BY PETER GACHERU
The world of sports is changing fast, and knowledge-sharing is how we keep up with it. I attended the SportsBiz Africa Forum held in Kigali, in my capacity as a Communication and Sports Marketing Consultant, which brought together a range of voices from across the business of sports. Data, AI and the Future of Sport in a rapidly changing landscape was among the topics that took my interest. It crystallised something I have been thinking about for a while: the biggest shift happening in global sport right now isn’t a new league or a new investor – it is data, and what it is about to do to the value of everything we sell.
For decades, the sports business has been built on sponsorship. A company sponsors a club, an athlete, a marathon, a federation. In return, it gets branding, visibility, media exposure and association with the sport. The conversation has been simple: how many people attended, how many hours on TV, how many logo appearances, how many impressions? These metrics still matter but are no longer sufficient. Sports rights are increasingly being viewed as investment assets, not just marketing opportunities.
A sponsor buys a marketing outcome. An investor buys an economic opportunity – ownership in a team or league, a share of media revenue, a rights package, an athlete’s IP. Private equity, family offices and sovereign wealth funds are moving in. Firms like Arctos have built portfolios across major US sports, and Asia-Pacific sports M&A reportedly hit $3.69 billion by July 2026, twelve times the prior year. Sport is becoming an asset class. Which raises the obvious question: how do you value the asset? That takes us straight to data.
Two competitions can each claim a million viewers and still not be worth the same. One audience might be young, urban, affluent, mobile-money users and frequent travellers; the other, older and lower-spend. The real asset was never audience size, it’s audience quality. Sophisticated sponsors and investors now want to know where audiences live, what they earn, what they buy, how they travel, and whether exposure actually shifts purchase intent. That’s the difference between media measurement and commercial intelligence: one tells you people watched, the other tells you what they’re worth.
Nielsen, a global leader in audience measurement, data and analytics, has already made this shift, combining exposure data with demographics, brand health and sales impact. One study of 100 sponsorships found a 10% average lift in purchase intent among exposed fans. The Australian Football League uses consumer research on fan behaviour to build sharper, more targeted partnership deals. The pattern: data isn’t just reporting sponsorship value anymore, it’s discovering new value.
Africa has extraordinary sports stories. Kenyan distance running, Nigerian football culture, South Africa’s sophisticated market, Rwanda’s positioning around cycling and major events, Morocco’s tourism-football play. Yet African sports properties remain significantly under-monetised, not for lack of audience, but for lack of commercially structured information about that audience. A Kenyan athletics event with 20 million views sounds impressive; it’s a far stronger pitch if the rights holder can show 5 million viewers aged 18–34, 2 million frequent travellers, 800,000 likely sportswear buyers, and 40% of the audience outside Kenya. That’s the difference between selling impressions and selling a defined, investable consumer segment.
NBA Africa illustrates what this looks like in practice. It isn’t selling basketball games, it’s built an ecosystem of media, partnerships, grassroots programmes and retail. In 2023/24, over 140 live telecasts drove a 41% year-on-year rise in viewership and nearly six million watch hours; local social accounts generated almost 90 million video views; NBA Store sales in South Africa rose almost 150%. Its 2021 strategic investment round, led by Tunde Folawiyo and Helios Fairfax Partners, shows investors backing the ecosystem around the audience, not just a sponsorship line.
Imagine a Kenyan Sports Audience Index combining media, demographic, behavioural, fan, engagement, commercial, geographic and economic data across football, athletics, rugby, basketball, golf and motorsport. For Kenyan athletics specifically, this could identify running tourists, marathon participants, sportswear consumers and destination travellers, turning a marathon from a broadcast asset into a tourism and investment asset. This is exactly where sport and tourism converge, a thread that ran through more than one session in Kigali this week.
The same logic applies to football. Knowing which banks, telecoms and products a weekly viewer actually uses turns a league’s pitch from perimeter boards into access to defined consumer communities. It applies to individual athletes too: a smaller, more affluent, highly engaged following can be worth more to a brand than a much larger, generic one.
Sponsorship isn’t disappearing; it’s becoming more investment-like, as CFOs increasingly ask marketing teams for evidence, not just awareness. Deloitte’s work on sports partnerships makes the same point: brands need data on outcomes, not generic reach.
Africa doesn’t have a shortage of sports audiences; it has a shortage of proof about who those audiences are. That’s a valuation gap as much as a data gap, and it’s why African properties get undervalued even when the audience is genuinely there.
The next generation of sports commercialisation, for Kenya and the continent, has to be built on a simple principle – don’t just measure how many people watch, measure who they are, what they do, what they’re worth, and what economic value their attention can create. The most valuable sports rights won’t be the ones with the largest audience; they will be the ones that understand their audience best.
The writer is the CEO IMG Kenya.
