For much of the last decade, sports marketing followed a familiar script: globalisation, digital scale and steadily inflating rights fees. In 2025, that script broke. This year forced brands, rights-holders and investors to confront harder truths about attention, technology and value, and in doing so, it reset how sport is bought, sold and measured.
From AI finally becoming operational, to women’s sport crossing from promise to proof, 2025 redefined what counts as premium, measurable, and essential.
AI went from pitch deck to plumbing
2025 will be remembered as the year AI stopped being a talking point and became infrastructure.
Across sport, AI moved out of pilots and into fan-facing reality: automated highlights, personalised feeds, conversational search and predictive performance tools became part of the everyday experience. Best-in-class broadcasters showed what that looks like in practice.
In the US, MLB delivered personalised daily video recaps tailored to individual fan behaviour, while ESPN integrated AI-driven predictive analytics into live NFL coverage. Closer to home, Wimbledon leveraged generative AI to automate highlights and enrich digital storytelling, extending the value of the live moment well beyond Centre Court.
Broadcasters leaned heavily into automated clips and data-led production to keep pace with social platforms, while clubs and leagues expanded personalised apps and direct-to-fan services.
As cookies continued to disappear and privacy regulation tightened, AI intermediaries filled the. gap. Fans increasingly consumed sport through personalised summaries, agent-driven recommendations and platform-level curation. That shifted the centre of gravity.
First-party data became the most valuable strategic asset in sport, not just for ticketing or CRM, but for sponsorship valuation and attribution. Rights-holders were no longer simply selling exposure; they were selling access to logged-in, addressable fan relationships.
Hot take: the most valuable sponsorships of the next cycle won’t be the loudest or most visible. They’ll be the most intelligently embedded into AI-mediated fan journeys.
Women’s sport crossed the line
If AI was the technological shift of 2025, women’s sport was the commercial one.
This was the year women’s sport stopped being “emerging” and started being essential inventory. In the UK, that shift was underpinned by success on the biggest stages: England lifted both the Women’s Rugby World Cup and the Women’s European Championship, proof that women’s sport delivers national moments, not just incremental growth.
Those wins translated commercially. UK football and cricket saw record audiences, while sponsorship interest broadened beyond traditional categories into technology and automotive brands.
The bigger shift? How brands framed the opportunity. The question shifted from ‘does it scale?’ to ‘what audience does it deliver?” In a fragmented attention economy, younger, more diverse and culturally engaged fans aren’t niche; they are strategically scarce.
2025 didn’t slow the growth of women’s sport. It normalised it. And in business terms, normalisation matters more than hype.
Hot take: within five years, brands will struggle to justify sports portfolios that don’t include women’s sport, not on values grounds, but on performance ones.
Live sport reasserted its pricing power
Digital still dominates headline spend, but 2025 exposed its limits. Brand safety concerns, diminishing returns and platform fragmentation pushed advertisers back towards environments that guarantee attention and trust.
In the UK, live sport benefited more than any other category. Premium football, cricket and Formula 1 regained board-level interest, particularly around marquee fixtures and tentpole moments. Broadcasters leaned on sport to hedge against audience fragmentation, while sponsors treated top-tier live events as fewer, bigger bets rather than spread commitments.
Scarcity accelerated a shift from badge-on-shirt sponsorships to performance-linked partnerships. Advertisers demanded clearer accountability, better data access and measurable outcomes. Rights-holders that could package broadcast, content and first-party fan data alongside visibility pulled ahead; others felt the squeeze.
The result was a familiar but sharpening dynamic: value concentrating at the top. Mega-properties commanded premiums, while mid-tier assets faced tougher questions on differentiation, diversification and survival.
Why 2025 was the reset
Taken together, these shifts explain why 2025 feels different.
AI made personalisation unavoidable. Women’s sport proved commercially credible. Live sport reasserted its value as one of the few environments capable of delivering trusted, high-attention reach. And fragmentation killed the illusion that reach alone equals impact.
The winners of 2025 weren’t those chasing novelty, but those building systems: data-ready rights, culturally fluent creative and partnerships designed for accountability rather than optics. In a cautious UK economy, certainty became the premium product.
Final hot take: the next era of sports marketing won’t be defined by who spends the most, but by who understands their fans best.
If recent years were about momentum, 2025 was about recalibration. For an industry built on moments, this may prove to be the year that quietly changed everything.
Louise Johnson is global chief executive of Fuse