Brands looking to engage with fans around the world are well aware of global football’s value. The world’s beloved game accounts for more social followers and engagements than all other sports combined. KORE’s 2022 Global Football Market Intel Recap provides insightful analysis of the sport’s performance as it relates to sponsorship value across social media. Here, we’ll share 2022 highlights from our recent workshops.  

From Leo Messi’s record-breaking year, the strength of women in global football, why the swoosh dominates and how Louis Vuitton stole the show of FIFA 2022 World Cup; read on to learn how these events impacted sponsorship value for brands, leagues, teams and athletes across the most followed sport in the world.  

Part 1: How the Global Football Evaluation Works

In February of 2022, KORE acquired Hookit – a groundbreaking AI-powered sponsorship analytics and valuation platform. This acquisition is revolutionizing the way brands and rights holders manage, measure, and optimize their partnerships. The integration of Hookit’s data and analytics into the Evaluate Social tool (found within KORE’s Portfolio Optimization Platform) provides an unprecedented level of insight into the performance of brands and rights holders partnerships, allowing them to evolve their winners by adjusting strategy on the fly. 

Understand our Evaluation Model.

KORE’s social valuation tool helps brands learn where opportunities are to invest in sport sponsorship, with who and what assets to invest in. It helps sport teams understand how they stack up, and where to optimize their strategy and content for the best ROI for their brand sponsors. While the Evaluate Social formula is more complex, here is a high-level outline of how we quantify sponsorship value to follow along.  

The Adjusted Ad Value (AAV) formula assigns a dollar value to a social post based on how clearly logos or brand mentions are displayed within text, image, or video and how much engagement the post generates.

• Text-only social listening tools miss significant visual attribution. 
• Evaluate Social, designed by Hookit, can capture a brand’s social value through: 
  • Quality logo visibility 
  • Audience data and watch-through rates
  • Built-in authentication 
• These features create a robust data story. We can track the AAV of any content created on social media that displays clear logos, deliberate tags, and keyword mentions. 

How Was the Global Football Social Scene Analyzed?

Our tools analyzed: 

• Over 9M posts from leagues, clubs, athletes and any content that referenced (via @, # or keyword) them during the 2022.  
• 455K posts related to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar from Novemeber 15th – December 20th 

Social media data includes followers, posts, engagement, valuation & audience data. 

Platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo and VK. 

Part 2: Most Followers Engage with Global Football

Sometimes people follow accounts and then forget about them. Globally, people don’t forget about football. If you aren’t engaging in some way with the sport on social media, then data tells us that more than half of your friends and family could be. Global football has more total followers and engagement than all other sports combined, and 54% of social followers of sport are following some type of global football entity. 

The year of Leo

The world responded to Lionel Messi’s record-breaking year by following and engaging with his posts in a mirrored, record-breaking fashion. The legendary footballer drove more than two billion interactions on Instagram in 2022 with over 35% of them just from the last two months of the year. Only forty players in the world have 38M followers total, which was the amount that Messi acquired between November and December of 2022. Messi’s sponsors received more than $59 million in AAV from his social posts, with his world championship post becoming the most liked post in the history of social media, across the globe.

It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere

Across sport, we’re swoosh promoters whether we choose to be or not. It would take a carefully curated photo in a stadium featuring any teams, players or fans where the swoosh isn’t visible. For example, the Nike logo appears on scores of elite soccer teams’ jersey’s, shoes, and fan’s gear. Any time the team, a player or a fan posts a picture of themselves in their kit, Nike receives sponsorship value due to the Swoosh on the shirt. This value even comes from posts by athletes sponsored by rival apparel brands like adidas or Puma. 

Nike and adidas alone account for 73% of value in the sporting goods & apparel sector. Most recently, Nike earned 35% of the total value ($80.9M) earned by the top 10 brands of 2022’s FIFA World Cup. While the swoosh is everywhere, there is still opportunity for others. A well-designed campaign activation can drive outsized exposure and value seen in our next highlight. 

A luxury state of mind

You know when the ultra-cool person in the room speaks, and everyone leans in to hear? That’s the worldwide equivalent response on social to the Louis Vuitton x Messi x Ronaldo “Victory is a State of Mind” campaign. Both legendary football players posted on the campaign launch day, November 19, 2022. Ronaldo’s post created over $6.1M and Messi’s post created more than $4.3M in AAV for the luxury brand by the end of the tournament. 

With just 232 posts, Louis Vuitton earned 28x and 25x more value per post than the two leading sportswear brands during this year’s biggest global football tournament. This clearly indicates that having more promoters does not always correlate with more value, especially in the case of a luxury state of mind at the helm. 

The female fight

The incredible story of the women’s plight in the world of sports continues to grow across continents. Women’s global football is growing around 2x faster than men’s across social. The female side of the sport is attracting major sponsors like Visa, Barclays, Volkswagen and Stanley Black & Decker, who are earning millions in AAV amongst the big sporting apparel brands on social. 

However, the most viral women’s football post in 2022 was two players who almost started fighting but turned into a helping hand. Posts that show awe-inspiring moves and goals, alongside emotional, heartwarming moments garnered the most engagement. 

If you’re looking to examine your 2023 partnerships with strategic insights & impactful data, then please contact our team. We’re happy to share the full report on Global Football, or one of our other market intel reports.  

With a full report or presentation, you can: 

• Learn what kind of impact the sport, leagues, events, and athletes have on fan engagement and why that matters 
• Find inspiration for partnership concepts 
• See how industry experts and peers are tracking impactful data and insights that help you measure return on objectives (ROO) or even return on investment (ROI) 
• Leave the session with some strategic and tactical actions you can implement right away

Heading into the first quarter of a new year is the perfect time to reflect on your team or organization’s objectives and goals, and how they can be achieved.  If you are looking to make gains in the sponsorship space, then leaning into KORE’s mission to help you improve your partnerships could be the game-changer needed. Let’s take a look at four ways you can get the most out of your partnerships this year, with the latest insights, tools, and industry expertise.  

1. Objective Setting: Start Small For Big Gains 

No two brands or teams are the same and each have their own objectives and goals. With every client that we onboard the first step to improving any pain point is identifying and setting measurable objectives. Let’s say you’re part of a major NFL team that wants to increase revenue from long-established brand partnerships. Figuring out how to start that process can be overwhelming. Our tools and support can help you identify a plan. Here’s a high-level example of how to approach this.

Goal: Increase revenue from established brand partners

• Define your team’s objectives and key results (OKRs) 
  1. Example objective to focus on: first, evaluate the performance of partnerships to come up with a strategy to drive more revenue

• Understand your partners objectives
  1. Regularly meet with partners to have productive conversations about their objectives 
  2. Collect information, insights and data that relate to your partners objectives 
  3. Ensure total alignment with partners measurement and methodologies 
  4. Provide near-time reporting (from days to 24-hours) to partners 
  5. Measure against benchmarks, adjust strategy or OKRs as needed 
  6. Set milestones to reach  
  7. Build in opportunities for revenue increase 

All of these can be achieved based on performance or other metrics identified through this process. Simplified, this process looks easy, but it takes an aligned team to build, and the right tools to accomplish. Each relationship is unique and it’s important to have tracked all the information that goes into that partnership, the data and the results, on a consistent basis to be able to have a conversation with your partners. This helps identify what you both deem is an important objective to meet together.

PRO TIPS: It’s important that these objectives are: 

• Realistic 
• Achievable  
• Carrying a specific timeline for completion 

Following these tips will help ensure that your team sets goals they can reach. The goal is to not get overwhelmed by too much noise from other tasks that could derail real progress. Once objectives have been identified, it’s time to start measuring them with data-driven insights that will help inform decision-making and improve strategy.  

2. Adopt a Single Source That’s Safe, and Secure  

In a single source platform, all data, insights, and communications are gathered in one place. You can easily track performance metrics such as cost of asset, alongside utilization of creative assets like videos or images for each partnership’s activations. Any aspect of how partnerships are performing can be seen from the top by brand or partnership directors and leadership through on-demand reporting. This makes it easy to identify which partnerships are performing well and which ones need improvement or attention. Every team involved in a partnership, including brand activation, sports marketing, and asset creators, as well as finance and operational groups can easily track partnership assets and activities and improve communication, collaboration, and performance. 

We’ve taken a single-source platform a step further by including our secure data, one of the deepest datasets in the industry, to integrate with your data, which supports real-time insights at every stage of the partnership life cycle. 

3. Attract Support & Increase Value

By accessing all of your partnership information in one secure place, it makes it easier for brand managers, CMOs, partnership managers and the like to justify their budget allocations for certain sponsorships. This helps gain support from stakeholders who need tangible results before approving expenditure for further partnerships. With KORE’s Portfolio Optimization Platform, teams can provide data-driven insights that allow users to increase the value offered to their partners while meeting (and exceeding) their own organizational objectives.   

4. Gaining a Competitive Edge 

Data-driven insights are critical to making the right sponsorship decisions in today’s partnership environment. Here’s an example: imagine you work with an English Premier League (EPL) team that creates the most value out of your entire portfolio, but the value across social media remains in the middle of the pack compared to other EPL teams. Then, you might have a Formula 1 driver who has quadrupled their following and engagement, which potentially could double the value they create for your brand across social. It’s helpful to understand what led to the growth. Maybe a new demographic is responding to a different form of content. You can use deep insights to work with your partners across various sport to test new activation strategies quickly or over time. 

Here’s an example of how our Evaluate Social tool quantifies value across social.  

How you go about managing the data, measuring and optimizing it for each partnership can become your competitive edge. When your team is aligned with efficient processes that work toward common goals it’s much easier to gain inspiration, test new ideas and make strategy decisions to support your return on investment (ROI) or return on objectives (ROO).

Here, rights holders can explore more of our solutions designed help you build deeper relationships with fans and to measure, manage and optimize your partnerships more effectively: 

• Clean ticketing data integrations to create a best-in-class CRM ecosystem 
• End-to-end sponsorship sales software to accelerate your sales pipeline 
• Easily access and track partnership assets and activation metrics from one spot 
• Quantify and take control of your social media value to power revenue 
• Report on the metrics that matter to your partners to drive value 
• Drive deeper fan relationships with a fraction of the effort 

We understand that every brand or team has different needs when it comes to optimizing their portfolio of sponsorships; whether they want more transparency over their investments or better ways to track performance metrics, our platform offers the ability to add the tools when the time is right, as your business grows.  Let us know how we can help.  

Contact us for a demo of how the new and improved platform works.

In our data-driven world, partnerships are more powerful than ever before. If you work for a brand in the sports or partnership landscape it’s important to keep a pulse on understanding how to leverage data and find the insights you need quickly to make informed decisions about how to be a better partner.

But data can be overwhelming. How do you make sense of it all? That’s where data-driven sponsorship workshops come into play. In these sessions you can:

1. Learn the state of a specific sport, or industry
2. Find inspiration for partnership concepts
3. See how industry experts and peers are tracking impactful data and insights that help you measure return on objectives (ROO) or even return on investment (ROI)
4. Leave workshops with some strategic and tactical actions you can implement right away

The Latest on The State of Sport & Leagues

In KORE Market Intel workshops, you’ll meet industry peers and get an overview of the current landscape in the world of that sport—including leagues, teams, athletes and influencers—and gain an understanding of their impact. You will also learn about relevant events within each league and team that can be leveraged as potential partnership opportunities. Knowing this information can help you identify which league or team best aligns with your business goals, or how to improve the partnership.

Additionally, these workshops can help shed light on areas that have yet been explored or are ripe for partnering with your brand. For example: Are there any overlooked leagues or athletes who could use a sponsor like yours? What kind of impact do major tournaments have on fan engagement? Who is getting the most value, how? What are the latest trends in partnership data? These are the type questions that we will aim to answer through deep dives into the largest sponsorship dataset available.

Strategic & Tactical Actions

Data-driven sponsorship workshops also provide tangible strategies and tactics you can implement right away or plan for in the future. These strategies may include ideas inspired by content creation around partnership activations and ways your brand can actively support its partners through social media engagement efforts. From sponsoring unique giveaways at pop-up locations or in the metaverse, to creating “watch parties” involving virtual or in-person games for families or groups of fans for live events. Additionally, these workshops may provide tactical ideas about how best to support partners on social activations through specific keyword, visual or video strategies.  

Upcoming KORE Market Intel Workshop: Global Football

With the exciting wrap of the worlds’ biggest global football tournament we’re already busy preparing key insights from it. Here’s a snapshot of Louis Vuitton, the impressive brand sponsor that took nearly 9% of the total promotional value across the tournament (as of Friday, Dec. 16 2022). That’s 146x and 95x more value per post than the usual suspects.

Join KORE’s market intel workshop as brand leaders and sponsorship experts in the space discuss key insights and thought leadership around the state of, and impact of global football. Space is limited due smaller, collaborative nature of these sessions.

Choose from: Thursday, January 12th 11am EST or Tuesday, January 17th 1pm EST

Formula 1 (F1) has been a rising star in the global sports market for some time now, but its recent growth across digital channels and success of the series Drive to Survive on Netflix has made it a prime target for sponsors looking to gain global exposure. Our KORE market intel report dives deep into the state of Formula 1 and provides insights into how brands can take advantage of this opportunity and maximize their spend. Here, we take a look at some highlights from our recent F1 market intel workshops.

The Basics of the KORE F1 Evaluation Across Social Media

First, we need to cover how our valuation works. In February of 2022, we acquired Hookit, the leading AI-powered sponsorship analytics and valuation platform. Our teams worked together to integrate the  Hookit data and analytics into the KORE suite of products to deliver the Portfolio Optimization Platform. Brands and rights holders now have a single source to manage, measure and most importantly optimize their partnerships.

How to understand the real value of social content with the Hookit valuation model.

Our social valuation tool helps brands learn where opportunities are to invest in sport sponsorship, with who and what assets to invest in. It helps sport teams understand how they stack up, and where to optimize their strategy and content for the best ROI for their brand sponsors.

Our Adjusted Ad Value (AAV) formula assigns a dollar value to a social post based on how clearly logos or brand mentions are displayed within text, image, or video and how much engagement the post generates.

• Text-only social listening tools miss significant visual attribution.
• Evaluate Social, designed by Hookit, can capture a brand’s social value through:
  • Quality logo visibility
  • Audience data and watch-through rates
  • Built-in authentication
• These features create a robust data story. We can track the AAV of any content created on social media that displays clear logos, deliberate tags, and keyword mentions.

What Was Analyzed Across the F1 Social Scene?

Over 420K posts from F1, teams, drivers and any content that referenced (via @, # or keyword) them during the 2022 season. Date range includes March – Dec.

Social media data includes followers, posts, engagement, valuation & audience data.

Platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo and VK.

Growth: The General State of F1

Compared to the NFL which grew followers modestly, by 5% this past season, the clear trend for F1 across social is growth, specifically in the US, which accounted for 36% of the growth. In terms of audience, women and youth were a huge part of the growth.

 FI viewership in the U.S. was up:

• 34% among females
• 49% among 12-17 year olds
• 43% among 18 – 34 year olds

FI race attendance grew by 27%, from 234k on average since the last full capacity season.

The General State of F1 Across Social

The drop in social engagement is a global impact across sport, speculatively attributed to general, post COVID ‘hangover’, a term recently coined to refer to the massive emphasis that was placed on social during lockdowns. Video viewership is up for mainly two reasons:

1. Access and adoption of IG Reels
2. Increased emphasis on video content amongst all social platforms

Content plays an integral role in creating deep connections between brands and audiences. It is essential to have strategies in place that capitalize on content type, its placement across channels, audience targeting metrics such as age/gender/location etc., including key influencers in the space. Additionally, understanding which specific topics resonate best with your target audience plays a critical role when formulating content strategies that drive maximum engagement rates.

Comparing F1’s Social Impact Across Other Sports Leagues

Formula 1 had a 23% increase in followers in the last 12 months quickly climbing to half of the amount of followers that the National Football League (NFL) has. When compared to other major sports leagues such as Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA) and NFL, Formula 1 comes out on top when it comes to its fans social media engagement. In fact, F1’s engagement per follower rate is the highest across all sports. This makes F1 a top choice for sponsors looking to reach a highly engaged fan base on social media platforms.

The Netflix Effect on F1: Drive to Survive

The launch of Netflix’s 10-episode docu-series Drive to Survive had an immediate impact on Formula 1 viewership numbers as well as fan engagement rates on social media platforms. Four season later, the series has provided unprecedented access into the inner workings of F1 teams and drivers which resulted in higher levels of fan interest and engagement compared with previous years. There is an excellent opportunity for brands looking to leverage this newfound interest by targeting viewers who are already engaged with the sport through their content marketing efforts.

How to Reach More F1 Fans

We found that 53% of fans who follow a Formula 1 Team account on Twitter also follow the Formula 1 account. Sponsorship opportunities could have a broader reach when you partner with both F1 & teams.

Moreover, we have even more data that drills down the overlap of fans following drivers. Contact us anytime, for a private viewing of the full data report.

A Few Key Findings

• In general, funny, unusual, heart-warming, behind the scenes content drives engagement
• The most viral F1 post garnered 52 million views
• Instagram is still #1 delivering 83% of all F1, team and driver engagement and 68% of all video views

• 71% of video views from Instagram by F1 Teams, Drivers & Owned accounts comes from IG reels (85% teams, 90% for drivers)
• F1 posts more videos than reels on IG, yet video views are down 35% this season

Reach out to our team for the full list of key takeaways.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Formula 1 presents an incredible opportunity for brands looking to leverage sponsorship investments and gain maximum exposure within the most engaged sports community around today—F1’s fanbase continues to grow every day as more people become aware of its unique appeal and entertainment value. With data-driven insights, such as the Instagram Reels engagement, into what resonates best with audiences along with creative approaches to content creation tailored for specific demographics, brands can maximize their return on investment through engaging activations built around F1 events, properties or drivers.

About KORE Market Intel Reports

Our goal is to deliver insights and thought leadership around the state, impact and potential of sport and the leagues, teams, athletes and events within them.  The purpose is to fuel strategic and tactical actions for brands and rights holders on where to invest and how to more effectively drive partnership value.

If you’d like to schedule a time to review more insights from our privately held F1 workshops, please, don’t hesitate to schedule a demo, to hear the full story. Request a demo today.

Cricket had one of its most engaged audiences ever. A quick comparison of 2022’s Cricket Twenty20 World Cup social data to the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo shows us that cricket fans watched 2.83B videos on the sport, versus 2.5B videos watched during the last Olympics. The social value created across both events was nearly identical ($67M during the games, versus $66.2M for cricket).

It wasn’t only legendary England who won the Cricket Twenty20 World Cup, but one could say that edtech brand, BYJU’S was victorious in terms of brand sponsorship value. The India-based app earned the most adjusted ad value (AAV) across social from the month-long activations of the year’s biggest cricket event. In this recap we will explain who created the most social sponsorship value, where it came from, how cricket compares to other sports, and tips on how the sport of cricket and its promoters can harness social content strategy.

First, Why is Adjusted Ad Value (AAV) Important to Understand for Sponsorship Impact on Social?

The AAV model assigns a dollar value to a social post based on how clearly logos or brand mentions are displayed within text, image, or video and how much engagement the post generates.

Text-only social listening tools miss significant visual attribution. Evaluate Social can capture up to 70% of a brand’s social value through:

• Clear, quality logo visibility
• Audience data and watch-through rates
• Built-in authentication

These features create a robust data story. We can track the AAV of any content created on social media that displays clear logos, deliberate tags, and keyword mentions.

Our AI-driven Evaluate Social tool, powered by Hookit, (and found within the Portfolio Optimization Platform) enables any organization to easily track and analyze the AAV of their partners’ social media content. It’s a two-way street that helps drive stronger partnership value for brands, rights holders, athletes and influencers.

Visual Example of the AAV Model

The ‘Unseen behind-the-scenes’ footage post of India’s win over Pakistan on October 23, 2022 was the single most engaged post throughout our analysis.

What Was Analyzed

From October 1, through November 15, 2022, Evaluate Social examined 66.9k posts from athletes, organizations, leagues, team accounts (club and country), events and media accounts across the cricket world cup.

General Stats:

• Total Engagements: 4.8B
• Total Branded Posts: 22.8k (34% of all posts)
• Total Branded Engagements: 3.48B
• Promotion Quality: 16.1%
• AAV: $66.2M

Fan Engagement Through Cricket Twenty20 World Cup

Notice the spike on October 23^rd in the graph below, which is from the visual example above of the behind-the-scenes post by the International Cricket Council, with more than 600M engagements.

Top 10 Cricket Sponsors Based on AAV of Banded Posts

Any time the word “branded” is used (branded posts, branded engagement), we are referring to posts or content that includes either text (hashtag, mention, keyword) or visual (logo) promotion of a brand.

Below are the top brands that benefited from branded posts during the cricket world cup. Byjus gained the most value overall, by more than $6M, while 60% of the top 10 brands ranged between $1.99M – 6M.

1. Byjus – $13.7M in AAV
2. Pepsi – $7M in AAV
3. Aramco – $5.99M in AAV
4. MRF – $5.87M in AAV
5. Booking.com – $4.35M in AAV
6. Nissan – $4.35M in AAV
7. Emirates – $3.2M in AAV
8. Oppo – $1.99M in AAV
9. Mastercard – $1.8M in AAV
10. Bira 91- $1.73M in AAV

More noteworthy takeaways from the list above

• 21% of all value goes to Byjus
• 17% of the value comes from team accounts (club & country)
• 95% of the value is coming from each entity’s owned accounts (vs. earned from mentions from other entities)
• 76% of value is coming from Instagram, even though only 45% of branded posts are on Instagram
• Twitter contributes 27% of posts, but only 8% of total value and 3% of total engagements

Top Value Drivers from an Entity’s own Social Channels

This means these three organizations or teams created the most value from their own social post strategies.

• International Cricket Council – $31.2M in AAV, 47% of total value created
• Indian Cricket Team – $9.4M in AAV, 14% of total value created
• Pakistan Cricket Board — $6.5M in AAV, 10% of total value create

Top Cricket Athletes Based on AAV

These are the athletes that created the most value for sponsors.

• Hardik Pandya drove 26% of the total value created from all athletes with $409k in AAV for:
  • Byjus — $131k
  • FTX – $56k
  • MRF – $42k
• Rohit Sharma drove 12% of the total value created from all athletes with $192k in AAV for:
  • Emirates – $192k
• Mohamed Shami drove 11% of the total value created from all athletes with $175k in AAV for:
  • Tourism West Australia — $102k
  • Byjus — $33k
  • FTX — $17k

Top Cricket Athletes based on Follower Growth

• Suryakumar Yadav – 3.8% follower growth during tournament
• Virat Kohli, 326M, 3% follower growth during tournament
• Rohit Sharma, 68M, 1.2% follower growth during tournament (for comparison, this is two times the amount of Lebron James’ current followers across social.)

Country Cricket Teams That Grew the Most Followers

• Indian Cricket Team – 55M, 1.1% follower growth during tournament
• South Africa Cricket — 6.6M, 0.27% follower growth during tournament
• Scotland cricket National Team — 231.5k, 2.3% follower growth during tournament

Club Cricket Teams That Grew the Most Followers

Club teams were much more active than country teams. The top three teams below had triple the growth over the country teams above.

• Barbados Royals, 3.4% increase during tournament
• Gujarat Titans, 3.2% increase during tournament
• Multan Sultans, 2.8% increase during tournament
• Average growth was 1.6%

How Cricket Compares to Other Sports

Total fans, engagement, and sponsorship value (AAV)

• Cricket teams & leagues drive 6% of overall value in 2022 (1/1/22 – 11/15/22),
• Cricket teams & leagues drive 7% of overall fan engagements in 2022, 3^rd highest sport behind Basketball and Global Football
• Cricket ranks 3^rd in total followers (from team & league accounts) with 551.4M, only behind Basketball and Global Football

Discover More Opportunities

Earlier this year, we noticed a behavior shift in the popularity of short-form videos. Audience and creator preferences shifted from Instagram (IG) videos to reels. Further, the growth of IG Reels began to compete with TikTok, who was the leader of social video engagement. The data below (pulled from January 1, – November 1, 2022) demonstrates the investment opportunity that cricket offers, as the 5^th largest driver of value across global sport.

Harness Content Strategy Across Your Partnerships

As audience preferences continue to shift towards short-form content, we don’t see the momentum of IG Reels slowing down in 2023. Social strategy is a critical part of investment strategy in the world of sports. If you’d like more key social insights like this, or tips on how to measure the value of your social activations then reach out for a demo on Evaluate Social, powered by Hookit.

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