Especially where commercial and content teams operate in silos. 

Alex’s argument is blunt. Sports teams already have plenty of content, and what most lack is a system for turning it into a sponsorship product that’s properly defined and priced. 

“Digital has been kind of treated as a throw-in ever since,” he told me. 

That’s an expensive habit. The best teams, he said, are generating high seven-figure to eight-figure revenue from digital content. Many rights holders still treat it as the extra item added after signage, hospitality, naming rights, and live activation have already been sold. 

He judges sponsored content by whether it gives fans something they expected to see from the team in the first place. 

A product can appear prominently and still fit. Red Bull’s post-race Yeti cooler, one of his examples, fits naturally as part of a recurring team moment. Things go wrong when an idea gets sold without the content team’s input, and the team ends up producing something that makes sense for the brand but not for its audience.

The test for commercial teams is whether they can give the partner a meaningful role in content fans already care about. 

For benchmarks, he pointed to the Philadelphia Eagles, especially their YouTube content, along with Liverpool, Arsenal, the Golden State Warriors, the Chicago Bulls, and the Buffalo Bills. He also rates the NFL as a league doing sponsored digital content well. 

In motorsport, his standouts were Mercedes and McLaren, with Red Bull, Aston Martin, and VCarb also worth watching. What those teams share is a willingness to build brands and products into the content itself, and Mercedes x WhatsApp is the clearest example. WhatsApp turns up in everyday content, from driver voice notes to summer-break messages laid out like the app itself.

The familiar version goes like this. A commercial team is trying to close a partnership; the buyer asks for digital support, and the salesperson agrees. The content team hasn’t reviewed the idea, the production burden is unclear, and nobody has established what the partner expects to get out of it. 

What usually follows is weak execution and a disappointed sponsor, and the commercial team is less confident selling digital the next time around. 

It shows up in the gap between what teams have available and what they should have. 

The 200 come from documenting the recurring content moments a property already creates: which channels they appear on, how often they run, how a sponsor can integrate, which categories fit, what results they can reasonably produce, and what each asset costs.

A commercial team should be able to pull up a defined inventory during a pitch, rather than promise a vague “content bank” and figure it out later. 

That’s where rights holders lose control. Once the contract is signed and the content is undefined, the sponsor can reasonably expect to shape what gets made, even if the content team has no capacity, the concept doesn’t suit the audience, or the cost runs well past what was sold.

Digital shouldn’t sit in a partnership deck as a stand-alone appendix. 

Traditional rights create visibility and association, and live activation brings physical experience, hospitality, sampling, and direct fan contact. Digital carries it beyond the venue and beyond matchday. 

If a sponsor owns a physical asset, content can showcase it in the moments fans care about most. If a brand has a live activation, the story can continue through social, email, app, web, text, and paid media.

Digital also reaches fans year-round. 

“You can reach people with digital 365 days a year, whether you’re home or on the road.” 

A travel partner can sponsor race-start information across time zones. Teams already produce that content; it can be templated for every race weekend, and the category fit is obvious. It also doesn’t need a disruptive creative concept. 

He counts “over 30 moments that these teams can be covering” on a race or game day. Here’s his game-day list:

Most of it is already being captured. 

The opportunity is in picking the moments where sponsorship improves the content, supports the wider partnership, or gives the brand a credible role. Plenty should stay as they are. 

His pricing model has five inputs: expected performance, direct production costs, opportunity cost, desired profit margin, and market demand. 

Expected media performance might set a baseline value of $35,000 from impression and engagement inputs. That’s the starting point. Teams then add hard costs, such as equipment or production, and the cost of internal time. 

Internal time doesn’t show up as an extra expense on the P&L. He calculates it anyway, because it tells him whether a custom project is worth taking on.

He’s seen actual margins land roughly between 60% and 80% on hard costs. Once internal team time is counted, around 50% is a useful target.

A content series sold for $100,000 might have $30,000 in hard costs. If a custom shoot and extensive internal work push the true cost to $60,000, the price needs to go to at least $120,000 to hold a 50% margin. 

That’s a more useful commercial conversation than applying a CPM to every post. 

The club got a lot more attention after KSI invested, though attention on its own doesn’t give a sales team a repeatable sponsorship model. 

Alex joined as the club approached sales season. He ran an audit, identified strengths and weaknesses, and began building a formal digital inventory across channels. The process started with roughly 175 concepts. The club reviewed each with content and partnership stakeholders and marked it as approved, denied, approved with changes, or held for future consideration. 

They finished with 149 approved ideas valued at £3M. 

One early partnership connected Gemini Sports (an AI platform that supports roster construction) with player-transaction content. The series ran as “Building the Team with Gemini Sports.”

By his count, it delivered more than 10 million impressions on X alone in its first three months, and it ran on other channels too. 

The club also increased the value of home matchday sponsorship through Instagram Story takeovers. Its key inventory included familiar football content: Starting 11s, matchday graphics, final scores, player arrivals, highlights, schedule updates, and a Monday mailbag format.

The value came from formalising recurring moments fans already expect, so it didn’t rest on KSI’s attention, results on the pitch, or one-off creative stunts. 

Commercial teams can’t sell defined digital inventory unless content teams help create and approve it. Content teams can’t protect quality if they only hear about sponsor obligations after the deal is signed. 

He also recommends a final content-team check before a partnership asset is formally sold. Is it still available? Has too much been sold around the same period? Does the cadence still work? Does it fit the wider channel plan? 

It sounds procedural. It’s also how teams avoid overloading matchday, overpromising to partners, and wearing down the audience experience. 

“The key thing you need to be doing is building the inventory first.”