The room is always the same. The athlete is on one side, sometimes flanked by an agent. The brand is on the other side, three or four people, one of whom has the budget authority and two of whom are looking at their phones. The deck is open on the screen. The number comes out. Everyone nods. The deal closes.
And in the months after, when we sit down to review what just happened, we find the same pattern, again and again: the athlete walked away with somewhere between thirty and forty per cent of what the deal was actually worth to the brand.
This is not a story about athletes being cheated. The brand-side people are usually decent. They are working with the number their procurement team gave them, and that number is the result of an internal valuation that is closer to honest than most athletes realise. The problem is upstream of the negotiation. The athlete's side never built the case for the other sixty per cent.
Where the missing margin actually lives
Sponsorship valuation is composed of three layers, and most athlete decks only price the first one.
- Reach value. The CPM-equivalent cost of putting the brand in front of the athlete's audience. This is what most decks lead with: followers, average impressions, engagement rates. It is the easiest number to calculate and the easiest to argue. It is also, almost always, the smallest layer of the three.
- Association value. What the athlete's brand attributes — competitiveness, discipline, regional identity, demographic — are worth to the brand's positioning. This is harder to price and almost never appears in athlete-side decks. But it is, in many categories, larger than reach value by a factor of three or four.
- Activation potential. What the partnership is worth in compounded brand activity over the contract term — content, appearances, retail tie-ins, social moments, crisis-deflection capability. This is where the biggest gap sits. Most athletes do not even know this layer is being priced internally by the brand.
If you are only pricing reach, you are negotiating against your own audience size. If you are pricing all three layers, you are negotiating against the value of the partnership itself.
The two questions the brand is actually asking
When a brand evaluates a sponsorship, the procurement team is running two parallel calculations. The first is: what would it cost us to buy this reach through paid media? That gives them the reach value number, which becomes the floor of the negotiation.
The second is more important: what would it cost us to acquire what this partnership gives us that paid media cannot? The credibility transfer. The cultural permission. The defensibility against a competitor partnering with the same athlete. The narrative material for next year's brand campaign.
This second number is the ceiling. It is where the margin lives. And most athlete-side decks never make the brand show its work on it.
What we do differently
When we run a sponsorship engagement, our deck spends roughly thirty per cent of its pages on reach, and seventy per cent on association and activation. The reach pages are present because they have to be — the procurement team needs them for their model. But they are not the argument.
The argument is structured around three things:
- The cultural moments the brand can co-author with the athlete that they could not co-author alone
- The competitor-blocking premium — what the partnership is worth in preventing a rival brand from accessing this athlete
- The compound asset value — what the relationship is worth in year three versus year one
None of these are made up. They are real value layers that the brand's internal valuation already includes. We are simply ensuring the athlete's side gets credit for them in the negotiation, instead of leaving them as silent margin on the buyer's side.
The result
The deals we close are typically forty to seventy per cent larger than what the athlete would have closed running their own negotiation. The brand still gets a fair deal — we are not extracting margin that is not there. We are just making sure that when there is margin on the table, our side does not walk away from it.
The deeper point: most athletes who feel underpaid are not underpaid by brands. They are underpaid by their own valuation model. The brand was always going to pay closer to the ceiling, if the ceiling had been made visible.