The opening session in the The Residency on day one of ISC 2025 featured a telco business headquartered in France, a major personal care and hygiene brand headquartered in the UK, and a videogames publisher based in Canada – all sharing a belief in the potential of sports partnerships to drive brand growth and returns.
Orange, Unilever and EA Sports are prolific partners of global sports rights holders and events, with portfolios that also encompass music, entertainment and the creator economy. And each has developed a sponsorship strategy that reflects changing consumer expectations, culture, and the real value of supporting meaningful change.
For Unilever, said Willem Dinger, partnerships are the epicentre of “culture, community and commerce”, helping its brands to “show up in an unmissable way”. Headline activations stimulate awareness while work with creators builds advocacy, allowing Unilever to drive conversions at retail. But its social change initiatives – like the Dove Self Esteem platform, while helps women and young girls to find and stay in sport – make personal connections that contribute to both sides of a partnership.
EA Sports had to be “really intentional” about reconstructing the identity of its marquee video game property when its FIFA series relaunched as EA Sports FC in 2023. That pushedthe company to reevaluate how its many hundreds of football industry partnerships translate to the real world, turning the “passive fan” into an “interactive fan” and even an “active fan”: younger EA Sports FC players are more likely to actually play football, inspiring the developer to incorporate UEFA-approved training exercises into its games.
All three companies have found that women’s sport – particularly football – offers a considerable opportunity to multiply social impact and brand growth.
For Orange, Soane explained, a focus on women’s sport is enabling the brand to address a marketing gap. An internal audit in 2018 found that only 29% of the properties it invested in were gender-equal, so it looked to football as a way of countering that imbalance. Where it has signed partnerships with national federations, it has led on sponsorship of women’s teams.
That strategy bore fruit ahead of the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2023. An innovative deepfake AI campaign that represented male stars producing stunning goals – actually scoredby female players – achieved major cutthrough for Orange and the French Football Federation. Its success has emboldened Orange to spend the same on its creative for female-led campaigns as it does in men’s sports sponsorship.
“The more people associate the Orange brand with women’s football, the more likely they are going to choose us,” said Soane.
The data supports investment in women’s sport. 3.4 billion women’s player items have featured in online Ultimate Team matches in EA SPORTS FC 25 since launch.
Unilever wanted to make sure that its partnership with FIFA was very female-driven and has just completed the first women’s cricket only partnership with the ICC. All of this, Dinger said, is also founded on a drive to reach girls and younger women and power sustainable growth for women’s sport at all levels, not just the elite.
“Women’s sport is fundamentally a massive, massive white space,” he added.
Technology and culture are changing how sport presents itself as a brand platform. Salmon is aware of several clubs who used data relating to their presence within EA Sports FC to get front-of-shirt sponsorship deals over the line.
And as Dinger noted, new types of content will engage fans in different ways, with communities continuing to form around it, while technologies like the Cosm ‘shared reality’ installations in the US will change how fans experience things together.
For Soane, that means it has never been more important for brands to consider fans and their relationship to sport in the round, from their discovery of sport through gaming to connection to their related passions for music and culture.
