- Sports marketing offers B2B brands an untapped opportunity to build relationships with customers, decision-makers and business partners beyond traditional sponsorships.
- As media audiences become more fragmented, live sports brings people together around shared experiences that can build trust and strengthen brand relationships.
- AI and audience analytics help B2B marketers create more relevant sports experiences and connect marketing investments to meaningful business outcomes.
- As marketing becomes increasingly automated, sports offers brands a powerful way to build authentic human connections that drive long-term business value.
As marketers look for new ways to anticipate audience needs and build lasting business relationships, one of the most promising opportunities may be hiding in plain sight. It starts with rethinking the role sports can play in B2B marketing.
Why B2B keeps sports on the sidelines
Walk through the hospitality suites at almost any major sporting event and you’ll find healthcare executives hosting hospital systems, technology companies meeting with CIOs, financial institutions entertaining clients, and manufacturers strengthening relationships with distributors. For many organizations, sports has become an extension of the boardroom.
Yet when those same companies build their annual marketing plans, sports is often treated as an afterthought (or dismissed altogether).
Somewhere along the way, B2B marketers convinced themselves that sports belonged to consumer brands. If you’re selling enterprise software, industrial equipment, logistics solutions or professional services, conventional wisdom says your marketing dollars should go toward trade shows, thought leadership, account-based marketing and digital campaigns. Sports, we’re told, is where beer companies, automakers and athletic apparel brands play.
The opportunity B2B marketers are missing
It’s not that sports suddenly became relevant to B2B, but rather B2B marketers have been evaluating sports through the wrong lens. They’ve looked at it primarily as an advertising channel when, in reality, its greatest value has always been its ability to build relationships, create trust and bring people together around shared experiences.
Those shared experiences are becoming increasingly valuable.
Today’s buyers consume media in highly personalized ways. Streaming platforms recommend different shows, social media algorithms deliver different content, and AI is beginning to personalize search results and online experiences for every individual. Reaching large audiences around the same cultural moment is becoming more difficult every year.
Live sports remains one of the few exceptions.
Whether it’s the FIFA World Cup, Formula 1, March Madness, the WNBA Finals or Sunday Night Football, millions of people are still experiencing the same unpredictable moment together. The Financial Times recently described live sports as one of the last remaining examples of cultural “monoculture”—a place where audiences still gather around a shared experience despite the fragmentation of modern media. That rarity is one of the reasons global advertising groups continue increasing their investments in sports marketing. (Financial Times)
The audience itself is becoming even more attractive.
Your buyers are fans, too
According to Nielsen’s 2025 Global Sports Report, 51% of people globally identify as football (soccer) fans, while sports audiences continue to diversify through streaming, women’s sports and younger generations. In fact, sports streaming among viewers aged 50 and older has grown 21% in just two years, demonstrating that sports continues to expand rather than fragment its audience. (Nielsen)
For B2B marketers, however, audience size isn’t the most compelling reason to invest.
The real opportunity is that the right people are watching together.
Every buying committee is made up of people with interests, passions and communities outside the office. The CIO attending a Formula 1 race with customers. The healthcare executive bringing clients to a baseball game. The procurement leader following the UEFA Champions League. The HR executive taking employees to a WNBA game.
These aren’t separate audiences from your business. They are your business.
One of the most persistent myths in B2B marketing is that enterprise purchasing is driven almost entirely by rational decision-making. While buying committees certainly evaluate capabilities, pricing and technical fit, research from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute has consistently demonstrated that trust, familiarity and emotional confidence play a much larger role in complex purchasing decisions than many marketers acknowledge.
Sports creates opportunities to build those relationships in ways that traditional advertising rarely can.
That’s why I believe the smartest B2B brands should stop thinking like sponsors and start thinking like sports marketers.
Sports marketing has never been just about putting a logo on a jersey or hanging signage inside a stadium. Done well, it becomes a platform for executive engagement, customer experiences, employee pride, partner development, thought leadership and community building. It creates conversations instead of impressions and memories instead of media placements.
Think about how many important business relationships have started in a luxury suite, over a round of golf connected to a tournament, or while watching a match with a customer. Those moments rarely appear in attribution dashboards, yet they often influence who receives the next phone call, the next meeting or the next opportunity.
Relationship marketing has always mattered in B2B.
Sports simply gives brands one of the most authentic environments in which to practice it.
Community is the competitive advantage
That lesson became even more apparent to me after becoming part of the ownership group of Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul. Seeing a club from the inside reinforced something marketers sometimes overlook: successful sports organizations don’t simply build fan bases, they build communities.
As Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul co-founder and CMO Edreece Arghandiwal puts it:
“The strongest clubs aren’t defined by wins and losses alone. They’re defined by the role they play in their community. Our supporters, partners, and local businesses are all invested in something bigger than 90 minutes on the pitch. When brands show up authentically and contribute to that community, they stop feeling like sponsors and become part of the club’s story.”
That’s a lesson every B2B marketer should take to heart.
The companies that consistently outperform rarely win because they had the cleverest advertising campaign. They win because they’ve built stronger relationships, deeper trust and more meaningful connections long before an RFP is issued or a buying committee is assembled.
From market signals to meaningful experiences
According to Deloitte’s 2026 Global Sports Industry Outlook, artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming sports organizations by enabling personalized fan engagement, smarter commercial decisions and deeper understanding of audience behavior. AI is helping organizations better understand the communities they serve. (Deloitte)
The same opportunity exists for B2B brands.
Modern analytics allow marketers to better understand audience engagement, personalize customer experiences and connect sports investments to meaningful business outcomes. Sports marketing no longer has to be justified solely through awareness or impressions. It can increasingly be measured through executive engagement, relationship development, community participation and long-term customer value.
These were some of the questions we explored at Read the Field, where marketers came together to discuss how to anticipate market shifts and turn emerging signals into action. Sports marketing offers a compelling example of that challenge. Brands need to understand not just who their audiences are, but what matters to them, where they gather and how to create experiences that resonate. The opportunity lies in bringing those insights together with the kind of real-world engagement that builds lasting relationships.
But I don’t believe technology is the real story.
The human advantage in an AI-driven world
The real story is that as AI automates more of marketing, human relationships become even more important.
Content will become easier to create. Campaigns will become easier to optimize. Media buying will become increasingly automated.
Trust won’t. Community won’t. Shared experiences won’t.
Those will continue to differentiate great brands from merely efficient ones.
That’s why I believe sports marketing represents one of the biggest untapped opportunities in B2B.
Not because sports delivers massive audiences (although it certainly does). Not because sponsorships are becoming easier to measure (although they are). But because sports creates something increasingly difficult to find in modern marketing: authentic human connection.
And for B2B brands built on long sales cycles, trusted relationships and complex buying decisions, that may be the most valuable marketing investment of all.
