The Painful Truth About Selling Sponsorships in 2025

"We still need to create a separate presentation or email for every deal. Sponsors don’t self-service, and every little package is the same manual process." - General Manager, Basketball Club

The Painful Truth About Selling Sponsorships in 2025...

Despite it's the year 2025, sponsorship sales at most sports clubs still feel like they belong in 2005. Many club websites don’t even bother with a proper sponsorship PDF - just a few lines of vague text and a call to action that says “CALL US” or “EMAIL US.” Sponsors aren’t knocking down the door with questions like “What’s available?” or “What’s the price?”, because often they don’t even know what to ask. And clubs, stuck in the old rhythm, aren’t making it easy to find out.

For me, it hit hard when I visited the website of a well-known football club here in Zurich. I was curious, how do they actually sell sponsorship? What I found was a few lines of text and a hard to read "CALL US OR EMAIL US" text. That’s it. No pricing, no visuals, no interactive listing. I remember thinking: How the hell are they selling anything through this? They probably don’t.

And before anyone jumps in with the classic "but sponsorship is a relationship business" line - yes, of course it is. I get it. No tool replaces trust, shared vision, and conversation. But come on, just because it’s a relationship business doesn’t mean you should still be operating like it’s 1998.

I also understand that for bigger clubs with a huge community and established branding, it’s probably easier to sell. They have the pull. But what about sports other than soccer? What about clubs with less capacity, less budget, less brand, and less established communities? Are they supposed to just keep grinding manually and just hope someone calls?

The thing is, you can optimize your funnel and keep relationships personal. You can reduce admin work and spend more time building the connections that matter. It's not black or white. It’s not one or the other.

Why is it still so manual?!

Passive PDF presentations, passive pipeline

Most clubs still rely on static PDF presentations uploaded to their websites. These sponsorship booklets are rarely viewed, even more rarely read in full. One club manager told me:

"No one really goes to our website, studies the PDF, and then calls us to buy a sponsorship. That basically never happens."

Everything Is Custom, Every Time

Without digital infrastructure, sponsorship sales teams are stuck building every deal from scratch. Want to sell a single LED ad? That means creating a new PowerPoint, new price package, new email thread, etc. You get the point.

No Real Funnel, No Discovery

There’s no browsing experience, no structured pipeline, no way for a sponsor to explore on their own. Even small-time prospects require the same manual effort as major partners. It just doesn’t scale.

Micropackages = Macro Pain

Ironically, the smaller the package, the harder it is to justify the effort. Selling a EUR 250 game-day asset might take just as many hours as a EUR 25,000 main sponsor, but without the upside.

And here's the thing: sponsors expect more now. They're used to targeted ad dashboards, branded content previews, and real-time campaign tracking. If clubs want to attract modern partners, and grow, they can't keep doing the same old stuff.

Honestly, I think clubs are missing out on revenue. Not because sponsors aren’t interested, but because clubs aren’t making their offers easy to find or understand. Instead of clearly showing what’s available, they’re relying on personal contacts and hoping someone reaches out. But in today’s world, if you don’t have a clear system that helps sponsors discover and buy, you’re just hoping for luck.

Voices From The Front Lines

Have you ever had to re-export a logo just to fit it into an outdated PDF deck? Spent 45 minutes hunting for a mockup image you already sent last season?

One club's marketing lead shared their struggle with constantly repeating the same steps, deal after deal. They know things need to change, but modern tools often feel like a luxury the team doesn’t have time or budget to implement.

Another sponsorship manager is experimenting with social media sponsored content, but faces the same bottlenecks. Every visual needs a designer. Every update requires someone to dig through files. "Helpful," she said, "would be a tool that just makes it all easier."

A Missed Opportunity

Now imagine this instead:

• A listing page for each available asset: LED banners, cubes, social posts, VIP tables.

• A self-serve tool where a potential sponsor can upload their logo and see how it looks.

• A live inventory view that shows what's available next weekend, and what's already sold.

• A one-click booking experience for small packages, just like buying a Google Ad.

For quite a long time, we've built tools almost entirely for media automation, streamlining how clubs produce social media graphics, in-venue visuals, and other sponsor-branded content. But along the way, I realized we're missing something: the exact same technology that makes content creation easy can also make selling that content easier.

So we started connecting the dots, building a listing system that doesn’t just show what’s available, but lets clubs pitch, personalize, and activate sponsorships from one place. Imagine pitching, managing and activating a sponsor from just one and the same tool?

Where Clubs Can Start Today

Want to test your readiness for a more scalable sponsorship process?

Ask yourself:

• Can a sponsor explore your offerings without calling you first? Like, REALLY explore all relevant info, pricing, see visuals, etc?

• Do you know exactly what's available and what’s sold for your next home game?

• Can you close a EUR 200 deal without digging through six folders, copy-pasting a deck together, and wondering if the logo you’ve got is actually up to date?

• Can your team visualize the sponsor’s logo on your media assets in under 2 minutes?

If the answer is "no" to most of these, your system isn’t broken - you're probably just missing out on revenue.

And if you're nodding along, here's what I'd say: let's talk. Let’s build just one product together. One listing. One asset. One moment where you get that "wow, this could really change things" feeling.

The Digital Shift Is Coming

Modern sports clubs don’t need more PDFs. They need pipelines. Pipelines that invite, convert, and scale, without burning out their staff.

The technology is here. The tools are ready. The only question is:

Are you building the process your sponsors wish you had?

TL;DR

Sponsorship sales in many sports clubs are still stuck in the past: static PDFs, manual emails, and zero discoverability for sponsors. This post explores why that’s a massive problem, especially as sponsor expectations rise. It’s not just about saving time; it’s about unlocking new revenue opportunities through smarter, more scalable processes.

I argue that even though sponsorship is absolutely a relationship-driven business, it doesn't mean you should be running it like it’s 1998. Critics might say I'm oversimplifying, or that tools can’t replace trust, and they’re right. But automation isn’t about replacing people, it’s about supporting them so you can close more deals, faster, and with less burnout.