There was a time when most sponsors wanted three things: branding, some hospitality, and the chance to meet their favourite player.
Not anymore.
Today's partners expect year-round content, measurable activations, introductions, proper reporting and genuine commercial value. The brief has grown considerably. The commercial team hasn't.
Sponsorship became a marketing channel
The reason is simple enough. The person signing the cheque has changed. A decade ago it was often an owner or a local managing director who liked the club. Today it's a marketing director with a budget to defend and a board asking what it returned.
That shift changes what a partnership has to be. Perimeter boards and a logo on a shirt are no longer the product — they're the packaging. The product is reach, content, data and access, and it has to perform against the same standards as every other line in a marketing budget.
The hard part isn't the sale
The biggest challenge in sponsorship today isn't selling it. It's delivering everything you promised once the ink is dry — across a full season, across every partner, across every channel you signed up to.
A single mid-tier deal can carry forty or fifty separate obligations. Multiply that across a portfolio and a commercial team of two or three people is holding several hundred promises, most of which have a date attached and none of which chase themselves.
That's where good rights management starts: not with the pitch deck, but with knowing precisely what you owe, to whom, and by when.
This isn't only a Premier League problem
If anything it bites harder further down. The expectations arrived at every level of the pyramid, but the headcount and the software budgets didn't. Clubs in Leagues One and Two, in rugby, in netball and in the women's game are being asked for the same reporting as clubs twenty times their size.
They're doing it on spreadsheets, and doing remarkably well. But the spreadsheet is the ceiling — and most are already at it.
We're building RightsHub to make it easier for commercial teams at every level to keep track of ever-expanding demands and delivery. Ask us how.