Last week, the United States, Canada and Mexico kicked off the largest destination marketing programme ever built around a single sporting event: a bet that eight years of preparation and six weeks of global attention will translate into lasting visibility and long-term growth in visitors and investment.
The build-up has been turbulent. Visa restrictions, border politics, travel costs and geopolitical tensions have dominated the conversation in a way no host nation would have chosen. Yet all three countries remain committed to playing until the final whistle.

For destination marketers, investing in football is nothing new. A slew of high-profile partnerships has emerged since Visit Florida appeared on Fulham FC’s shirts in 2015, arguably the first major investment of this type. The harder question is how to make that investment pay off, and it is this challenge that has prompted two experienced practitioners, Justin Cooke and Ryan Sandilands, to examine the growing number of destination marketing organisations that have placed their own bets on European football clubs.
Who is behind these deals? How have they been activated? Who has succeeded? And what lessons can inform the next generation of partnerships?
Over the past decade, a significant number of destination marketing organisations have invested in partnerships with leading European football clubs, attracted by passionate global fanbases, year-round visibility and an emotional connection with audiences that few advertising campaigns can replicate.

Much of the attention has focused on Visit Rwanda’s portfolio, which at one stage included Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, Atlético Madrid and Bayern Munich. Other partnerships have included Visit Maldives with Liverpool FC, Qatar Tourism with Inter Milan, DR Congo Tourism with AC Milan and Barcelona, and Visit Dubai with Real Madrid. Abu Dhabi took a different approach entirely, acquiring Manchester City and building a multi-club network, perhaps the most ambitious use of football as a nation-branding platform yet attempted.
This is no longer a niche experiment. Traditional advertising competes for attention in an environment increasingly resistant to interruption. A leading European football club offers something different: a passionate global audience that actively engages with its identity and values. Rights packages that were once beyond most tourism budgets have also become more flexible and modular, making them increasingly comparable to regional advertising investments.

The question Cooke and Sandilands set out to answer is whether the rights being sold are actually the rights destinations need.
Both have direct experience with these partnerships, from their construction and negotiation to activation and measurement.
Some have generated genuine, measurable results. The Visit Rwanda and Arsenal relationship, which ran for several years before recently ending, produced documented increases in destination awareness in key markets, giving Rwanda a platform to tell a story of transformation to audiences with little prior engagement.
Others have delivered more modest returns. Rights were acquired but never fully activated. Perimeter boards appeared and disappeared. Hospitality suites sat empty. Social media content generated little engagement. The connection between sponsorship assets and actual visitor behaviour, bookings, arrivals, visitor spend and investment opportunities, was often assumed rather than demonstrated.
Cooke believes this is where many destination marketers fall short.

“The mistake many destinations make is believing the badge is the strategy,” he says. “Football can open the door to vast global audiences, but it only creates value when it is built around clear markets, clear visitor segments and a plan to convert attention into arrivals, spend and investment. The best partnerships are not sponsorship deals, they are destination growth platforms.”
This, in the view of both analysts, is the central challenge. The football industry excels at selling rights, but is less effective at ensuring those rights deliver value for the buyer.
As Sandilands explains: “When selling sponsorship, part of my role was to know a little bit about how each target industry makes money. This gave me sufficient insight to know that my approach was in the right area. I then relied on the buyer to use their in-depth knowledge of their brand and business to fine-tune the partnership package.”
Many destination marketing organisations, navigating unfamiliar commercial territory and under pressure to demonstrate relevance, sign deals without a clear framework for success or measurement. That gap, between a sponsorship announcement and a meaningful tourism outcome, is where much of the value is lost.

What strikes both analysts is how rarely these partnerships begin with a clearly defined strategy. The conversation typically starts with a rights holder presenting an opportunity and the destination responding. Destinations often evaluate what is available rather than define what they need, compare packages rather than set objectives, and measure outputs rather than outcomes.
That distinction, between buying a badge and building a platform, sits at the heart of the companion report Cooke and Sandilands will publish in the coming weeks. The report examines which partnerships were built on genuine strategic foundations and what the next generation can learn from both successes and failures.

The report concludes with perspectives from each author. Cooke brings more than three decades of experience in destination marketing and place branding, focusing on audiences, positioning and long-term growth. Sandilands brings deep expertise from sports sponsorship, including senior brand roles at Visa across multiple FIFA tournaments and a key role in Manchester City’s expansion into China.
Football’s appeal to destination marketers is easy to understand. Few platforms can deliver such passionate global audiences and emotional engagement. But that appeal comes at a cost, and investments of this scale demand measurable returns.
The same scrutiny applies, on an even larger scale, to the FIFA World Cup itself. As the world enjoys the next six weeks of football, an important question remains: when the final whistle blows, will the United States, Canada and Mexico all be able to claim victory?