FIFA used at the 2026 World Cup isn’t documented at any Czech club; clubs stick to a price list announced before the season.

For a club, a season ticket is more than a discount for loyal fans. The money arrives before the season, when the club needs cash most, and with every season ticket the club gets a name, a contact, and an attendance history. The top clubs sell out: for the 2025/26 season, Sparta had 10,000 season tickets and more than 29,000 people on the waiting list, Slavia almost 12,000 and another 12,000 waiting, and Baník Ostrava 9,500, 1,800 more than a year earlier (Forbes CZ). The main indicator is the renewal rate: how many holders buy their season ticket again. Czech clubs don’t publish it; in the Premier League, Brighton reports 93% and Wolves 94% (2025). Clubs steer renewals with rules: Slavia takes away the right of first refusal from anyone who misses two matches without releasing the seat, and the order on the waiting list is set by purchase history (slavia.cz).

The ticket turns into one fan ID. SPARTA iD links ticket purchases, membership, stadium entry, food and drink, and the fan shop; tickets exist only in the app, and points in SPARTA iD set the order on the season ticket waiting list (Marketing & Media). The Sparta UNLIMITED membership, from CZK 149 a month, had more than 10,000 subscribers two months after its 2024 launch (sparta.cz). The data lets you build segments: the core, occasional fans, families, and companies, with a different offer for each. Three indicators are worth tracking: the number of active fans in the database, the renewal rate, and spending per fan per season. For a sense of scale: a Premier League fan spends an average of £138 on matchday without the ticket, £8.90 of it on food and drink inside the stadium (Barclays, 2026).

Fan data comes with rules. A club may send marketing by email or SMS only with consent; the exception covers its own customers and similar products, and every message must offer an easy way to unsubscribe (Czech Act No. 480/2004, Section 7). A child can give consent alone only from age 15 (Czech Act No. 110/2019, Section 7); for younger children, a parent decides. And not everything technology can do is allowed: according to a 2026 opinion of the Czech data protection authority, ÚOOÚ, issued after a Slavia derby, facial recognition of fans isn’t permissible without a specific law (Česká justice).

Now you’ll try it yourselves. The company is HOPI: logistics and food; its customers are other companies (B2B), and its employees work in warehouses and transport. Three model partnership offers have landed on the table, and each group gets one:

Each group’s output is one slide: three answers and one sentence on why HOPI should or shouldn’t sign it. Does the proposal measure anything other than logo impressions? Does the plan for the worst case have concrete steps (who, what, by when), or just “we’ll deal with it”?

A hint on audience: there are few corporate customers in B2B logistics, and most of them don’t sit in the stadium; employees number in the thousands (HOPI Logistics has some 3,000, the whole HOPI group 4,500), and the region around the warehouse is a neighbor the company lives with. A hint on activation: tickets for employees, hospitality for clients, content for social media, a recruitment channel. A partnership without activation is a gift, not marketing.

Athletes aren’t just performance; they are brands. Cristiano Ronaldo has roughly 679 million followers on Instagram (September 2026, list of the most-followed accounts), more than any club, league, or sports brand in the world, and 62 times the population of the Czech Republic. Lionel Messi has about 517 million. For a sponsor, an athlete is a channel with a reach the club doesn’t have. For the club, it’s a risk: the player leaves, and the audience leaves with him.

The athlete is both performer and product. Their form, image, and behavior off the pitch directly determine the brand value of the club and its partners. One tweet, one photo from a bar, one positive doping test, and a campaign worth millions is useless. That’s why clubs and federations invest in media training, monitor social media, and have crisis scenarios ready. An athlete’s behavior is brand exposure that can’t be switched off. How a personal brand is built is covered in the Brand chapter.

An unpredictable product calls for reactive marketing. Injuries, form, weather, referees: you control none of it. So the plan has to have versions for winning and losing, content that goes out within an hour, and people with the authority to decide without an approval loop. The value creation model in the image sums it up: content, distribution (stadium, TV, video on demand, social media), monetization (tickets, pay-per-view, partners, rights, data), and adaptation based on data. The loop turns every week. And a win is the cheapest marketing there is, but only if you have content ready for it.

Technology is changing sport on four levels:

The fifth level is a quiet one: data as a product. Official league data is bought by bookmakers, the media, and game developers. A league that doesn’t sell its data is leaving money on the table. For small sports, this is an opportunity: the IJF publishes results, rankings, and match videos you can build your own service from.

But technology doesn’t change the essence: the uncertain outcome remains. It only changes how much of the product you can capture, distribute, and sell. How this kind of content is produced is covered in the Streaming chapter.

The biggest shift of the last ten years: the fan comes in through the story, not through the result. The Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive (since 2019) is the textbook example. In 2025, Formula 1 had record attendance of 6.7 million people and an average of 1.32 million viewers on ESPN in the US (in 2018 it was 554,000), and the number of partners grew from 12 (2020) to 31 (BlackBook Motorsport). The series itself doesn’t create race viewers; it creates fans of the drivers, and they then watch.

Welcome to Wrexham is the same thing on a small scale. The Welsh club was bought in 2021 by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney; since then it has been promoted three times, average attendance has grown from 4,058 (2019/20) to 12,781 (2024/25), and revenue has reached a record £33.3 million, 58% of it from abroad (annual report). The club itself writes that the series brings it no direct income, but that it is a unique international marketing platform. Be careful with causality: the chart also rises with promotions and stadium capacity, not just with the series.

The second trend: streaming platforms are buying sport, because it’s content that has to be watched live. At Christmas 2024, Netflix aired two NFL games averaging over 30 million viewers per game worldwide (Netflix); Amazon and Apple pay leagues billions (see the section on revenue streams). The third trend: women’s sport. Deloitte estimates the revenue of elite women’s sport in 2025 at $2.35 billion, a quarter more than the year before ($1.88 billion), with basketball and football in the lead. The fourth: the fan as creator. Creators on TikTok and YouTube extend a league’s reach, so leagues open up the stands to them and give them content.

The Czech Republic copies these trends with smaller numbers. Chance Liga viewership on Oneplay rose by 23% in the fall of 2025, the Sparta–Slavia derby was watched by more than 656,000 people, the most in the channel’s history, and average league attendance rose to 6,309 (MediaGuru). Working with social media is covered in the Social Media chapter, and events in the Events chapter.

Elite and amateur sport are two economies. The elite lives on media, partners, and a global brand; the grassroots on subsidies, membership fees, local sponsors, and volunteers. The costs are inverted: the elite pays its athletes, while the grassroots rests on people who work for free. A typical village football club relies on coaches who are also the players’ parents, and on a pitch that belongs to the municipality.

The pathways are narrow even where the system is set up best. The American NCAA calculates every year how many college athletes end up in a professional league: in hockey 7.5% (with a caveat, see the chart), in baseball 4.9%, in American football 1.4% (257 of 18,621 players eligible for the 2025 draft), in men’s basketball 1.0%. And that’s only the second step: from high school football, 8.1% make a college roster. So out of a thousand high schoolers in helmets, roughly one plays in the NFL. The lower in the pyramid, the more marketing shifts from monetization to recruitment and retention.

The Czech Republic: the Czech Sports Union (ČUS) registers over 1 million people in 7,378 sports associations and clubs, 14,036 club sections, and 79 federations. State money through the National Sports Agency (its budget is in the section on revenue streams) goes mostly down the pyramid, not to the elite: to clubs, youth, and infrastructure. For a federation marketer, this means a dual audience: the parents who bring their child, and the state, which pays for the sports hall.

Between the two worlds, a third one is growing: products where professionals sell to amateurs. Camps with national team athletes, running races with the elite at the front of the field, Strava challenges with a professional team. The value is in proximity: the amateur buys a piece of the elite.

American and European sport rest on opposite principles. USA: closed leagues with no promotion or relegation, franchises run like entertainment companies, and the league maintains parity with tools a European club would never accept: a salary cap (NFL 2025: $279.2 million per team, NFL), the draft, and equal sharing of TV revenue. The result: every team has a chance, and franchise values rise over the long term.

Europe: an open pyramid where relegation is real and painful. Transfers are market-driven, clubs are autonomous, the risks are higher, but identity is stronger. Germany protects its clubs with the 50+1 rule (see the section on organizations): an investor can have money, not control. Barcelona and Real Madrid belong to their members. The result is generational loyalty, which in the US is replaced by the show.

Fan culture differs just as much. An American game: halftime show, family entertainment, sponsors on the field, the fan as consumer. A European derby: pyro, chants, choreos, politics on banners, the fan as guardian of tradition. Marketing has to reflect these roots: a polished, inclusive tone in the US, a tribal, emotional one in Europe. That’s why the Super League fell: an American model in a European culture.

What to take from this in the Czech Republic: our league is European in structure, but with a market of 10.9 million people it is closer in size to a single American metro area. That’s why clubs learn from both: tradition and the ultras from Europe, hospitality, data, and a family experience from the US.

Sport is the only business where customers pay for not knowing what they’ll get, and come back even when they got little. Everything else in this lesson follows from that: rivals who have to cooperate, brands that borrow values, and marketing that has to be ready for any result.

A sports marketer’s checklist:

Homework: pick a club, a federation, or an athlete and write three short campaigns: after a win, after a loss, and after a scandal. Same brand, same values, three moods. How to build campaigns like these is something we’ll cover in the Advertising chapter.