If you’re putting together a sports partnership this year — as a brand, a club, a league, or an emerging sports property — start with one question: what does the fan or player actually get out of it? If you can’t answer that before you decide where the logo goes, you’re not building a partnership. You’re renting attention.
That distinction is where the money is moving.
Take the deal the ATP and TikTok announced in August 2025. It wasn’t another logo beside a court. The two built a Tennis Creator Network — a roster of TikTok creators given behind-the-scenes access to ATP events, which launched at the November 2025 ATP Finals and expands across the nine Masters 1000 tournaments in 2026. Creators make content. Athletes build audiences. Tournaments get distribution. TikTok gets closer to the culture forming around tennis. Fans get material they actually chose to watch. Everyone has a job. That’s what makes it a partnership rather than a billboard.
I’ve kept that deal out of the argument that follows on purpose. The only source for it is our own press release, and it would be the weakest evidence in the piece dressed up as the strongest. It’s here so you can discount my enthusiasm from the start — not as proof of anything.
Everything below is really an argument for six questions. Here they are first, so you can hold the rest of the piece against them.
The Six Tests
Run your next partnership against these before you sign.
Take the logos away. Would anyone notice the partnership existed? If not, price it as advertising.
Name what each side actually does. If one pays and the other displays, that’s sponsorship.
Write down what you’ll count and who funds counting it before launch, not after.
Settle who owns the fan data, the player list and the content. Get it in writing.
Name the commercial engine on both sides. A deal only one party profits from won’t last.
Decide what creative control you’ll trade for audience knowledge. Trading none? Buy a billboard.
The logo isn’t disappearing — it’s just not enough
Be clear about what’s not happening: exposure isn’t dead. Nielsen found that the ten most valuable U.S. team sponsorship assets generated almost $515 million in media value for brands in 2025, much of it from NBA court signage. (Media value is Nielsen’s modeled estimate of what that exposure would have cost as advertising — not cash the teams banked, but a real signal of what visibility is worth.)
The problem is that visibility alone is getting harder to defend to a finance department. Deloitte pegs the global sports-sponsorship market at roughly $97 billion in 2025 — though estimates vary widely by definition, with other research firms putting it anywhere from the high-$50-billions to the low-$90s — and reports that 62% of brands say better data is the key to better partnerships. The shift underneath that number is simple: companies increasingly want to know not just who saw something, but who did something afterward.
That’s the move from a logo to a loop, and it’s the removal test in practice. If I put my name on your wall, what happened? If I put my product in your players’ hands, let them use it, build content around it, and give them a way to keep buying it — now there’s something to measure.
What “partnership” looks like on the ground
The stronger deals start from a different question than “what inventory can I sell you?” They start with: what can we build together that neither of us could alone?
You can see it in recreational sports, where the rights holder isn’t a giant league. In early 2025, the indoor-club franchise Dill Dinkers and the retailer Pickleball Central announced a partnership that put pro shops inside clubs so players could demo paddles before buying. Worth naming honestly: this isn’t charity. Independent coverage noted it also hands club owners a new revenue stream and sharpens the franchise sales pitch. The product becomes part of the player’s experience and part of the business model. Both are true, and a smart operator plans for both.
That’s the economics test passing on both sides. The value isn’t confined to a sign on the wall — but the commercial engine is always running underneath, and pretending otherwise is how clubs and brands end up disappointed in each other.
The measurement test is the one most deals fail
Here’s the caution the optimistic version of this story skips. “You can count sampling, sign-ups, trials, purchases” — yes, in theory. In practice, measurement is the industry’s weakest link.
The WFA and the consultancy Lumency, surveying more than 40 brand owners representing over $8.2 billion in sponsorship spend, found that nearly three-quarters of practitioners still name measurement and proving ROI as a top challenge — and that most measurement still tracks awareness, not sales. Forrester’s 2025 research found the same: 76% of U.S. consumer marketers who invested in sports sponsorships struggled to calculate their return.
So the “loop” is a goal, not a solved problem. If a partner promises you clean attribution from a courtside sample to a purchase, ask exactly how — and who’s funding the measurement, since it’s chronically underfunded. A deal that can’t answer that question hasn’t left the old model; it has just described itself in newer language.
Community became the asset — with strings
When the rights holder is small, it can offer something a national media buy can’t: a specific, engaged group. A pickleball club with 1,500 weekly players. A golf creator who knows exactly what her audience buys and mocks. A coach who quietly shapes equipment choices. A local tournament that can put a product in 400 hands in a weekend. Smaller audiences, closer to the action.
That’s genuinely valuable — and it’s part of why the WFA data shows brands spreading beyond sports into music, arts, and community platforms. But “community as asset” raises the data test, which the marketing glosses over: whose data is it? A partnership built on knowing the fan depends on collecting fan and player information, and “privacy is handled properly” is a clause, not a plan. Before you sign, settle who owns the player list, the engagement data, and the content — because that’s the actual asset, and it’s the thing most likely to be fought over later.
Co-creation changes who holds the pen
One more shift brands underrate: traditional sponsorship starts after the idea is built, then inserts the athlete or property into it. The stronger model brings the sports side in earlier — the people who know what gets players excited on a Wednesday night, which product claim gets laughed out of the locker room, what a fan will skip in two seconds.
Forrester’s 2025 work argues for exactly that: a flexible, collaborative partnership from the start rather than a standardized package. The trade-off is real, though, and it’s the control test. Co-creation means giving up some control, it’s slower, and it’s harder to keep a brand consistent across dozens of local partners. That’s a price, not a free lunch — worth paying when the partner genuinely knows the audience, not worth it when you just need reach.
The same logic explains why distribution and supply partnerships are quietly becoming the unglamorous version of this story. A good product made in one market still faces a basic problem — how does it reach players in another? — and a partner who already sits between the maker and the player solves something operational rather than decorative. It’s less photogenic than a creator network. It’s often more durable.
Where this actually lands
The shift worth paying attention to isn’t sponsorship versus no sponsorship. Exposure still works — Nielsen’s half-billion dollars proves it. And the honest state of the field is that the industry wants the loop far more than it can currently measure one: three-quarters of practitioners still can’t prove the return on what they’re already buying.
Which is why the six tests at the top are worth more than any single case study, including the good ones. Take the logos away and see if anyone notices. Name what each side does. Write down what you’ll count and who pays to count it. Settle who owns the data. Name the commercial engine on both sides. Decide how much control you’ll trade. The deals that clear all six are the ones where the audience actually has a reason to care that the two of you found each other. The deals that clear none of them are advertising — which is fine, as long as you price it that way and stop calling it a partnership.
Cassandra Toroian is a sports-tech entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Ruley, the AI “e-referee” serving tennis, pickleball, padel, golf, and soccer. With 25+ years building companies—and a background in finance (MBA) plus Python training—she’s also co-founder of Volleybird and author of Don’t Buy the Bull. A former Division I tennis player, she’s focused on using AI to make sport fairer and more accessible.