Watching a World Cup match in a friend’s back garden a few evenings ago, the conversation gradually drifted away from the football and towards the advertising boards surrounding the pitch. It started with somebody asking why companies such as Visa, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s continue to spend extraordinary sums sponsoring one of the biggest sporting events on the planet when almost every adult already knows who they are, but before long the discussion had become considerably broader.

Nobody around the table was going to apply for a new credit card because they’d spotted a logo between corners, nobody was suddenly going to discover Coca-Cola after more than a century in business and, if we’re being honest, I doubt many of us could confidently have said whether Visa or Mastercard was actually the tournament sponsor anyway.

Curiously, the brands that generated the greatest interest weren’t the famous ones at all but the unfamiliar names. Phones appeared, Google searches followed and conversations sprang up about companies we’d never heard of, reminding me that only a few years ago BYD fell squarely into that category for me. I didn’t immediately buy one of their cars after seeing the brand repeatedly associated with major sporting events, but I did look it up, and that simple act of curiosity is arguably the first hurdle every challenger brand has to overcome.

The question stayed with me over the following days because, despite having spent part of my career working on sponsorship programmes, I realised I’d instinctively been judging them in exactly the same way as everyone else in the garden: by the logos.

The visible tip of the iceberg

The more I’ve thought about that conversation, the more convinced I’ve become that most of us evaluate sponsorship through the only element we ever experience. We see the perimeter advertising, estimate the number of television viewers and conclude that the sponsor has spent a remarkable amount of money buying a few seconds of visibility every couple of minutes. Judged on those terms alone, it’s easy to question whether the investment can possibly be worthwhile.

Having spent part of my career working on sponsorship programmes, including Novartis’ partnership with Eurovision and exploratory discussions around UEFA Women’s EURO 2025 in Basel, I can barely remember a single meeting where logo placement or television impressions dominated the agenda. Those things were measured, of course, but they were rarely the point. The conversations revolved around employee engagement, stakeholder relationships, activation opportunities, reputation, storytelling and how a sponsorship could advance wider organisational objectives long after the event itself had finished.

To those of us watching from the garden, the sponsorship looked like a logo around a football pitch. To the organisation paying for it, it represented a platform for client hospitality, executive networking, retailer engagement, internal communications, content creation, licensing, public relations and business development. The logo was simply the visible expression of a much larger strategy.

Awareness is only one possible outcome

That distinction also explains why sponsorship serves very different purposes depending on the maturity of the brand involved.

For challenger businesses such as BYD, visibility itself has enormous value because awareness remains a barrier to growth. Every person who searches for the company after repeatedly seeing its name during a tournament represents a small but meaningful step towards legitimacy and familiarity. Awareness rarely creates an immediate sale, but it often determines which brands make the shortlist years later. Looking back, that’s exactly what happened to me. I didn’t become a customer, but the brand moved from complete obscurity to something I recognised and could place in a conversation, which is precisely what many emerging brands are trying to achieve.

For Visa, Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, however, awareness ceased to be the objective decades ago. Marketing science instead points towards concepts such as mental availability and the mere exposure effect, suggesting that repeated encounters with familiar brands reinforce memory and preference even when people have little conscious recollection of where those encounters occurred. The objective, therefore, may not be to make people remember the sponsorship at all, but simply to ensure the brand continues to feel familiar, trusted and culturally present when a purchasing decision eventually arrives.

There is another subtle benefit too. Global sporting events carry their own associations of optimism, excellence, internationalism and shared experience, allowing sponsors to borrow some of that meaning through repeated association. They are not simply buying exposure. They are buying proximity to moments that millions of people care about, quietly reinforcing the idea that their own brands belong alongside them.

Activation often matters more than the asset

One of the most talked-about branding moments during the first weekend of the tournament wasn’t an official sponsorship activation at all. The media briefly became fascinated by reports that Levi’s had covered part of its stadium branding with a tarpaulin whose outline still unmistakably echoed the famous batwing shape. Whether intentional or not, the resulting discussion arguably generated more attention than conventional logo placement ever could.

It struck me as a reminder that, in an age of social media, the asset itself is often less valuable than what a brand chooses to do with it. The sponsorship creates the opportunity. The activation creates the conversation. In many cases, the story surrounding a sponsorship travels much further than the sponsorship itself.

The sponsorship may also be defensive

It’s also entirely possible that Visa sponsors the World Cup not because it desperately needs to be there but because it doesn’t want Mastercard there instead.

Marketing conversations often focus on growth, yet protecting an existing position can be every bit as valuable as gaining a new one. If your closest competitor quietly occupied the world’s biggest sporting stages for twenty years while your own brand gradually disappeared from those shared cultural moments, the cumulative effect might be impossible to isolate statistically yet still commercially significant. Sponsorship, viewed through that lens, starts to resemble an insurance policy as much as an advertising campaign.

Then again, another possibility deserves consideration.

Large organisations are no less susceptible to inertia than the rest of us, and long-standing sponsorships can acquire an almost untouchable status simply because nobody wants to be remembered as the executive who cancelled them. Unlike digital advertising, sponsorship operates across multiple audiences, channels and time horizons, making attribution extraordinarily difficult. If a partnership is renewed and nothing changes, nobody asks many questions. If it’s cancelled and market leadership quietly erodes ten years later, nobody can conclusively prove whether the decision was responsible either.

The uncomfortable truth is that nobody can run the counterfactual experiment. No global brand can simply stop sponsoring the World Cup for a decade to discover what would have happened instead.

I suspect the truth lies somewhere between those two positions. Some sponsorships undoubtedly create enormous strategic value, while others probably survive because the risk of stopping feels greater than the cost of continuing.

Perhaps we’ve been measuring the wrong thing

The more I’ve reflected on that conversation over the past few days, the less convinced I am that the average football fan is supposed to remember who sponsored the World Cup at all. In fact, if somebody stopped me in the street tomorrow and asked whether Visa or Mastercard sponsored the tournament, I’m not entirely sure I’d answer with complete confidence despite having watched match after match surrounded by their branding.

Perhaps that isn’t a failure of sponsorship but evidence that we’ve misunderstood its purpose.

The best sponsorships may not interrupt an experience so much as become woven into it, quietly reinforcing familiarity through hundreds of subtle interactions rather than one memorable message. They create platforms for organisations to engage employees, strengthen stakeholder relationships, entertain clients, generate content, build reputation and borrow meaning from moments that matter, while the logo around the pitch simply reassures the outside world that all of this is happening.

The average football fan assumes the sponsor is buying visibility. The sponsor is probably buying an ecosystem.

Judged on those terms, the question isn’t whether Visa, Coca-Cola or McDonald’s can justify another tournament sponsorship. The more interesting question is whether organisations of that scale can really afford to surrender those cultural moments, the relationships they enable and the strategic platform they create, simply because the average viewer only notices the logo.

Perhaps that’s why the world’s biggest brands keep returning. They may not be buying the logo around the pitch at all. They may simply be buying the right to remain part of the world’s biggest shared moments.