Play the match or play the season? Planning sports investment beyond the whistle
17 Sport Co-Founder Fabien Paget speaks to The Drum about the FUTURE effects of global sports tournaments.
When it comes to sports, attention is like a heartbeat monitor. Take soccer: for 90 minutes, the world is watching. Then the graph spikes. Peaks. Surges. Viral moments. Last-minute goals. Record-breaking streams. One night when your brand logo is everywhere.
For many brands, that spike is the objective. But attention is not equity. Live sport creates spikes, but equity requires systems.
The real commercial question is not how loudly you show up during the tournament but whether that visibility compounds into sustained brand growth.
The economic reality: buying into an ecosystem
Global sports sponsorship continues to expand, with billions of new investments already flowing into leagues, clubs and host cities ahead of the Fifa World Cup 2026.
The World Economic Forum projects sport will become an $8.8tn global economy by 2050, explains Fabien Paget, CEO and co-founder of 17 Sport, which reframes what ‘long-term’ actually means in this context.
“Brands investing in sport aren’t just buying access to an audience. They’re investing in a system”
“Brands investing in sport aren’t just buying access to an audience. They’re investing in a system,” he says.
And systems require strengthening, not strip-mining, he adds: “Long-term brand value depends on strengthening sport itself, not extracting from it. The brands that invest in strengthening sport now will still be benefiting in 2029. The ones chasing the moment won’t be remembered.”
Fame v infrastructure
The key distinction for buyers is to ask: are you renting attention, or building an asset? Brands that treat major tournaments as standalone stunts often struggle to translate awareness into sustained commercial impact – particularly when media weight drops off and internal focus shifts to the next quarter.
There’s a difference between creating fame and building infrastructure in sport.
Fame looks like:
A Super Bowl spot
A viral matchday moment
A short-term spike in search or social buzz
Infrastructure looks like:
Multi-year rights platforms
First-party data capture and CRM growth
Always-on content pipelines
Grassroots and community engagement
Internal employee and partner alignment
To read the full article, visit The Drum.
