For years, sport has had a quiet but influential presence at Cannes Lions. This became official in 2019, when we launched the Entertainment Lions for Sport, which recognise the incredible work happening at the intersection of sports and entertainment. Year on year, we watched this space grow bigger, louder and more central to the broader global conversation surrounding creativity, culture and commerce. It became clear that sports marketing could no longer be treated as a side conversation or a seasonal activation. It was time to give it a permanent home. 

The birth of LIONS Sport didn’t happen overnight. It’s the culmination of conversations with industry leaders, brands, leagues and rights holders – the very people who live and breathe this space every single day. What they told us was remarkably consistent: they wanted a dedicated, physical space at the Cannes Lions Festival where the brightest minds in our industry could gather to collaborate, challenge conventions and outline the future of this US$417bn sports landscape. 

The inaugural LIONS Sport event and this accompanying report are built to celebrate that future. But as we step into this new era, we must also confront an uncomfortable truth: the old sports marketing playbook is officially obsolete. Sponsoring a team or an event by simply plastering a logo on a billboard, fence or jersey is now recognised as “spiritually invisible”. Armed with razor-sharp ad filters, modern fans detect and reject rented commercial intrusions and logo wallpaper. Today’s fans demand that brands move beyond that simple, passive visibility. 

The future belongs to brands that entertain or educate fans, help them co-create their own experience of the sport or make their lives friction-free – so they can spend more time enjoying the sport. The most effective brand partnerships of tomorrow are those that use their unique capabilities to solve real economic, operational or emotional challenges for sports properties and their fan communities. We see this in IBM’s co-creation of an AI match summary tool for Wimbledon, which scaled digital editorial output by 300%, helping fans absorb the top shots from all the matches in the busy opening rounds. In Infosys’s haptic sensory board that allowed blind and visually impaired fans to track a tennis ball’s trajectory live in the stands for the first time at the Australian Open. And in Mastercard’s “just walk out” stores that eliminate agonising queue wait times at the AO sports precinct. 

We observe it in the way athletics league ATHLOS has co-created its entire model with women athletes as active owners – re-engineering outdated and clumsy running bibs for women’s torsos, paying prizes via Cash App seconds after they cross the finish line and replacing traditional medals with custom Tiffany & Co. crowns to turn a track meet into an unmissable cultural party.  

We witness it in the Kings League, which gamifies physical football with live power-up cards and halftime dice rolls, putting direct rule-making agency back into the hands of a hyper-engaged fanbase while eliminating dull scoreless draws. And we experience it in the fearless, unhinged storytelling of Riyadh Season’s boxing promos that bypass safe, sterile corporate clichés to turn elite heavyweight champions into cinematic characters packed with subcultural Easter eggs that show fans the brand truly speaks their language. 

LIONS Sport is a celebration of these makers, thinkers and innovators, as well as the incredible athletes at the heart of the sports we all love. It’s a permanent foundation built to explore what each sport can teach other sports, elevate the thinking behind the work and deliver ideas that drive commercial and cultural impact.

Whether you’re a brand, a creative agency, a league or a rights holder, thank you for choosing to spend this time with us. We built LIONS Sport for you, and we can’t wait to see what you build next. 

The same is true in the explosive world of esports, as Hero Esports Co-Founder and CEO Danny Tang noted in ‘Selling Out Olympic Stadiums – How Esports Rewrites Attention/Fandom. Tang observed that fans are highly sensitive to whether brands are “talking to them either from just a preaching perspective or just trying really trying to get to know them...and connect with them in a really genuine way”.

And at least some of the industry is responding to this trend by moving past traditional brand badging and towards functional integrations – using their brand’s unique capabilities to solve real economic, operational or emotional friction for the sports property and its fan community.

At the All England Tennis Club’s Wimbledon Championships, IBM did this by applying its generative AI and large language models to solve operational and accessibility issue for the tournament’s local and global audience. In ‘How AI Innovation is Serving Up the Future of Fandom, the brand’s VP of Sports and Entertainment Partnerships Kameryn Stanhouse shared that Wimbledon and the US Open tennis grand slams operate with a small foundational team of only five editors who physically could not cover all 254 simultaneous singles matches playing across 17 courts. IBM co-created an AI match summary tool that drafted structured post-match articles, keeping a human editor at the centre for accuracy. This scaled Wimbledon’s digital editorial output by 300%.

Educate fans to build deeper bonds

Traditionally, sports broadcasters have assumed that anyone tuning in would be familiar with all the relevant terminology – inadvertently excluding newcomers, casual viewers and global audiences from regions where the sport is unfamiliar or unplayed. But modern sports properties and technical partners are rewriting this discriminatory playbook by using tech to demystify complex sports rules, as well as track raw statistics and tell the stories of lesser-known athletes. And they’re fundamentally changing the fan experience as a result.

For example, IBM built ‘Match Chat’ to help casual fans and tennis novices feel included. This generative AI tool allows viewers to ask basic questions live – for example how to pronounce a player’s name or who has hit the most aces – so they can follow along without feeling out of the loop.

This type of educational empowerment can be a powerful entertainment vehicle. When fans understand the subtle ‘game within the game’, whether that’s a tactical momentum shift or a player’s serving pattern on a break point, they become deeply invested participants. As IBM’s VP of Sports and Entertainment Partnerships Kameryn Stanhouse put it: “Smarter businesses create smarter fans, and we’re in the business of smarter fans who foster connection.”

That’s not all, either. For the athletes on the field, performing in front of an intellectually engaged and data-fluent crowd is more fulfilling. Brands providing this intelligence can become established as indispensable guides rather than loud, distracting interrupters.

Even when fans are well versed in a game’s rules and terminology, there’s room for brands to offer specialised knowledge. As NFL’s CMO Tim Ellis explained in the LIONS Sport ‘CMOs in the Spotlight session, research has shown that younger sports fans in particular “go deep into stats”. He advised: “If you give them something interesting, they’ll keep watching.”

And this openness can support players, too. For instance, Wimbledon and IBM re-engineered their digital Player Portal to give every qualifier the same access to premium tactical and performance data that, historically, only top-tier tennis players would’ve been privy to, as they’re the only ones who can afford to bring specialised data analysts onsite.

Solve real-world problems every day

When brands partner with a sport, their default instinct is often to focus on how the sport can serve their business. But the most culturally enduring and commercially successful sponsorships do the opposite: they focus on how they’re best placed to solve a real problem for the fans and their communities.

Modern sports fans don’t exist in a broadcast vacuum. They face agonising stadium queue bottlenecks or can’t get into playing a sport themselves because expensive athletic equipment or their own physical accessibility needs are barriers. They’re also people with full lives outside of being sports fans. And when a brand uses its operational, financial or technological power to support them, the brand transitions from a decorative corporate entity into a trusted community ally.

Founder and CEO of Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment Laura Correnti shared her perspective on creating physical services for parents and guardians such as childcare, nursing rooms or even parking space for pushchairs and prams – arguing that these are “the things that you need to not only cater to the athletes and their families, but your fans”.

Fans actively reward brands that respect their lifestyle, protect their play spaces and ease their everyday routines. When a shoe company designs high-performance gear for athletes with Down syndrome as adidas and its Toronto-based agency TBWA\Canada did with Innovation Lions Grand Prix and Silver Entertainment Lions for Sport winner ‘Supernova Adaptive’, or when a performance equipment brand tricks GPS algorithms to save streets for kids to play in as True Hockey did with Bronze Entertainment Lions for Sport winner ‘Game on Ball’, they’re not just running an ad. They’re demonstrating their product’s core purpose and usefulness under the ultimate test: real life.

In the LIONS Sport ‘CMOs in the Spotlight session, Strava’s CMO Louisa Wee explained why brands must stop chasing broad, passive exposure and instead ask how their products can – in this case through AI – actively assist, inspire and support a consumer on their daily physical and wellness journeys. And in ‘The AO Playbook: Stop Selling Sport. Start Building Culture’, Tennis Australia’s Director of Partnerships and International Business Roddy Campbell gave a few examples of what that might look like – including one from payment giant Mastercard, a 2026 Creative Brand Lion winner, which eliminated long stadium queues at the Australian Open by powering ‘just walk out’ retail stores.

In Canada, navigation apps suggesting shortcuts through quiet, residential streets to drivers facing traffic bottlenecks on main roads placed the beloved sport of street hockey at risk of disappearing as kids no longer felt safe playing outside with cars racing through their neighbourhood. True Hockey and Dentsu Creative, Toronto, fought back by engineering ‘Game on Ball’ – a tech-enabled street hockey ball that emits a signal that tricks major navigation databases into detecting heavy congestion on the street where a game is active. The rerouting solution reached more than 2.6 million hockey fans and earned a Bronze in the Entertainment Lions for Sport.

adidas and TBWA\Canada, Toronto, discovered that traditional performance running shoes are unsuitable for people with Down syndrome, as they lead to issues such as poor balance, blistering, cramping and hypersensitivity. So they addressed this accessibility gap in the sports market by collaborating with runners who have Down syndrome to design a shoe that meets their needs – with features such as midfoot support, a custom gusseted tongue and a stable, adaptive heel. Sold in 29 countries, ‘Supernova Adaptive’ saw 42% of its US sales come from first-time buyers, proving that true sponsorship is built on authentic utility. It won four Lions, including the 2026 Innovation Lions Grand Prix and a Silver in the Entertainment Lions for Sport.

And Colombian beer brand Aguila made the national football jerseys – which normally cost the equivalent of 25% of the country’s minimum monthly wage – more financially accessible by offering fans a gamified trade-off: increase the size of the Aguila logo on the jersey and unlock discounts cutting down the price to as little as US$20. The jersey sold out in under two hours – a record for the brand. ‘Resize the Price’, by DAVID Bogotá, won a Gold in the Entertainment Lions for Sport, as well as two more Lions.

Lindsey wasn’t the only one to highlight this. In ‘Selling Out Olympic Stadiums – How Esports Rewrites Attention/Fandom, the University of Edinburgh’s Tongyu Liu, who specialises in esports psychology, argued that esports have changed the dynamic of the fan–athlete relationship, with sports stars like F1 driver Lando Norris or NFL player Travis Kelce connecting with fans by posting content and building their social media presence. According to Liu, this unprecedented access to previously “unreachable” athletes has cultivated a “transparasocial” connection between fans and sports professionals. She suggested that the esports category, where streaming was built into the experience from the outset, has a lot to teach traditional sports brands on how to build fandom and connect with athletes.

Formula 1 driver George Russell also argued in favour of shifting towards raw, human-centric storytelling. In his session on ‘What Pressure Reveals: The Edge between Good and Great with Marriott International President and CEO Anthony Capuano, Russell contended that documentaries like Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive have transformed fan connection by showing audiences that racing is a deeply collaborative ‘team sport’ rather than a solo endeavour. He argued that entertaining modern fans requires stripping away the safe, corporate façade of athletes to reveal the intense psychological realities of competition. For Russell, this means being open about the arduous “emotional hangovers” of both victory and defeat, embracing failures as necessary stepping stones to personal strength and reminding the public that athletes are teammates who navigate the same raw, vulnerable human experiences as the fans cheering in the stands.

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Another superstition-themed Entertainment Lions for Sport winner came from craft brewer Mikkeller in Taiwan, where baseball fans refuse to watch games live during high-stakes tournaments like the World Baseball Classic (WBC) for fear of ‘jinxing’ their team. To solve this psychological friction, Mikkeller broadcast the classic Taiwanese period TV drama The Pioneers in its bars during game time. Except, thanks to voice cloning and lip synching technology, the cast were no longer acting out their scenes: instead, they were providing a real-time audio commentary of the live game. ‘The Switch Hit’, by Ogilvy Taipei, allowed fans to follow the game ‘jinx-free’ while enjoying their beer – and perhaps even played a role in Taiwan defeating Korea for the first time in history.

And Gatorade helped lower the high dropout rate of El Cruce, one of Latin America’s most gruelling three-day trail running events, by embedding its branding directly into the physical struggle of the race. Together with Tombras, Buenos Aires, it designed a modular ‘Fragmental Medal’ that was awarded to runners fragment by fragment after completing different milestones, at the point where most would quit the course. By turning its branding into a physical motivational tool, Gatorade helped decrease the dropout rate by 80% and was awarded a Bronze in the Entertainment Lions for Sport.

The Hundred’s evolution is part of a wider trend of traditional properties making high-stakes bets to appeal to modern audiences and reverse the decline in traditional live viewership among Gen Z. By prioritising accessibility, spectacle and fan agency, these leagues are capturing a huge, untapped demographic of audiences who previously had no interest in the game. As Twitch’s Chief Product Officer Mike Minton put it in his session on how Gen Z is engaging with sport, the athletic competition is no longer the sole event in this re-engineered ecosystem – it’s the anchor for a broader cultural celebration.

Another example of this is the Australian Open, which managed to attract new Gen Z fans by adopting the live entertainment approach. Tennis Australia’s Head of Event Brand Marketing Britt Wickes shared the four strategies that have created new entry points for prospective fans, ranging from festival music on tournament grounds and dedicated spaces built for and by Gen Z to the One Point Slam, an entry-level tournament pitting some of the world’s biggest tennis players against amateurs.

ATHLOS has taken a similar approach. Olympic Gold medallist and long jump world champion Tara Woodhall-Davis, who’s the headlining field event athlete for the meeting series, explained how it’s spearheading a track and field revolution in a session on ‘Game Changers: How Emerging Sports Leagues Are Redefining Fandom. By moving field events out of traditional arenas and directly into the streets of Times Square, in New York, USA, ATHLOS has created a packed, high-energy “party” where women athletes are positioned as the central storytellers and empowered to compete freely.

Even the most traditional sports are evolving. In the same session, film producer Oriol Querol talked about the Kings League, which he created together with former Barcelona star Gerard Piqué to eliminate the possibility of a boring match and appeal to “fans raised on streaming, memes and the chaos of the internet”. He shared how the Kings League – where he serves as Chief Product Officer – has gamified physical football by introducing video-game-style elements like half-time dice rolls and randomised secret “power-up” cards that could activate perks like instant penalty kicks, double-goal-value windows and benching of opposing players. It has also transformed traditional sport into an interactive, unscripted live stream by handing over club ownership to the world’s largest creators and streaming matches for free across Twitch, YouTube and TikTok.

This philosophy of dismantling traditional, slow-paced sports formats to thrive in the creator economy is transforming other heritages sports, too – like golf. In ‘Marketing in the New Era of Sports, 2× US Open Winner and content creator Bryson DeChambeau admitted that, in its traditional four-hour linear broadcast format, watching professional golf can sometimes feel like “watching paint dry”. Rather than relying on traditional sports television to build his brand, DeChambeau built an in-house creative team with backgrounds rooted in fast-paced video games and began compressing tournament rounds into hyper-dynamic one-hour YouTube spectacles. This allowed him to convert a historically exclusive, slow game into an addictive pop-culture proposition – as well as speak to his new audience of more than 3 million subscribers with unfiltered candour.

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Latin America’s largest e-commerce platform and leading football sponsor, Mercado Libre, transformed the vocal energy of fan chants into active commerce through ‘Discount Chants’. This interactive platform synchronised stadium billboards with football crowds, unlocking real-time discount coupons on the Mercado Libre mobile app for products ranging from beers to TVs as soon as fans chanted a song referencing them. Converting a passive stadium advertisement into a gamified tool of direct fan participation, the campaign by GUT Buenos Aires saw a 139% jump in coupon use. It was awarded a Bronze in the Entertainment Lions for Sport, as well as a Silver Lion in Outdoor and in Direct.

And when NFL superstar Travis Hunter received a record-breaking deal for his two-way skills in offence and defence, video game Clash of Clans capitalised on the moment by challenging fans to play ‘two ways’ like Travis for the chance to win millions of in-game currency. Mirroring NFL draft tactics, the brand analysed the real-time gameplay of ordinary players to calculate their defensive skills, offensive power and win–loss ratios. ‘Two-Way Deal’ attracted more than 1 million new players, proving that a fan’s digital effort is as watchable and prestigious as a pro athlete’s physical triumphs. By DAVID New York, it took a Bronze in the Entertainment Lions for Sport.

This isn’t new, of course: sports stars have long fought for more than just victory on the court or pitch. The late tennis star Arthur Ashe, the first-ever Black man to be selected for the US Davis Cup team in 1963, famously used his status as an elite player to speak out against racial inequality. Billie Jean King, the first woman athlete to be named Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year in 1972, has done the same in support of LGBTQ+ and women’s rights. More recently, NFL star Colin Kaepernick took the knee instead of standing during the pre-game anthem in 2016 – a move that was adopted across the globe by sports stars in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. And on the podium at the 2020 Tuscan Grand Prix, F1 seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton wore a shirt demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, the African American medical worker who was killed by police officers in her own home.

As traditional institutions experience unprecedented public criticism, sports have emerged as a cultural anchor – the last true global moment that draws simultaneous mass attention and brings deeply divided communities together. Being visible falls short. Brands must capture the heart – as well as the eyeballs – of their audiences.

As NFL’s CMO Tim Ellis explained in the LIONS Sport ‘CMOs in the Spotlight session, brands must “stop using sport just as an association of value” and instead find ways to “connect with people on a human emotional level and talk about things that maybe might even make you a little uncomfortable”.

This means using a brand’s unique capabilities, operational scale and media assets to stand as a protective shield and advocate for fans. Modern fans don’t leave their real-world struggles at the stadium gates. They face systemic gender inequality on the sidelines, alarming rates of hate speech and racism in the stands and severe human rights violations in their daily lives. Brands that break down these barriers can transition from a passive corporate sponsor using media placement into an active community ally.

Equal pay and gender justice

For decades, the sports industry treated investment in women’s athletics as a charitable afterthought or a safe ‘goodwill’ checkbox. But that era of passive, superficial corporate handouts is over, and a new level of fan-driven accountability is reshaping the market.

Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment CEO Laura Correnti highlights this shift by pointing to the historic 2019 moment when the US women’s national soccer team won their fourth World Cup title in France while suing their own federation for equal pay. Instead of a standard patriotic celebration, the stadium erupted into a unified chant of “equal pay”. This wasn’t just a sporting victory – it was a watershed moment that turned a live sporting arena into an active, unmissable platform for sociopolitical progress.

A LIONS Sport panel on ‘Rethinking How We Keep Girls in Sport urged brands to sustain this momentum by addressing the broken underlying systems instead of hiding behind short-term campaigns. They warned that a pipeline crisis looms over the industry, as young girls are pushed out of play at twice the rate of boys by age 14 due to negative social norms, safety concerns and a lack of local infrastructure. Standard Chartered Group Chief Operating Officer Tanuj Kapilashrami and F1 Academy Managing Director Susie Wolff argued that sponsorships must be integrated into core business strategy to build permanent, profitable models of ROI. According to Lisa O’Keefe, Secretary General of the International Working Group on Women and Sport, true progress requires transforming internal corporate structures and putting the cash on the table to redesign the physical and financial system from the ground up.

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And when French sports journalist Christophe Glaise was sentenced to seven years in an Algerian prison, Reporters Without Borders and The Good Company, Paris, hacked the live commentary of a football match to deliver a psychological lifeline. As Glaise’s only link to the outside world was a TV in his cell, where he watched Paris Saint-Germain matches, they arranged for his mother to take over the mic in the broadcast booth for 30 seconds and deliver a personal, uncensored message of love, hope and legal updates to him. ‘A Mother’s Commentary’ led to 33,000 petition signatures – 65% above target. It won three Lions, including a Silver in the Entertainment Lions for Sport.

Normalise the human under the helmet

Formula 1 is often romanticised as engineering precision meeting human expertise. Yet during the panel on ‘What Pressure Reveals: The Edge between Good and Great,’ Mercedes-AMG driver George Russell delivered a poignant truth about elite performance. He acknowledged that beneath the helmets, fire suits and multimillion-dollar sponsorships, athletes are going through psychological challenges just like the audiences watching them from the grandstands. “We sometimes forget that, ultimately, we are all just human,” Russell reflected, calling for a deeper culture of mutual care within sports and business alike. “Every single one of us is moving through life balancing our own private struggles with our own celebrated successes. It doesn’t matter if you have reached the absolute summit of your industry or if you are just starting out on day one. We have a quiet obligation to check in on one another. At the end of the day, we are all teammates.”

Brands that can build partnerships that reference and support athletes’ real-world routines and challenges appear much more authentic to fans experiencing similar issues. It also gives athletes an opportunity to think of themselves as a media house first and competitor second. They can put out a lot of fast-paced and unfiltered content across platforms such as YouTube and Twitch, reaching millions of fans and bypassing the traditional media that might control or manipulate their messages.

Turn athletes into characters

Sports marketing commands some of the largest budgets in global advertising – yet it produces some of the safest, most predictable advertising and marketing. Athletes’ agents can often book them into short slots for shoots and will talk athletes out of anything that feels “off brand”. Any lines or wardrobe choices that feel too funny, too risky or too much like a gimmick can be vetoed. This can lead to work that feels very homogeneous – and dull.

Mohammed Sehly, the Emmy-winning CEO of BigTime Creative Shop, believes that this safe approach is a commercial disaster because “fans have no mercy for bad or mediocre work”. If a brand’s creative is invisible or predictable, e.g. ‘face-off’ visuals for boxers, it’ll be met with empty and silent YouTube comment sections – the ultimate sign of failure, according to Sehly, who says that agencies must have the courage to protect the core creative idea at all costs. They should also act as if they’re shooting a film, using storytelling and making elite athletes the protagonists.

Riyadh Season’s viral, multi-Lion-winning ‘Obsession’ campaign, for example, replaced the standard press stare-down with a film shot by Guy Ritchie. The British director cast heavyweight champions Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk into highly crafted, obsessive characters acting out fever dreams, with Usyk ‘doppelgänging’ Fury’s wife to get inside his opponent’s head. The promo went even more unhinged by casting Matchroom Sport Chairman Eddie Hearn as a zombie flicking cigar ash into another zombie’s head. This character-first format generated 4.2bn impressions and led to Usyk receiving mainstream feature film offers.

Sehly urged creatives to use Easter eggs, i.e. little nods to the stories behind the sport, calling them “the most common language between you and the fans”. He offered a number of examples of this, such as an “ostarine-free burger” mocking boxing star Ryan Garcia’s performance-enhancing drugs scandal, a graffiti-tagged statue representing Dmitry Bivol’s controversial 2025 win against Artur Beterbiev or a nod to the iconic “peeking” diving pose of ex-footballer Sergio Busquets.

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