The Fintech Takeover of Sports Sponsorship
Manchester City announced Revolut as their official back of shirt partner for both the men's and women's first teams. Revolut, with over 70 million customers globally, joins a growing wave of fintech brands making major investments in sports sponsorship.
This is not a one-off. It is a pattern reshaping the sponsorship landscape. Financial technology companies are becoming one of the most active and aggressive spending categories in sports. If you sell sponsorships and you are not actively pursuing fintech brands, you are missing a significant revenue opportunity.
Three Reasons Fintechs Invest in Sports
1. Trust Through Association
Fintech companies face a fundamental challenge: they are asking consumers to move their money away from established banks. Associating with a globally recognized institution like Manchester City transfers credibility. When fans see Revolut on the same shirt as their favorite players, the brand moves from unfamiliar app to trusted name.
2. Efficient Global Reach
A Premier League shirt placement reaches hundreds of millions of viewers across broadcast, streaming, and social media in virtually every country. For Revolut, which operates in over 38 markets, a single sponsorship delivers coordinated brand exposure across all of them simultaneously. No other marketing channel offers that efficiency.
3. Demographic Alignment
Football audiences skew young, digitally native, and internationally distributed. That is the exact customer profile fintechs are built to serve. The audience overlap between Premier League viewership and potential fintech users is unusually strong, making the cost per relevant impression highly attractive.
The Fintech Sponsorship Wave
Revolut is not alone. The financial technology category has become one of the most active in sports sponsorship worldwide:
- Crypto.com secured naming rights for the former Staples Center and maintains partnerships with Formula 1 and the UFC
- PayPal holds naming rights for the Phoenix Suns arena and sponsors multiple MLS clubs
- Klarna partnered with Angel City FC and several European football properties
- Cash App has invested across NBA and NFL partnerships
- Revolut now adds Man City to an expanding European sports portfolio
The pattern is clear: fintech brands are not experimenting with sports sponsorship. They are building long-term brand strategies around it.
How to Position Your Property for Fintech Budgets
Fintech companies evaluate sponsorships differently than traditional sponsors. Here is what matters in your pitch:
- Lead with audience data. Age distribution, household income, digital behavior, geographic spread, and mobile usage. Fintechs make decisions on data, not tradition.
- Quantify digital and social reach. Broadcast impressions are table stakes. Fintechs want to see follower counts, engagement rates, content reach, and the potential for viral moments that drive app downloads.
- Propose activation beyond logo placement. QR code integrations, in-app promotions tied to game days, co-branded content series, and fan experiences that create direct customer acquisition opportunities.
- Offer category exclusivity. Financial services is a crowded and competitive space. Exclusivity commands a premium and protects the sponsor's investment from competitor noise.
- Build in attribution and reporting. Fintechs are data companies at their core. They expect to measure impressions, engagement, sentiment, and conversion. Your proposal should include a clear measurement framework.
Managing Complex Multi-Asset Deals
A deal like Revolut and Man City involves more than a logo on fabric. It spans two teams, multiple competition formats, digital content rights, social media integration, event activations, hospitality obligations, and granular performance reporting. Each of those is a deliverable that needs tracking, fulfillment, and proof of performance.
Managing this level of complexity across spreadsheets and email threads is how obligations get missed and renewals get lost. Sponsorship management platforms that centralize agreements, track deliverables automatically, and generate performance reports are becoming essential infrastructure — not optional tools — for organizations operating at this level.
What This Means for the Market
The fintech sponsorship wave is accelerating. As these companies scale globally and compete for customer acquisition, sports sponsorship offers a uniquely efficient channel for building trust and awareness at scale. Rights holders who understand what fintech brands value — data, digital reach, attribution, and activation — will capture an outsized share of this spending.
The organizations that win these deals will be the ones that can pitch with data, propose with specificity, and prove value with measurable results. That is the competitive advantage in modern sponsorship sales.
