U.S. Soccer Turned World Cup Storytelling Into Sellable Inventory

U.S. Soccer spent the spring shooting 26 short films across seven countries, one for every player headed to the World Cup, walking them through the childhood neighborhoods, training grounds and family homes that shaped them. The series, 26 Stories for ’26, began rolling out after the roster was revealed on Fox in late May. The official announcement noted that the program is presented by Haleon, a consumer health company.

That series is one title on a slate U.S. Soccer built around its home World Cup, with a presenting sponsor attached to nearly every piece. United States of Soccer, a look at supporter culture across the country, is presented by Coca-Cola. Stars and Stripes House, the federation’s custom-built tournament studio for podcasts, interviews, and live reactions, is supported by La Colombe. Just one series was unveiled without a presenting sponsor, 26 USMNT Moments: Past to Present, a set of sub-three-minute archival episodes.

The headline product isn’t even new as a franchise. 26 Stories returns from 2022, when it ran as One Nation. One Team. 26 Stories. and was presented by Volkswagen. In 2022 the series carried one presenting sponsor. This year nearly the entire slate does.

“There’s an energy around soccer in this country right now that feels different,” said Catherine Newman, U.S. Soccer’s chief marketing and communications officer, in the announcement of the slate. A governing body that has long sold sponsor space around the national team is now selling the storytelling itself, sliced into units a brand can sponsor.

U.S. Soccer isn’t the first to treat owned content this way. Across college athletics the build has gone further than at most professional teams, and LSU and Clemson have taken it in two different directions.

LSU created a media company inside its athletic department. The Brand, launched in spring 2025 on a renovated floor of Tiger Stadium South, folds the department’s communications, social, photo, video, design, podcast, marketing and NIL teams into a single unit of more than 100 staff and student workers. It runs its own streaming platform, LSU+, and a podcast network that LSU says has logged more than 1.45 million plays across eight shows. Its docuseries, including the gymnastics film The Climb and the football series The Path, have aired on ESPNU and drawn millions of viewers.

The content also gets sold. According to a case study from the analytics firm Sprinklr, LSU tagged and measured the engagement around The Climb, then used those numbers to sell the series to sponsors, landing multiple partners for a second season. The content is the product, and the measurement turns it into a media buy.

“Showing the value of our content starts with good data,” Zach Greenwell, LSU’s deputy athletic director and chief strategy officer, told Sports & Co. He said the department’s social and tracking data has matured to the point that it sharpens LSU’s own content choices and makes its partners more informed too, in some cases “convincing them that the content they came in wanting is not the best strategy for our mutual brand success.”

The Brand also works for the athletes themselves. Greenwell said it plays a significant role in helping LSU players land their own deals, through the department’s in-house NILSU division, its external Playfly property, and by folding athletes into LSU content in ways that raise their profiles. He called that infrastructure something the competition cannot duplicate, and tied it to the new math of college athletics. “All of us at this level are pretty much all-in on revenue sharing up to the cap,” he said, “so the differentiator is what you can help your student-athletes secure beyond that in the third-party space.” The more outside NIL deals The Brand helps land, he said, the less strain on the department’s traditional operating resources.

Clemson leaned into the commercial side, giving its in-house operation a private-sector business structure. In August 2024 the athletic department created Clemson Ventures, an affiliated organization built to generate revenue on the program’s behalf. It houses Clemson’s multimedia rights, which the school owns outright rather than licensing to an outside firm, along with original media production, an NIL agency, and a sales operation. Ventures produces programming and sells sponsorships against it. Athletic director Graham Neff, who created it, framed it as a vehicle to drive new revenue, and in early 2025 Clemson Ventures named its first chief executive, longtime NBA and NFL executive Michael Drake.

Pro franchises are generally doing a lighter version of this so far, and one team has leaned hardest into the content itself. In early 2025, the Kansas City Chiefs launched Foolish Club Studios, a production company built to make original scripted and unscripted content that reaches well beyond game film. Named for the upstart owners who founded the American Football League, the studio operates alongside the team’s existing in-house production arm, 65 Toss Power Trap Productions, and is led by Chiefs president Mark Donovan and the team’s media and marketing head, Lara Krug.

The Chiefs’ recent slate runs wide, from a Hallmark movie that became the top cable film of 2024 to the six-part ESPN and Disney+ docuseries The Kingdom and Spanish-language series aimed at fans in Mexico and Spain. Where U.S. Soccer is selling presenting slots on the series it distributes itself, the Chiefs are building premium programming for outside platforms like Hallmark, ESPN and Disney+, with a global audience in mind. The bet is that a franchise can become a media company in its own right.

The national team, the college campuses and the pro franchise are all reacting to a shift in what counts as sellable. Tickets, signage and game-day assets are finite and bound to a date on the calendar. Content can be produced year-round, distributed across platforms a property controls, and measured in a way that lets a seller put a number on it. The properties moving fastest are the ones treating their own media operations as commercial infrastructure rather than promotion, and pricing the audience they were already building.

“We don’t necessarily start by saying, ‘Will this be easily monetized?’” LSU’s Greenwell said. “If it showcases the LSU brand and tells a good story, the monetization overwhelmingly takes care of itself.”

We surveyed nearly 1,700 Americans for our Q2 2026 Sports Fan Index and found that the spending gap between dedicated and occasional fans is 41 points. Our analysis: The growth opportunity isn’t only acquiring new fans, it’s deepening the ones already on board. You can read the complete poll summary and takeaways on our website.

Andrea Young → Chief Financial Steward and Senior Associate Athletic Director, Yale Athletics
Young takes over the finance unit of Yale’s athletic department, leading budgeting, forecasting, and long-term financial planning. She arrives from Georgetown, where she worked on budgeting, resource allocation, and operational planning for the athletic department, after more than five years at Delaware as senior associate AD for finance and business operations. At Delaware she ran a $50 million operating budget and built the 10-year forecast behind the Blue Hens’ move up to the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Morocco Brown → General Manager, Wisconsin Football
Brown takes over roster management, player personnel, and football operations for the Badgers, working alongside head coach Luke Fickell. He arrives from a 25-year NFL front-office career, most recently eight seasons with the Indianapolis Colts as chief personnel executive and director of college scouting, with earlier stops in the front offices of the Cleveland Browns, Washington Commanders, and Chicago Bears. The job opened when Marcus Sedberry was elevated to interim athletic director, leaving Fickell without a general manager during a busy recruiting stretch. Wisconsin handed its roster to a career NFL evaluator, which is the kind of NFL-style front-office hire spreading fast across college football.

Massimo Calvelli → Chief Executive Officer, AC Milan
Calvelli steps in as CEO of one of European football’s most storied clubs while keeping his executive roles at RedBird Capital Partners, the U.S. fund that owns Milan and placed him there directly. He spent 2020 to 2025 as CEO of the ATP, running men’s professional tennis, before joining RedBird and spending the past year working alongside Milan’s leadership. He replaces Giorgio Furlani, whom RedBird removed after a season that ended fifth in Serie A and out of the Champions League. The hire is RedBird’s in-house playbook at work: Rather than bring in an outside CEO, the owner embedded one of its own operators to run one of its most important investments.

Jared Johnson → General Manager, New Mexico Goatheads (ECHL)
Johnson is leading the Goatheads into their inaugural 2026-27 season as the ECHL’s newest franchise, the league’s 31st, owned and operated by REV Entertainment and based at the Rio Rancho Events Center. He came over from the SPHL’s Huntsville Havoc, where he was vice president and oversaw business operations and ticketing through four straight single-season attendance records. The Goatheads open in October as the new ECHL affiliate of the Colorado Avalanche, bringing pro hockey back to New Mexico for the first time since 2009.

Bob Burnquist → General Manager, XC São Paulo (X Games League)
Burnquist trades the board for the front office as the inaugural GM of XC São Paulo, one of four founding clubs in the new MoonPay X Games League, where he runs team and athlete strategy, partnerships, and roster decisions. He is the most decorated athlete in X Games history, with 30 career medals, and he learned to skate in São Paulo, the city his club now represents. The new league is giving each team a home city and a recognizable name at the top, betting that durable identities will turn action-sports fans into followers who come back season after season.

Matthew Kent → Chief Financial Officer, USA Gymnastics
Kent steps into USA Gymnastics’ top finance job, overseeing financial reporting, budgeting, cash management, and audits from its Indianapolis headquarters. He spent nearly nine years as CFO and deputy director of planning and administration at the Indiana Department of Administration, with earlier work at the Indiana State Budget Agency and in the private sector. USA Gymnastics reached outside sports for a career public-finance executive ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Director, Revenue Marketing & Fan Development — Phoenix Suns (Phoenix): Directs the Revenue Marketing and Fan Development teams, owning data-driven strategy across ticket revenue, fan acquisition, database growth, and retention, and reporting to the Senior Director, Marketing. Runs performance marketing across paid media and partners with Ticket Sales and Business Intelligence to align campaigns with inventory and revenue targets, spanning single-game tickets, memberships, premium seating, suites, and group sales. The role is part of Player 15 Group, the company behind the Suns, Mercury, and Valley Suns. Learn more and apply here.

Assistant or Associate AD, NIL Strategy & AI Analytics — University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati): Oversees the full NIL lifecycle for a Big 12 athletics department, from valuation and contract negotiation through compliance fulfillment, reporting to senior athletic administration. The role applies AI and predictive analytics to project student-athlete market value, negotiate licensing agreements, and audit deal deliverables against NCAA and state requirements. It puts AI and data modeling at the center of how a program runs NIL. Learn more and apply here.

Director of Social Content — Pacers Sports & Entertainment (Indianapolis): Leads social content strategy across the Indiana Pacers, Indiana Fever, and Noblesville Boom, owning platform growth goals and the long-term content calendar built around seasons, tentpoles, and campaign launches. Runs social on game nights, reviewing and approving content before it posts, and directs a team of video producers, social managers, designers, and marketers. One social operation across all three properties, spanning the NBA, WNBA, and G League. Learn more and apply here.

Director of Marketing & Fan Experience — University of Colorado Boulder (Boulder): Owns the strategic marketing and fan experience plan for Big 12 men’s basketball and women’s soccer, building campaigns to drive revenue, ticket sales, and attendance while running in-game production for both programs. Doubles as game producer, writing and running the gameday scripts that cue band, cheer and dance, video, and audio teams, and coordinates on-field duties at CU football games. Works with Buffalo Sports Properties to build sponsor activations into the gameday production. Learn more and apply here.

Director of Corporate Sponsorships — Columbus Fury (Columbus): A player-coach role that owns the revenue, personally prospecting, pitching, and closing corporate partnerships while leading a team of one to two partnership staff. Builds and grows the Fury’s full sponsorship portfolio across new business development, account management, activation oversight, and category strategy, inheriting a base of existing partners and reporting to the President and General Manager. The Fury enter the 2027 season as a Major League Volleyball franchise under new leadership. Learn more and apply here.

Senior Advisor, Team Services — USA Swimming (Colorado Springs): Serves as the dedicated, on-the-ground link between the national governing body and its member clubs, the staff member a set of assigned clubs turns to for help with operations, coaching, and growth. Delivers resources and education that drive membership growth, retention, and performance, connects clubs to programs like SWIMS Data and USA Swimming University, and travels to visit assigned clubs around the country each year. The job makes one person the personal point of contact for every club they cover. Learn more and apply here.

Iren × Golden State Warriors: The AI cloud provider signed a multi-year deal to replace Rakuten as the Warriors’ jersey patch sponsor, with the agreement spanning the full organization, including the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries and the G League’s Santa Cruz Warriors. The Warriors called it a “landmark” global partnership and did not disclose financial terms.

CommunityAmerica Credit Union × Arkansas Athletics: The credit union secured long-term naming rights to Razorback Stadium, which becomes CommunityAmerica Razorback Stadium beginning with the 2027 football season, and will serve as the Official Credit Union of Arkansas Athletics. The deal was facilitated by Learfield and Razorback Sports Properties, and is the first corporate stadium naming-rights partnership in program history, replacing the philanthropic Donald W. Reynolds naming that expired in 2024.

RBC × Vancouver Canucks: Royal Bank of Canada’s logo will appear on the Canucks’ home jerseys beginning with the 2026-27 NHL season, with the deal naming RBC the Official Bank of Canucks Sports & Entertainment. The multi-year partnership covers CSE properties across British Columbia, including the Abbotsford Canucks, Vancouver Warriors, Rogers Arena, and Rogers Forum.

Culver’s × Wisconsin Athletics: The Wisconsin-based restaurant brand became the first jersey patch sponsor of Badger Football, Men’s Basketball, and Men’s Hockey in a multi-sport deal facilitated by Learfield’s Badger Sports Properties. Culver’s, already the on-court logo partner at the Kohl Center, will debut the patch on football uniforms when Wisconsin opens against Notre Dame at Lambeau Field on Sep. 6.

Polymarket × Liga MX: The prediction market platform signed on as Liga MX’s official and exclusive prediction market partner in the United States, with Genius Sports supplying official data and integrity services for market settlement. Markets open to eligible U.S. users with the 2026-27 season, which includes the Campeón de Campeones match on July 25 in Carson, California.

adidas × University of Utah: adidas signed a seven-year agreement to become the official footwear, uniform, apparel and sideline partner of Utah Athletics beginning with the 2027-28 school year. The agreement will make all of the Big 12 school’s student-athletes across its 19 varsity programs eligible for adidas’ NIL Ambassador Network.

Yoggies × NJ/NY Gotham FC: Nature’s Garden’s Yoggies snack brand joined Gotham FC as its Official Better-For-You Snack Partner, with the Yoggies logo set for the right sleeve of all match kits beginning with the 2026 NWSL Challenge Cup. The multi-year agreement also includes youth soccer clinics for players under 12.

Vanda Pharmaceuticals × George Washington Athletics: The biopharmaceutical company became GW’s inaugural jersey patch partner, adding the Vanda logo to the home and road uniforms of all 20 Revolutionaries varsity teams through rights holder Bullpen Strategies. GW called it the first such deal in the Atlantic 10 and among non-football schools nationally, as well as the largest corporate partnership in program history.

See you next Wednesday.