Sport Became a Growth Engine and B2B Brands Are Moving In

No spreadsheet can tell an executive what a sponsorship will return before it runs, which is exactly why sport has outgrown its old role as a media line item and become a growth engine that builds cultural relevance and long-term commercial value. As sponsorship shifts from passive endorsement toward active, behind-the-scenes partnership, a door has opened for B2B companies that were never in the conversation before, and the ones getting value out of it can read whether an opportunity fits the brand before rivals have finished debating it. When nearly 63 million Americans watched the World Cup final this month, it confirmed that sport now carries a cultural footprint few channels can match, and it reset what a premium spot is worth to anyone trying to buy in.

Kunal Mehta is Global Head of Marketing, Communication and Brand for the Animal Nutrition & Health business unit at dsm-firmenich. He has played both sides of the field, running traditional consumer campaigns with cricket stars like Virat Kohli at Nestlé before bringing that same logic to data-driven animal nutrition. Few operators have run a cricket megastar campaign and a nutrition lab, and that combination is what sharpens his read on which opportunities are worth acting on and which just feel safe.

"Sport is no longer an add-on that only a few sports brands are thinking about. It has become part of culture and part of mainstream communication," says Mehta. At Cannes, sports marketing moved off the beach outside the Palais and into the formal program with the arrival of the Lions Sport summit. That shift tracks a broader move toward reading cultural signals as intelligence rather than treating them as background noise.

The signals moved upstream of the endorsement

Acting on that shift starts with a different read on talent, because many athletes now operate as sophisticated corporate entities, carefully vetting the brands they associate with. The days of one face copy-pasted across thirty brands during a single tournament are ending, in part because athletes now carry their own intelligence, reading their audience the way brands do and tracking the data underneath the comments.

"They know what is being said to them, what is being said about them, what's being spoken about them," Mehta says. "They have no hesitation anymore in coming in front of these platforms to share their thoughts, and not just necessarily on sport, but also on things like marketing, branding, innovation, even the political spectrum."

Consumers have grown just as discerning, and they can spot when a name has been rented for a campaign versus when an athlete extends what a brand stands for. That discernment raises the bar on what a partnership has to deliver, and the strongest signals now come from brands and athletes building something together. Mehta points to Maria Sharapova launching her Sugarpova candy line and Roger Federer starting as an interested investor in On before that relationship helped drive the brand's retail surge. For some companies, true partnership means bringing the athlete into the lab and building credibility from the ground up.

Applied expertise buys entry money cannot

Mehta works this exact problem from another angle, since elite performance comes down to precise diet, training, and data measurement, the same variables that govern his nutrition work. That rigor mirrors the exactness of data-driven animal nutrition, where precise dietary inputs optimize gut health and drive results; for Mehta, the parallel is the business itself.

It comes to life through the dsm-firmenich Running Team, where the company uses a title sponsorship to act as a direct scientific partner, working with athletes behind the scenes to fine-tune nutrition and sustain performance without injury. That structure lets smaller-budget companies into a game they were previously priced out of, since they can act as performance partners and contribute applied expertise in place of expensive media placements. This behind-the-scenes model is showing up well outside sport, in categories where a brand can contribute expertise instead of spend. "The biggest shift is that sports partnerships are no longer just what people see in front of the cameras. The behind-the-scenes work is becoming an even bigger role," Mehta says.

Hijacking the field

A second route skips the athlete entirely, with brands muscling into cultural moments as unofficial sponsors through unexpected category crossovers. That alignment often reaches past direct athletic tie-ins, with luxury labels showing up at events like Wimbledon by backing players who double as fashion figures.

The sharpest recent example took the top outdoor prize at Cannes, where Mercado Libre and agency GUT São Paulo converted a Brazilian football stadium into a live scannable barcode that fans could scan from the stands or off their screens for a discount coupon. "They took the ground, they took something so unexpected, and of course, it got the buzz," Mehta says. The same logic drives stadium branding like Levi's Stadium during the World Cup, where attention itself becomes the currency and the brand earns visibility just by being embedded in the environment.

Pricing the downside before the upside

Cultural relevance carries a risk a media buy never did, since a brand and an athlete who share equity also share public perception, and the internet flags any misalignment fast. That exposure is why modern contracts now carry rigorous behavioral clauses, and why teams have to build fallback plans before a deal is ever signed. Mehta cites the reputational damage that followed high-profile athlete controversies as the reason the calculus changed. "Sometimes the pain of something going bad is so long that a limited amount of virality doesn't even overcome the cost of that pain," he says.

Conviction is what carries a brand through the early skepticism, provided the move is anchored in long-term belief that outlasts any single quarter. Ryan Reynolds buying Wrexham proved the point as the club climbed and the commercial value followed. What replaces the forecast, in Mehta's approach, is a repeatable filter he runs before virality ever enters the conversation, the same instinct that turns a raw signal into a business decision. "My approach has always been to ask myself the question, is this right for the brand today? Is this right for the brand tomorrow?" he says. "If the answer to that is yes, is it part of the strategic framework of the brand, its positioning, its big idea? If the answer to those things are yes, go ahead and do it."

The test travels. Any bet a spreadsheet can't model, a new market, an unproven channel, a partnership with no comparable, comes down to whether a team knows its own brand well enough to decide in the room. The question a team asks at the front of the process governs the speed of every decision that follows, which is why Mehta keeps returning to the language a marketing organization chooses for itself. Corporate marketing leans on the vocabulary of combat, attack and strike and guerrilla warfare, when the thing it claims to be borrowing from runs on a warmer instinct. "Sport is such a beautiful place, and the language of sport is so nice. It talks about team spirit, collaboration, goal, victory, celebration, all of those things," he says. "While it's great to lean into sport, if we can also lean into the language of sport, as marketers and as corporate people, we can make the world of marketing even more magical and beautiful rather than using the old war terminology."