Somewhere in your club's shared drive is a spreadsheet. It has partner names in column A, deliverables in column B, and a column marked "done?" that nobody updates.
You know it's incomplete. Your partners don't know what they're missing. And when renewal time comes, you have no evidence that you delivered anything at all.
This is how most sports clubs manage their sponsorship obligations in 2025. It works until it doesn't and when it doesn't, it costs you a partner.
A sponsor deliverable is any asset or right that a sports club has contractually agreed to provide to a partner in exchange for their investment. Deliverables fall into several categories:
Visibility rights - logo placement on kits, LED boards, stadium signage, digital screens, and printed materials.
Media rights - social media posts, mentions in press releases, logo in broadcast graphics, naming rights to specific content formats.
Hospitality and ticket rights - a set number of matchday tickets, hospitality suite access, car parking, VIP area access, and player or staff meet-and-greets.
Activation rights - branded activations at events, fan engagement opportunities, product sampling, and branded photo areas.
Reporting rights - the right to receive regular performance reports, media value calculations, and attendance data.
Each partner in your portfolio has a different combination of these. A shirt sponsor gets different things from a regional supplier partner.
Tracking them together in the same way (or not tracking them at all) is how things fall through.
Spreadsheets are not a system. They are a document. The difference matters.
A document requires a human to update it. A system updates when something happens. When your sponsorship portfolio spans 15 to 40 big partners, each with a unique contract, different renewal dates, and different entitlements a document breaks within a season.
The five failure points:
1. No single owner. The commercial manager built the spreadsheet. The hospitality coordinator updates a different spreadsheet.
The CEO is looking at a third version. Nobody knows which is current.
2. No delivery evidence. "Done" in a spreadsheet cell means someone typed "done." It does not mean it happened. It certainly doesn't mean a partner saw proof.
3. No alerts. Spreadsheets don't tell you that a partner's matchday hospitality allocation has gone unused for three months. That partner is quietly preparing to not renew.
4. No reporting output. At the end of a season, rebuilding what a partner received from a spreadsheet takes hours. Most clubs skip it. Partners notice.
5. No automatic data syncing. You and your colleagues constantly need to chase each other for data.
For each partner, a proper deliverable tracking system needs to capture:
This is not a spreadsheet job. This is a database job.
The clubs that renew partners at high rates - 90% or above - share one thing in common: they can show and prove what they delivered.
When a partner asks "what did we get last year?", the answer should take seconds, not days. A document that shows delivered assets, attendance records, media appearances, and hospitality usage is not just good service. It is the renewal conversation.
Research from sports partnership consultancies consistently shows that partners who receive structured performance reporting are significantly more likely to renew and more likely to increase their investment tier. The renewal is earned during the season, not at the renewal meeting.
Sports clubs that have moved away from manual tracking use purpose-built partnership management software - not CRMs, which are built for sales pipelines, and not general project management tools, which have no concept of contractual rights.
The key features of a proper system:
Rights - you define partnership tiers and rights once (e.g., "Official Supplier") and every partner at that tier gets the same entitlement set automatically loaded.
Collaborative workspace - no silos, you are looking at the same data.
Delivery tracking with evidence - each deliverable can be marked complete with a file, link, or photo attached. This creates an audit trail.
Usage dashboards - at any point in the season, you can see which partners are under-using their hospitality or haven't activated a social post yet.
Automated partner reports - instead of building a PDF from scratch, the system generates a branded post-match or end-of-month report for each partner automatically maybe in their own portal.
Renewal alerts - the system flags partners who are at risk (low usage, no hospitality attendance, overdue deliverables) before you reach renewal conversations.
Run through this for your current setup:
If more than two of those are "no," your renewal rate is being quietly affected.
What is the difference between a sponsorship deliverable and a sponsorship activation?
A deliverable is what the club promises to provide — logo placement, tickets, social posts. An activation is what the sponsor does with those rights — running a competition, hosting a client at a hospitality event, creating branded content. Both need to be tracked, but the club is responsible for delivering the rights; the sponsor is responsible for activating them.
How many deliverables does the average sports club manage per partner?
For a mid-sized club with a 20-partner portfolio, the average contract contains 8 to 15 individual deliverables per partner. Across the portfolio, that is 160 to 300 separate delivery obligations per season — far beyond what a spreadsheet can reliably manage.
Can a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot track sponsor deliverables?
General CRMs can be customised to approximate deliverable tracking, but they lack native concepts like rights allocation, hospitality seat management, and automatic partner reporting. Building these features inside a CRM typically requires significant custom development and ongoing maintenance.
What is sponsorship fulfilment?
Sponsorship fulfilment is the process of ensuring that everything promised to a sponsor in their contract is actually delivered, on time, and evidenced. A high fulfilment rate is directly correlated with partner renewal rates and investment growth.
How often should I report deliverables to partners?
Best practice is at minimum monthly for active-season clubs, with a comprehensive post-season report. High-performing clubs send matchday summaries to hospitality partners within 48 hours of each match.
SponsorshipOS is a partnership operations platform built for sports rights holders. It tracks deliverables, manages hospitality, and generates partner reports automatically — so nothing gets missed and every renewal conversation starts from a position of evidence.
