22/07/2024

Today’s brands have lost sight of what makes sports special: winning.

Will Roscoe, Senior Data Strategist at BBH London, urges marketers to rediscover the joy of competition.

Modern sports advertising is a tale of pros and plebs.

The professionals are treated like Marvel heroes. The ads, dominated by football, tell stories of competition, supremacy and titanic struggle. They feature stylised, fantastical dramas of the world’s best players tackling, dummying and megsing each other in darkened arenas, each individual showdown more climactic than the last. Even outside football, it is much the same.

As for us plebs - well, we get very different treatment.

Nowadays, everyone's an athlete. Our pursuits are all about the journey - not the finish line. Visceral moments of sporting immortality are for the superstars - not the masses.

This convention has become so entrenched that even AI knows it. Ask Chat GPT to write a script featuring star athletes, and it will talk about “champions” and the “desire to conquer”. Ask it to write a script featuring amateur footballers, and it will come back with platitudes about “the joy of the game” that “isn’t just for the few” but “for everyone”.

Even ads containing sentiment that could apply to a non-pro - for example, Nike’s recent ‘Am I a Bad Person?’ - still focuses on professionals to make this point.

It’s all a bit… patronising? More importantly, it has implications for how brands value people who care about a key facet of sport - winning.

Prior BBH research with dozens of young aspiring athletes and sports clubs has drawn out this paradox. So much of modern sports advertising is oriented around the idea that performance is relative, and the only opponent that matters is yourself.

But for so many athletes, the opposite is true.

We have got into the habit of devaluing the concept of victory. Of winning. Of the zero sum nature of competitive sport - crucially, at any level.

Time and again, sports advertising showcases two types of athlete: professionals, and amateurs, but outside of a serious competitive environment. The concept of victory, and the desire to do anything to achieve it, is limited to the rarified air inhabited by professional athletes. 

Among high level junior footballers in the UK, only 0.012% make it to the pro ranks. In the US, 0.03% of high school basketballers reach that level. Regardless of geography, the numbers are unequivocal - professionals make up a miniscule proportion of any given sport’s practitioners. 

For those that don’t go pro however, their sporting life does not stagnate - they just carry on playing and competing. In the UK for example, over 2 million people play football at least twice a week, many of those in Sunday or 5/7 a-side leagues, where performance is still deeply important. Over 5 million people in the UK regularly take part in one of the 6 most popular sports in the country.

For millions in the UK alone, not becoming a professional does not mean that participation has no stakes - whatever level of sport a person may compete at, competing and winning means as much to them as it does to the pros.

BBH interviews with amateur sports players back this idea up - the hunger for wins burns as fiercely for someone playing once a week on a potholed pitch, as it does for a professional who competes day in, day out. 

“Every single (amateur rugby) player I know says play as long as you can - once that competitive part of your life has ended, it’s hard to get it back, even if you want to.”

• Rugby player, 32

“The only time competing is fun, is when you’re performing and winning.”

• Football player, 29

Sporting performance in this audience is not characterised by athletic feats that stretch toward the distant horizon of human physical potential, or by moments that reverberate across global audiences. 

It is lumpen, muddy, beautifully flawed - lacking the glamour of the baying colosseums in professional sports, but still pulsating with fire, rage, desire. 

Under Armour have come closest in recent years to encapsulating this idea, with their ‘Protect This House’ platform. 

It encapsulates an important idea: wherever you play, whatever your level, every arena matters.

And this, as the numbers show, matters. 99.98% of footballers in the UK are amateur, with similarly high numbers for other sports. 

These people do not compete for headlines, sponsorship deals, or sums of money beyond a few hundred quid - but winning matters to them as much as it does to any pro. 

Nothing compares to competing, and winning. Nothing. 

So, this is the BBH proposition for sports brands. Sport is for everyone. Winning Isn’t.

There is a silent majority of sports practitioners mostly unaddressed by sports brands, for whom the services of these brands still matter deeply - incremental gains, the prospect of a few extra yards, a little additional power, a smidge more precision. 

They are students, bus drivers, lawyers, sometimes even ad people. They are your podgy uncle, who ‘once nearly got into the West Ham academy when he was 13’. They are your daughter, who still loves draining threes on the basketball court, even after a long day at work. 

They are the everyday competitor. 

The first brand to embrace this forgotten mentality will reap great rewards, owning a mindset which our industry seems to have ignored.

Because, as they say, the winner takes it all.