A global number of fans and followers is an incomplete asset
Exposure still sells, but it doesn't build you an audience you know and can target directly. That void is precisely where so much of the media and advertising revenue is slipping away.
Sports engagement around clubs and athletes is among the highest in entertainment. The missed opportunity? It is monetised only at face value. Approaching a sponsor with a global follower count, little insight into who those people are (their passions, affinities, needs, expectations and intent) and no capability to reach them directly is a weak proposition.
This lack of depth impacts not only the core sponsorship deal but especially the media and advertising revenue that should run alongside it, on its own or as part of the main activation. Today, most clubs can directly reach and engage only a small share of the audience they declare, mostly in their home market. The rest is just a large, often un-deduplicated number.
Social media platforms are vital top-of-funnel distribution for global visibility and cultural relevance, but the audience built there is not owned or controlled by the club. Those followers belong to Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, available at the same time to millions of competing brands via standard advertising tools. Relying on third-party channels as a club's primary commercial proof point leaves its revenue at the mercy of platform algorithms that can collapse visibility overnight, even in the middle of a campaign.
A claimed audience is not a known audience, and sponsors know the difference. Even a number built on a large survey is still a claimed audience. An example: one of the few clubs listed on a stock exchange has to present its number to its investors. Its filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission put its global fans and followers at 1.1 billion, extrapolated from a 2019 survey of 54,000 people across 39 countries. The same filings acknowledge that the club has found no practical way to measure the difference between a fan and a follower and note that the actual total could be significantly higher or lower. The survey recorded what people said about themselves, not what they did. That 2019 estimate was still the club's number in the quarterly results published in May 2026.
None of this has stopped the same club from reporting record commercial revenue in the first year of its current front-of-shirt deal, because exposure still sells. But what the number cannot supply is an audience that a sponsor can reach directly and with precision, on a strategy defined in advance.
The gap matters at every level, although not on the same scale. For a global club it appears at the margin of a record front-of-shirt deal. For a mid-tier club, closing it can change the size of its commercial revenue, though not every mid-tier club will see the same effect.
In the meantime, third-party technology and data partners sitting between clubs and their fans (ticketing platforms, streaming providers and retail partners) are capturing what rights holders leave behind. Several can offer sponsors addressable, high-intent segments of the same fans, while the majority of clubs can offer only a social media tally. At those clubs, a commercial brief asking for a specific, addressable audience segment cannot yet be answered in-house. Building that capability requires owned data and the infrastructure to turn what the club knows about its fans into sponsorship and advertising products.
Operating media-level technology of its own is the ideal and the recommended option, but it is not the first step. The first step is an audience monetisation strategy: what the club will sell to sponsors and advertisers beyond exposure, and what it needs to know about its fans to build those products. The second is the contracts with existing technology and data partners, renegotiated so that data flows back to the club.
Without owned data, sponsorship and advertising prices are set by comparison: with what other rights holders charge, with what the same exposure would cost if bought as advertising or with sporting results, a volatile proxy for engagement and passion. Exposure value can tell a sponsor how many people were reached and for how long, not who they were or what they did next. Many sponsorship proposals are built on follower counts that inflate the audience. The irony is that clubs and athletes are expected to perform like modern media operations, which are priced on measured audiences, while they are still paid like talent: on reputation and on a comparable deal.
The main sponsorship position and stadium broadcast exposure will always command top-of-funnel value for brand equity and global prestige. But performance budgets are being directed elsewhere. A sponsor can buy campaigns targeting the same fan demographics on a streaming platform or YouTube with a set of target audiences agreed in advance and performance measured at the end. Digital media set the precedent over a decade ago: buyers moved their money to the platforms that could offer addressable, measurable audiences. Media owners without an addressable audience of their own were priced against them. Sponsorship pricing is next.
New media revenue and a stronger headline sponsorship both require looking beyond a single global number. The club should use third-party platforms to attract the audience to its own digital properties. The data collected there is the foundation of the first-party insights and segments that the club offers to sponsors and advertisers, connecting them to its fanbase. Those segments are smaller than any platform's reach, but they are where engagement and loyalty are highest.
Until that capability becomes reality, which it can, a vanity number in place of a known fanbase is an incomplete asset, leaving the most measurable revenue on the table.
It is a claim, valued and priced against audiences that are addressable and measurable.