The psychology of sports sponsorship, explained:
- Team sponsorship can transfer supporters’ loyalty to a brand, while oppositional brand loyalty may drive rival fans away.
- League-wide partnerships can reduce tribal risk, although they may create a weaker emotional connection than backing one team.
- Rivalries, poor performance, ownership disputes and public health criticism can all turn a valuable sports association into a reputational risk.
Mondelēz International wants Oreo, Ritz, Sour Patch Kids and Chips Ahoy! to become part of the Kansas City Chiefs’ game-day ritual. The snacking giant’s first sponsorship of a professional American football team will take the four brands into Arrowhead Stadium (home of the Chiefs), tailgates, watch parties and retail displays across Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. Across those states, regional promotions will openly align the brands with one team.
That explicit alignment is precisely what Mondelēz is buying. Sports sponsorship gives brands access to loyalty, identity and belonging on a scale conventional advertising rarely achieves. Sporting allegiance, however, always comes with an opponent. By entering Chiefs Kingdom, Mondelēz also places mass-market brands sold around the world on one side of several deeply entrenched rivalries.
Research suggests team rivalries can influence what supporters remember, recommend and buy. Oppositional brand loyalty allows consumers to express allegiance by rejecting brands associated with an opponent. A rival supporter doesn’t need to dislike the taste of Oreo to avoid buying it; the association with the Chiefs may provide sufficient reason.
Sports tribalism has already destroyed one high-profile partnership. In 2024, Pernod Ricard agreed to become an official global partner and exclusive champagne and spirits provider of Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). The group abandoned the deal within days after supporters of bitter rival Olympique de Marseille threatened to boycott Ricard, the pastis brand born in their city. A sponsorship intended to extend the company’s international reach had underestimated the commercial force of 90 years of local identity.
Sports sponsorship can backfire in other ways, too, from making sponsors proxy targets for fan anger – as Adidas and Cadbury experienced during the 2021 Manchester United protests – to surrounding products high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) with the healthy imagery of sport, as KP Snacks discovered through its controversial partnership with The Hundred.
When marketing speak meets fan psychology
Family history, geography, friendships and childhood memories can make a team part of a supporter’s identity. Social identity theory explains how people classify themselves and others through group membership, creating an in-group of ‘us’ and an out-group of ‘them’. Sponsorship can pull brands into either camp.
A 2021 Journal of Business Research paper by researchers from Oregon State University and the University of Montana examined what happens when a sponsor enters that rivalry. Its experiments found that highly identified fans could experience a rival’s sponsorship as a threat. That perceived threat generated anger and damaged responses to the sponsoring brand.
Mondelēz could consequently gain its strongest goodwill from supporters who care most deeply about the Chiefs while encountering its greatest resistance among equally committed rivals. One Arrowhead Stadium promotion won’t provoke a national rejection of Oreo, but repeated exposure through team marks, retail displays, stadium activations and social content could make the connection much harder to ignore.
The wording used to promote the deal reinforces that fan psychology. In its marketing blurb, Mondelēz says it is “charging into Chiefs Kingdom” alongside “one of the most iconic fanbases in sports”.
Nick Rogers, director of portfolio marketing and sponsorships at Mondelēz International, pushes the association further by presenting the brands as longstanding fixtures of American football culture. “Mondelēz snacks have fuelled legendary tailgates and family gatherings for generations,” he says. “Elevating that Arrowhead Stadium tradition with fan favourites like Oreo, Ritz, Sour Patch Kids and Chips Ahoy! allows us to bring the ultimate gameday lineup straight to Chiefs Kingdom.”
Those references to tradition, shared gatherings and Chiefs Kingdom strengthen the sense that the brands belong inside the fan group. Psychologists describe one related response as “basking in reflected glory” (BIRGing), through which supporters associate themselves with a team’s success. Its counterpart is “cutting off reflected failure” (CORFing), which describes attempts to distance themselves following defeat. Mondelēz’s celebratory wording is designed to benefit from BIRGing, but the brand association could be weakened by CORFing when the team loses.
Ricard’s Marseille origins had already made the brand part of the city’s identity, so supporters interpreted its PSG agreement as desertion. Their backlash and threatened boycott prompted Pernod Ricard to abandon the partnership within days.
“For more than 90 years, Ricard’s history has been intertwined with Marseille, where it was born, grew up and was inspired,” CEO Alexandre Ricard said when explaining the reversal. “And this link is stronger than anything else.”
His statement captured the psychology behind the deal’s collapse: Ricard’s inherited relationship with Marseille outweighed the prospective value of PSG’s global audience. Supporters had turned their anger into a credible commercial threat and forced one of the world’s largest drinks groups to retreat.
Is it safer to sponsor the entire sport?
Mondelēz’s commitment to one team contrasts with the broader strategies being pursued by Campbell’s, Tostitos and Coca-Cola. These companies are attaching themselves to the wider American football environment and its eating occasions without making their brands the property of a single fanbase.
Campbell’s has renewed its NFL partnership for a 29th season and expanded the agreement from soup into single-serve frozen meals. Its league-wide position allows Chunky to occupy tailgates and game-day meals regardless of which team a consumer supports.
Tostitos also operates at league level as the NFL’s official chip and dip sponsor. Its 2026 programme combines limited-edition team bags with chances to win merch, tailgate products and game-day experiences. The strategy aligns with research conducted for PepsiCo ahead of Super Bowl LX, which found that 74% of Americans choose chips and dip while watching football. Owning the occasion may prove more valuable than owning one team.
Coca-Cola is also spreading its allegiance widely by targeting 13 US college and 12 professional football teams. Its returning ‘Fan Work Is Thirsty Work’ platform will combine localised packs, merch, tickets and team experiences with a 74-stop tour of partner college campuses and selected professional football tailgates. That breadth allows the beverage giant to appear in local colours without becoming nationally synonymous with one club. Supporting numerous teams reduces the danger of rejection by rivals, although it can weaken the exclusivity that gives sponsorship much of its psychological force.
The commercial calculation is therefore whether the affection gained among one team’s supporters will outweigh rejection elsewhere. A 2020 European Journal of Marketing study by University of New Brunswick researchers tested that balance across four samples of 1,294 professional baseball fans and found that positive responses to a favoured team’s sponsors were broader and stronger than hostility towards rival sponsors.
Sponsorship may consequently win more business than it loses, but Mondelēz has accepted greater tribal exposure than brands operating across an entire league or sport. Coca-Cola, Campbell’s and Tostitos are courting football supporters; Mondelēz is courting Chiefs supporters.
When the team’s problems become the sponsor’s problems
Rivalry isn’t the only route through which fan anger can reach a sponsor. Manchester United supporters targeted Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Adidas, Marriott and other commercial partners in 2021 during protests against the Glazer family.
Many supporters had opposed the Glazers since their debt-funded takeover in 2005, criticising the debt loaded onto the club, dividend payments to the owners and limited fan influence. Anger intensified after United joined the failed European Super League project in April 2021. The supporters’ initiative threatened to “boycott products and tarnish brands” unless sponsors pressured the owners. Its statement claimed sponsorship money was being used for “debt servicing and dividends” and accused commercial partners of sustaining a “parasitical relationship”. Those companies hadn’t created the dispute, but their financial relationships with United made them useful targets.
Controversy, however, doesn’t inevitably destroy a sports partnership. Food brands can face a different form of backlash when sponsorship wraps products with less healthy nutritional profiles in the imagery of fitness and athletic achievement. KP Snacks is one manufacturer that’s weathered such criticism without abandoning the relationship.
Its partnership with the England and Wales Cricket Board was announced in 2019 ahead of The Hundred’s delayed 2021 launch and saw Hula Hoops and McCoy’s branding appear on team shirts. With the competition deliberately developed to attract children and families, health campaigners, MPs and NHS leaders argued the arrangement placed products classified in the UK as high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS) in front of young audiences.
The criticism acquired regulatory force in 2022, when the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld complaints about two promotions connected with the partnership. An ECB email featuring HFSS brands was sent to 326 recipients known to be under 16, while a Butterkist Instagram post lacked sufficient safeguards to exclude younger users. Both breached restrictions on directing HFSS advertising at children.
Crucially, the ruling applied to those promotions rather than the sponsorship itself, leaving KP Snacks and the ECB free to continue the relationship. They confirmed a multi-year renewal in August 2025, with McCoy’s, Pom-Bear, KP Nuts and Hula Hoops moving to the sleeves of The Hundred’s men’s and women’s team shirts from the 2026 season.
KP Snacks has also strengthened the community element of the partnership. It became an official partner of England’s men’s, women’s and disability cricket teams and committed £750,000 over three years to grassroots projects through the ECB’s Cricket Cities programme. That investment gives the company a stronger defence against accusations that it’s merely using cricket to place HFSS brands in front of families.
The defence has commercial value, but it doesn’t settle the wider question of whether sport should be used to promote products with less healthy nutritional profiles – a concern extending far beyond KP Snacks. A 2018 study led by New York University School of Medicine found that food and nonalcoholic beverage companies were the second-largest sponsor category across 10 US sports organisations popular with young viewers. Among the products assessed, 76% of foods received unhealthy nutrition scores and 52.4% of drinks were sugar-sweetened.
The KP Snacks example nevertheless demonstrates that backlash doesn’t have to end a sponsorship. Tighter advertising controls, continued investment in participation and a credible benefit for the sport can help preserve the relationship, although they won’t necessarily silence questions about which products are gaining exposure.
Sports sponsorship reaches consumers while emotions are elevated, loyalties are exposed and food rituals are already under way. Mondelēz could make Oreo, Ritz and Chips Ahoy! symbols of celebration throughout Chiefs territory or give rival supporters a reason to leave them on the shelf.
Ultimately, every team partnership comes down to one hard commercial calculation: how many consumers might the brand lose while winning the fans?
Studies:
Bee C, King J and Stornell J. Are you with us or against us? The role of threat and anger in sport sponsorship, Journal of Business Research, Volume 124, 2021, Pages 698-707, ISSN 0148-2963, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.02.048.
Lin H, Bruning PF (2020), Comparing consumers’ in-group-favor and out-group-animosity processes within sports sponsorship. European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 54 No. 4 pp. 791–824, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-03-2018-0195
Bragg MA, Miller AN, Roberto CA, et al. Sports Sponsorships of Food and Nonalcoholic Beverages. Pediatrics. 2018 Apr;141(4):e20172822. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2017-2822. PMID: 29581181; PMCID: PMC5869328.
