How can sports brands protect legacy while building for the future?
Walk into the boardroom of any sports business and you’ll find a team debating a similar topic:
‘how do we grow our revenue, without losing our fans?’
Emotions are high within elite sport - it’s about passion, belonging and community - and when fans no longer feel at home with their beloved team, that hard-earned loyalty becomes a point of contention.
There is immense pressure for the guardians of these brands to protect that heritage and deeply-rooted connection, and keep the spirit of the club alive for years to come.
But in the modern sporting world, surrounded by ever-intensifying competition for broadcast deals, sponsorship revenue and fan attention, managing these brands presents an increasingly significant challenge. The very heritage that established the club’s greatest asset, sometimes becomes its
greatest liability.
When brands focus purely on preserving legacy, they risk being anchored by their past. Yes, they can talk elegantly about accolades and sporting heroes, but they neglect to tell a meaningful story that will win the hearts and minds of fans and partners of the future. In fact, great commercial opportunities can often be found off the field, court or track - and you don't have to look far to see the diversifications to business models that successful brands go through. For example, the likes of PSG, Arsenal and Juventus are building cult fashion followings through culturally connected partnerships in Jordan, NTS and Palace, taking the world’s obsession with wearing football shirts and making it as suitable for the runways of Milan as the pub on matchday.
On the other hand, organisations that focus purely on what’s next risk losing the core DNA of the club - they roll the dice with fickle media and attract even more fickle fans - take Cardiff City’s famous blue-to-red kit debacle, throwing away the Bluebirds’ most iconic asset in favour of appeal with a new audience.
Treading this line requires a clear and focused strategy that isn’t about neglecting where you came from, but rather, harnessing that history as a foundation of credibility. One that provides stretch and unlocks greater opportunities beyond the core offer.
Evolving the championship for Wimbledon
For well over a century, the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC) has delivered one of the world’s most prestigious sporting spectacles. Strawberries & Cream, Pimm's, and jaw-dropping rallies remain a pinnacle of London’s, and indeed, the world’s summer calendar.
However, maintaining global leadership in the modern broadcasting and digital era required a shift - moving from simply resting on their laurels to implementing a dynamic, future-focused strategy that brought new fans to the game.
We worked with Wimbledon to resolve the core relationship between The Club, The Championships and the wider social impact of the Wimbledon Foundation, taking a complex portfolio and building a unified architecture that set the brand up for greater commercial growth.
By sensitively evolving the iconic identity, we helped Wimbledon flex flawlessly across traditional broadcast overlays, physical wayfinding, and digital channels like the "myWimbledon" platform, without losing the core essence of the brand. Heritage wasn’t sacrificed, it was integrated into a seamless brand system and customer experience that both maximises commercial opportunity and protects the brand’s premium.
Pushing the boundary for Lord’s
When we talk about brand systems, we mean helping align their strategic foundations, design, people & culture, and technology, to sustain competitive advantage, and that’s exactly what we helped Lord’s achieve.
The world of cricket is also steeped in tradition, both on and off the field, with the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) at Lord’s at the forefront of the story. In the hyper-competitive world of premier sports and entertainment, the Lord's brand was old-fashioned and lacked the elegance and flexibility it needed to work effectively across channels, not to mention connect with cricket fans across the world.
As a progressive organisation with a powerful new promise of ‘Pushing Boundaries’ we helped MCC shift the conversation away from stuffy connotations of elitism, and elevate the brand and its experience to become the global 'Home of Cricket', opening the ground up for greater diversification and
commercial opportunity.
When the balance tips
Striking this balance of heritage vs modernity requires absolute rationale - get it wrong, and the world won’t be afraid to tell you. The Leeds United salute, Juventus’ minimalist J, Utah Jazz scrapping their iconic purple mountain. The number of sports clubs that have got it wrong is endless.
In every case, the mistreatment of legacy as an optional afterthought leads to extreme tension and an immediate violation of fan trust, proving that when you strip the authenticity out of your sports brand, you silently sabotage the exact premium that sponsors and fans are willing to pay for.
As a consultancy that is agnostic when it comes to the type of brand we work with, we’ve had the pleasure of helping businesses across the full spectrum of industries grow. A common red thread across these projects is that in order to gain buy-in, both from internal and external audiences, you need to bring them on the journey with you. This is never truer than in professional sport, and these warning stories speak to that
in volumes.
Understanding exactly what makes these audiences tick, their motivations and their desires, is key to building and maintaining belief, advocacy and adoption, and the stronger the brand you build with your audiences, the greater role you can play in their lives.