This article is a summary of Chapter 7 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules, a report produced by World Football Summit documenting how the global football industry has changed over the past decade. A new chapter will be published each week. Download the full chapter free of charge at worldfootballsummit.com.
In 2016, football’s commercial model ran on a single currency: exposure. A logo on a shirt was priced by how many eyes might pass over it, not by who those eyes belonged to, what they cared about, or whether they ever bought anything because of it. Nobody could say with any confidence what a fan was actually worth, so nobody tried. Clubs sold the only thing they could measure, and brands paid for the only thing clubs could offer.
Chapter 7, Commercial Strategy & Intellectual Property, of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules follows the ten years it took football to move from that guesswork to a model brands could hold to account.
For most of the decade, a club’s pitch to a sponsor rested on its own word: its fan numbers, its reach, its demographics. Brands bought that story because there was no better one on offer. That stopped working once brands started auditing the claims themselves, and finding the real numbers were a fraction of what clubs had promised. Awareness and reach turned out to be two different things, and only one of them could actually be verified.
Building the evidence
For most of the decade, football ran through intermediaries who knew more about a club’s own fans than the club did: a broadcaster held the rights, an agency managed the sponsorship, and a fan’s own social media platform held a richer picture of who that fan was than the club itself. Clubs began building their way out of that position. Loyalty programmes tracked what fans bought and how often. Ticketing systems tied every stadium visit to a named account. Clubs that ran these systems directly, rather than through a broadcaster or a platform, ended up owning the fan relationship itself, and with it the data a brand could no longer get anywhere else.
Once a club could prove who its audience was, the deal stopped being a static placement next to the pitch. Sponsors moved inside the matchday experience itself, and outside it too, into moments that had nothing to do with a ticket. The value shifted from being seen to being present in something a fan actually wanted, which meant the old single-logo, single-price deal gave way to something built jointly around a specific audience rather than sold off a rate card.
Competing for attention, not just for fans
The furthest end of this shift was clubs redefining what business they were actually in. Competing for a fan’s attention now means competing with entertainment platforms that have nothing to do with football.
LALIGA described itself as an entertainment business, not a football business, competing with Netflix and Amazon for the same hours in a fan’s day. Juventus acted on that logic directly, rebuilding an entire content unit around the reach it lost when Cristiano Ronaldo left, treating attention itself as the asset to replace, not just the player. Even FIFA, an organisation with no shirt, no stadium and no players of its own, now draws most of its revenue from exactly that: content and intellectual property, not the scoreline.
Proving a fan’s value, unlike simply claiming it, is expensive to build. The clubs that built the infrastructure this chapter describes now know exactly who’s watching and why. Everyone else is still asking to be taken at their word.
Read the full Chapter 7 of Football 2016–2026: The Decade that Rewrote the Rules at worldfootballsummit.com here.
Download Chapter 6: Competition Formats & Alternative Models here
Download Chapter 5: Broadcasting, Rights and Distribution here
Download Chapter 4: The Business Case for Women’s Football here
Download Chapter 3: The Stadium Economy here