How to create sponsorship packages for a sports club
Most clubs build their sponsorship packages backwards. They decide they want R250,000 from a title partner, then work out what to put in the package to justify it. The number comes first and the inventory is assembled to fit.
That works exactly once. At renewal the sponsor asks what they actually received, and nobody can answer, because the package was never built from anything measurable in the first place.
Here is the method that survives a renewal meeting.
Start with an inventory, not a price
Before you decide what a package costs, list every place a partner's name can appear. Be exhaustive and be specific. A real inventory for a mid-tier club usually runs to twenty or thirty items:
- Kit — front of jersey, back, sleeve, shorts, training kit, warm-up tops
- Ground — perimeter boards by position, big screen, tunnel, dugouts, gates
- Digital — website header, fixtures page, squad page, match centre, newsletter
- App — match centre presentation, player-of-the-match vote, push notifications, native feed units
- Social — matchday graphics, team announcements, score cards, player content frames
- Matchday — announcements, programme, hospitality seats, activation space
- People — player appearances, coach appearances, community sessions
Every one of those is a unit you can sell separately or bundle. Until they are written down, you are guessing.
The test: if you cannot say roughly how many people see a given unit in a season, you cannot price it and you should not be selling it yet.
Attach a number to each unit
This is where most clubs stop, and it is the only part that matters. Each inventory item needs an audience figure attached to it.
Some are easy. Website and app placements are counted — your analytics tells you exactly how many times a unit was served. Newsletter placements are counted. App push notifications are counted.
Some are measured rather than counted. Social exposure means detecting the logo in the images you post and multiplying by that post's reported reach. Perimeter boards in match photography work the same way.
Some are estimated, and you should say so. Attendance-based exposure, broadcast exposure, and anything on kit during a televised match is modelled, not measured. Present it separately and label it.
Mixing counted, measured and estimated figures into one big number is the single fastest way to lose credibility with a sponsor's media agency. Keep the three columns apart.
How many tiers, and what goes in each
Three or four. Not six. Every additional tier makes the decision harder and the difference between levels less obvious.
| Tier | What defines it | Typical share of the book |
|---|---|---|
| Title / principal | Exclusive category, front of jersey, naming on the biggest asset | 40–55% |
| Official partner | Non-exclusive, secondary kit position, strong digital presence | 25–35% |
| Supporting partner | Ground and digital only, no kit | 10–20% |
| Community / local | Boards, programme, one digital unit | 5–10% |
The rule that keeps tiers meaningful: each level should contain something the level below cannot buy at any price. Category exclusivity, front-of-jersey, naming rights. If the only difference between your top two tiers is quantity, the top tier will always be negotiated down to the one below it.
Price against your own numbers, not somebody else's
The temptation is to benchmark against a bigger club. Do not. A sponsor can look up what that club's audience is, and yours is smaller, and the conversation ends badly.
Price against a cost-per-thousand you can defend. The most defensible figure is the one you already pay: whatever your own club pays for a thousand impressions when it runs paid social. A sponsor cannot argue with that, because it is a real transaction in your own ad account.
Take your total counted impressions for a unit, divide by a thousand, multiply by that CPM, and apply a premium for placements with genuine attention — a match centre that is opened in most sessions is worth more than a footer logo, and you can prove it with engagement data.
Worked example. An app match-centre placement serves 184,000 impressions a month. Your own paid CPM is R48. That is R8,832 of raw media, and the unit is the highest-attention surface in the product, so a 1.9× premium is defensible. You price it at around R16,800 a month, and you can show every step.
Write the deliverables down as numbers
The package should not say "regular social media presence". It should say "a minimum of 24 posts featuring the partner mark across the season". Not "newsletter inclusion" but "12 newsletter placements".
Two reasons. First, it makes the package sellable — a sponsor can compare it against other opportunities. Second, it makes it trackable, so you find out in week 20 that you are eight newsletter placements short, rather than finding out in the renewal meeting.
Build the report before you sell the package
This is the part almost nobody does, and it is the reason renewals fail.
Before you sign anything, decide exactly what the end-of-season report will contain and make sure you can actually produce it. If a deliverable cannot be measured, either find a way to measure it or take it out of the package. A promise you cannot report on is a promise you will be asked about.
What this looks like in practice
A club that does this properly ends up with an inventory of 20–30 named units, each carrying an audience figure and a rate, grouped into three or four tiers, with every deliverable expressed as a number and a report format agreed up front.
That is a commercial asset. What most clubs have instead is a PDF with three columns of bullet points and a price at the bottom.
Working out what each unit is actually worth
Once the inventory exists, every line needs a number beside it. This is the part that separates a package a sponsor can evaluate from a list of bullet points.
Take a worked example from a mid-tier rugby club with 15,000 website sessions a month in season, 2,500 app actives, and an average social reach of 6,000 per post.
| Unit | Monthly impressions | Grade | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website match centre | 36,000 | Counted | 1.0× |
| App match centre | 20,000 | Counted | 1.9× |
| Player of the match vote | 8,200 | Counted | 1.4× |
| Social posts (24/month) | 144,000 | Measured | 0.45× |
| Newsletter (4 sends) | 2,736 | Counted | 1.3× |
| Perimeter board | Attendance-modelled | Estimated | Show working |
At a defensible CPM of R48 — the rate that club actually pays when it boosts a post — the counted digital inventory alone comes to roughly R4,600 a month before the estimated units are added. Over a seven-month season that is a real number with a real derivation, and it is the floor for what a title partner should pay.
Category exclusivity, and how to write it
Exclusivity is the most valuable thing you sell and the most common source of disputes. The mistake is defining the category too broadly.
“Financial services” sounds tidy until a short-term insurer wants a board and your title partner is a bank. “Automotive” sounds tidy until a tyre fitter and a dealership both want in.
Define it narrowly and in writing:
- Too broad — financial services, automotive, food and beverage, retail
- Workable — short-term insurance, new vehicle sales, quick-service restaurants, building supply
And only sell exclusivity where you can actually enforce it. If your league sells a category centrally, or your ground is shared with another club, say so before signing rather than after.
What to do when a sponsor wants something you don't have
Your best prospects will not want your tiers. They will want something built around a campaign they are already running — a product launch, a recruitment drive, a regional push.
This is a good problem, and a published rate card is what lets you answer it quickly. Because every unit already carries an audience figure and a rate, you can assemble a bespoke package in an afternoon and defend every line of it.
Without the rate card you are guessing, and guessing in front of a media buyer usually ends with your number being halved.
The three-column discipline
This runs through everything and it is worth stating once more plainly. Every figure you present belongs in exactly one of three columns:
- Counted — you served the impression and logged it. Website, app, newsletter, push. Independently verifiable.
- Measured — you detected the mark in content and multiplied by the platform's reported reach. Defensible when the method is shown.
- Estimated — modelled from attendance or broadcast audience. Legitimate, but label it.
Clubs collapse these into one headline number because it looks bigger. A sponsor's media agency will pull it apart in the first meeting, and once one figure is doubted every other number in the document becomes suspect. A smaller honest number survives; a larger blended one does not.
Reviewing the package each season
Inventory changes. You add an app, the newsletter grows, a competition moves broadcaster. A rate card built two seasons ago and never revisited is either underselling you or, worse, promising audiences you no longer have.
Rebuild the numbers at the end of every season using actual delivery data rather than last year's assumptions. That also gives you the strongest possible renewal conversation: here is what you received, here is what it was worth, here is what next season looks like.
Common questions
How do you create sponsorship packages for a sports club?
Start with an inventory of every place a partner's name can appear, attach an audience figure to each, group them into three or four tiers, and write every deliverable as a number.
How many inventory units does a club usually have?
A mid-tier club typically finds twenty to thirty distinct sellable units across kit, ground, digital, app, social, matchday and player access.
What is the most common mistake?
Deciding the price first and assembling inventory to justify it. That works once, then fails at renewal when nobody can say what the partner received.
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