Clubs, competitions and federations want to know what are the most common soccer sponsors so they can better identify who to target

To answer this, caytoo analysed over 15,600 sponsorship deals signed around the world between 1 January 2023 and 30 September 2025 to identify which categories are the most common sponsors of soccer rights holders.

Gambling leads the way, accounting for 9.1% of all soccer sponsorship deals.

This is followed by Specialist Professional Services – these are B2B companies outside Consultancy/Tax, IT, Legal and Recruitment. Although they rank second, they’re probably an over-looked area in terms of a dedicated outreach strategy (i.e. “we must target this category”). However, it encompasses a very wide range of micro-categories to target including waste management, office and media solutions and facilities management etc.

These are followed by Foods (at 4% share) then Banks (which also include Building Societies and Credit Unions) and Soft Drinks, which also include Coffee and Tea.

So, from a pure ‘numbers game’ perspective, these are the most viable categories to approach about soccer sponsorship as they’ve done the most deals in soccer.

Another way to slice the data

However, aside from ‘volume’, there is another way of looking at which categories to target – those which are ‘most concentrated’ around soccer. In other words, in which categories does soccer account for the greatest share of all deals.

This second group may not do the most deals in soccer but when it comes to potentially doing a deal, they are the most likely to choose soccer versus any other rights holder.

For example, although Sport/Leisure Facilities (mainly gyms) only account for 0.8% of soccer deals (ranked 48th by ‘volume’), they are the most concentrated category around soccer; 53.3% of all Sport/Leisure Facility sponsorship deals are in soccer.

Following Sport/Leisure Facilities is the Property Development category, which also includes housebuilders. The latter tend to do a lot of sponsorships to promote new build projects near to the soccer club’s location.

So, from a likelihood perspective, these are the most viable categories to approach about soccer sponsorship because if they’re considering sponsorship, its most likely to be a soccer one.

The full data is covered in the full ‘Most likely categories to sponsor soccer’ report.