Building a Sports Nation, Part 7.
Building a Sports Nation, Part 7.
By Marc Esterer and Alexander Strulak
Sport is often treated as a budget line before it is treated as an economy.
Governments fund federations, facilities, athletes, competitions and participation programs because many of them create legitimate public value long before they can generate sufficient commercial returns. That support is often necessary.
The risk begins when public funding becomes the permanent business model rather than the capital that helps a market develop. A mature sports economy works differently. The government still invests where public value justifies it, but alongside that investment sits a growing market of sponsors, broadcasters, spectators, members, licensees, event organizers, sports businesses, technology companies and private investors.
Commercialization therefore means much more than selling sponsorship. It requires understanding the economic value of sport, developing products people and businesses are willing to pay for, creating investable opportunities and ensuring that public expenditure produces measurable outcomes beyond visibility.
Different countries illustrate different parts of that journey. Germany has spent more than a decade building a Sport Satellite Account to make the economic contribution of sport measurable. France increasingly treats sport as an economic sector through a structured public-private industry platform. South Korea shows both the potential and risks of using public financial instruments to stimulate sports investment. And Rwanda offers one of the most ambitious emerging-market examples of using sport as a platform for tourism, investment promotion and international positioning.
Four questions therefore determine commercial maturity:
Can the country reliably measure the size, composition and development of its sports economy?
Are sports organizations building diversified revenues and the capabilities required to generate them?
Can private investors identify credible, bankable opportunities and enter the sports market with confidence?
Does public investment catalyze measurable economic and commercial development, or simply sustain activity year after year?
The goal is not to remove the government from sport. It is to ensure that public investment creates enough momentum for markets, organizations and private capital to increasingly carry part of the load.
Governments cannot develop an industry they cannot see. Sport creates economic activity across many sectors: media, tourism, hospitality, retail, construction, technology, transportation, advertising and professional services. Traditional economic statistics rarely capture all of it as one sector. That creates a strategic problem.
A ministry may know how much government spends on sport, but not:
how much sport contributes to economic output
how many jobs depend on it
what households spend on sport
how much companies invest through sponsorship
how much value media rights generate
what sports tourism contributes
where private investment is increasing or declining
Without that baseline, sports policy easily becomes focused on inputs rather than economic outcomes.
Germany provides one of the strongest examples of systematic measurement. Its Sport Satellite Account has been developed and monitored since the reporting year 2008, integrating sport-related economic activity into a framework linked to the national accounts. It measures areas including sports consumption, sponsorship and advertising, media rights, facility investment and wider economic activity.
The latest national update, published in 2025 using 2022 data, calculated sport-related GDP at approximately €82.5 billion, an increase of 20.3% from 2021 as the sector recovered from the pandemic. The value is not simply the number. Germany has created a repeatable measurement system. That allows policymakers to observe changes over time, compare different parts of the sports economy and understand whether consumption, employment, sponsorship or other economic activities are moving in the desired direction.
A mature country should therefore move from occasional impact studies toward a regular economic dashboard covering:
Sport-related GDP and value added
Employment
Household sports expenditure
Sponsorship and advertising
Media and digital revenues
Sports tourism
Event-related expenditure
Private investment
Public investment
Measurement should ultimately influence decisions.
If sport is expected to become an economic sector, it needs to be measured like one.
Public funding and commercialization do not have to compete. They perform different functions. Governments may legitimately finance grassroots participation, national teams, athlete development or socially important sports that could never sustain themselves commercially. The problem arises when the government becomes the only meaningful customer.
An organization funded almost entirely through annual allocations has less financial incentive to develop audiences, improve its product, collect customer data or create new revenue streams. Commercial maturity starts when organizations learn to monetize the value they already create.
Depending on the sport, that can include:
Sponsorship and partnerships
Media and content rights
Ticketing and hospitality
Memberships
Licensing and merchandising
Participation fees
Events
Digital products and data
B2B products and services
Not every federation should become commercially self-sufficient. But every organization with meaningful market potential should understand where that potential sits.
France provides a useful example because it increasingly approaches commercialization beyond individual federations or leagues. Government estimates published in 2025 put the French sports ecosystem at approximately €73 billion in turnover, 144,000 businesses and 450,000 jobs, representing an estimated 2.6% of GDP. Around €41 billion in revenue was attributed to 3,250 core companies operating largely in commerce and industry.
More importantly, France has institutionalized cooperation between government and business through La Filière Sport, a permanent public-private platform created to develop the economic growth of the sports sector.
Its ecosystem brings together companies, public institutions and sports organizations, while its renewed roadmap connects areas such as innovation, international development, support for French sports companies and the post-Paris 2024 sports economy.
The broader lesson is important. Commercialization does not begin when a federation hires a sponsorship salesperson. It begins when organizations understand: What is our product? Who values it? What problem does it solve? And what are they prepared to pay for?
A leading sports system therefore needs both commercial revenue and commercial capability. That means people who understand rights packaging, pricing, CRM, sponsorship activation, media, licensing, sales and account management, not only public funding applications.
Investors do not invest in ambition. They invest in assets, rights, businesses and cash flows they can understand.
A country may announce that sport is open for investment, but private capital still needs basic conditions:
Clear ownership and commercial rights
Credible governance
Reliable financial information
Identifiable revenue streams
Transparent procurement and PPP rules
Realistic project economics
Legal certainty
A pipeline large enough to justify investor attention
Without those conditions, investment remains dependent on personal relationships and isolated transactions.
Governments can help develop the market through incentives, co-investment, guarantees, loans or venture funds. But public finance needs discipline as well.
South Korea has built explicit mechanisms to support its sports industry. Its Sports Industry Promotion Act allows government support for investment vehicles targeting sports businesses, while public programs provide low-interest financing for sports facilities and companies.
The scale is significant. The sports-industry lending program reached approximately KRW 260 billion in 2025, after growing from KRW 56 billion in 2019 to KRW 276.9 billion in 2024.
But a September 2026 government review illustrates the risk of confusing available capital with effective market development. Investigators identified 117 cases involving KRW 38.6 billion where funds were improperly used or inadequately documented. They also found that around 60% of financing was concentrated in golf-related businesses, while fitness centers and swimming facilities accounted for only around 6%.
That does not make South Korea a questionable sports-investment market. It demonstrates something more useful:
Public financial instruments require the same investment discipline expected from private investors.
A mature system should therefore develop a visible investment pipeline across areas such as:
Sports technology
Leagues and clubs
Event businesses
Academies and training services
Facilities and PPPs
Media and content
Participation businesses
Sports tourism
The objective should be progressively to crowd private capital in, not simply make public capital easier to access.
Rwanda provides perhaps the most provocative example because its strategy deliberately uses public commercial investment in sport to pursue objectives far beyond sport itself.
The central vehicle is Visit Rwanda. When the Rwanda Development Board signed its first partnership with Arsenal in 2018, the objective was not to finance football development in England. It was to place Rwanda’s tourism and investment brand in front of one of the world’s largest sporting audiences.
That initial partnership ultimately lasted eight seasons before concluding in June 2026. Rwanda subsequently expanded the model. Its sports partnership portfolio has included:
Paris Saint-Germain, launched in 2019 and renewed through 2028
FC Bayern Munich, signed in 2023 through 2028 and restructured in August 2025 from a commercial tourism sponsorship into a youth-football development cooperation
Atlético de Madrid, signed through 2028
The Los Angeles Clippers and Los Angeles Rams, with multi-year agreements announced in September 2025, terms undisclosed
Wider international sports and event activity including the Basketball Africa League and the 2025 UCI Road World Championships
The proposition is broader than logo exposure. The Bayern partnership includes youth-football development. PSG’s relationship includes the PSG Academy Rwanda, which RDB says has provided training and education to more than 400 young Rwandans. Other partnerships promote Rwandan tourism, coffee, culture and investment opportunities alongside sport.
And Rwanda’s wider economic numbers have moved significantly. Tourism revenue increased from US$498 million in 2019 to US$647 million in 2024 and US$685 million in 2025. Visitor arrivals reached approximately 1.49 million in 2025, while the country’s MICE sector generated US$94.7 million from 165 international and regional events.
The wider investment proposition has also grown. Rwanda recorded US$2.62 billion of registered investment across 799 projects in 2025, while foreign direct investment inflows reached US$872.9 million in 2024. Under Rwanda’s second National Strategy for Transformation, which RDB implements, the country targets US$1.1 billion in annual tourism receipts and US$4.6 billion in private investment by 2029.
But these numbers require careful interpretation. They do not prove that sports sponsorship caused the growth. Tourism is influenced by connectivity, accommodation, conservation, pricing, economic conditions, destination development, events and many other factors.
RDB itself reported that tourism revenues had increased by approximately 47% between the beginning of the Arsenal partnership in 2018 and 2024; measured from the 2019 baseline, the rise is closer to 30%. The first-year evaluation also reported approximately £36 million in media and social value, while a survey of 20,000 Arsenal supporters across 30 markets found that 51% said the partnership made them more likely to consider Rwanda as a tourism destination.
Those are useful indicators. They are not the same thing as incremental economic return. That distinction matters because Rwanda’s strategy has also attracted criticism over the use and transparency of public funds. The original Arsenal agreement was widely reported at around £30 million for its initial three-year term, a figure RDB disputed as overstated, prompting debate over whether a developing country should spend public resources sponsoring one of Europe’s wealthiest football clubs.
The strategic response should not be to dismiss either side of that debate. It should be to measure the investment properly.
For a destination partnership such as Visit Rwanda, a serious benefit case should track:
Brand awareness in targeted markets
Tourism consideration and conversion
Incremental visitor arrivals attributable to targeted campaigns
Visitor yield and tourism revenue
Investment enquiries and qualified investor leads
MICE enquiries and confirmed events
Commercial value generated for Rwandan products and businesses
Sporting capability created locally
Total rights and activation cost
Return compared with alternative marketing channels
This is where Rwanda becomes particularly relevant for other emerging sports nations. The important innovation is not simply that Rwanda bought sponsorship rights. It is that sport was integrated into a broader national economic proposition spanning tourism, investment, events and international positioning.
The next stage of maturity is proving, partnership by partnership, which investments generate enough value to renew, which should evolve and which should end.
Rwanda’s decision to conclude the Arsenal relationship after eight seasons while expanding into other markets can therefore also be interpreted as part of portfolio management rather than a contradiction of the original strategy. RDB explicitly described the change as an effort to diversify partnerships and enter new markets.
That is what catalytic public investment should eventually do:
Test, measure, learn, scale, and reallocate.
Vinciamo Sports
Power Insight.
The article series and engagement is led by Marc Esterer, Director Business Development, and Alexander Strulak, Strategic Partnerships Advisor & Communications Manager.
A note on process: AI tools were used to support the research and visualisation of the data presented.
Sources: German Sport Satellite Account / Federal Institute for Sport Science (Die ökonomische Bedeutung des Sports in Deutschland: Sportsatellitenkonto 2022, and methodology); French Ministry of Economy and La Filière Sport (sports-economy figures and the public-private sector framework); South Korean Office for Government Policy Coordination (2026 review of the sports-industry financing program) and the Sports Industry Promotion Act; Rwanda Development Board (2024 and 2025 Annual Reports, Five-Year Strategy 2025-2030, Visit Rwanda partnerships with Arsenal, PSG, Bayern Munich, Atlético de Madrid and US sports properties, and first-year Arsenal partnership research); The Guardian (reporting on the cost and public debate surrounding the initial Arsenal partnership).
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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