By Gabi Attal, Founder of WhyWorry Advertising Agency, Guest writer

Attention is the scarcest resource in marketing right now. Traditional viewership keeps eroding. Audiences are scattered across streaming platforms, social networks, and AI-powered feeds. And yet one category keeps pulling millions of people to the same screen at the same moment. Live sport.

For brands, this is no longer just a media channel. It’s one of the last genuine attention assets left.

News and sport remain the core growth engines for broadcasters, but sport has something news doesn’t. It creates emotional connection in real time. People aren’t just watching. They’re reacting, feeling, living the moment alongside millions of others.

As AI makes content faster and cheaper to produce, live and authentic experiences become more valuable, not less. The drama of a championship game can’t be replicated, re-edited, or generated by an algorithm.

That’s exactly why sport is becoming a more strategic asset in the age of AI, not less of one.

The Numbers Behind the Momentum

June puts this reality on full display. NBA Finals, World Cup preparation, major sporting events across every market. These aren’t just cultural moments. They’re proof that sport generates serious ROI.

When 30 seconds of airtime during the NBA Finals crosses the $800,000 mark, marketers aren’t buying reach. They’re buying access to culture, emotion, and a conversation happening right now.

That translates into a massive economy driving revenue, subscriptions, merchandise, sponsorships, and brand equity for the companies smart enough to show up at the right moment.

Case Study: The New York Knicks Effect

Most people assume brands are measured by wins. In reality, they’re measured by their ability to hold value when things aren’t going well.

The New York Knicks are a textbook example.

For years, the team’s on-court performance fell short of expectations. And yet the Knicks remained one of the most valuable and commercially powerful sports brands in the world.

That has nothing to do with basketball. It has everything to do with the brand.

The emotional connection to Madison Square Garden, the New York identity, the culture built around the team, the ability to turn a sports club into a lifestyle platform. All of it created a strategic asset worth far more than any trophy.

For marketers, the Knicks are a reminder that Brand Equity is a business asset on its own terms. Even when the product isn’t perfect, a strong brand keeps generating demand, loyalty, and growth over time.

The deeper lesson is that strong brands don’t live only in the moment of consumption. Over the years, the Knicks kept showing up in films, TV series, fashion, music, and pop culture even when they weren’t championship contenders. Their appearance in Hollywood films like “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” wasn’t about basketball. It was about New York identity. The Knicks became part of the city’s story, its culture, its public conversation.

Athletes Are Not Influencers Anymore

The relationship between brands and athletes has fundamentally changed.

Athletes used to be the face of campaigns. Now they operate as entrepreneurs, investors, and business partners.

The roots of this shift go back to the 1980s. Michael Jordan was the first to prove that an athlete could be far more than a spokesperson. The partnership between Jordan and Nike became one of the defining case studies in marketing history. Air Jordan wasn’t just a shoe line. It was a standalone brand that continued generating billions of dollars decades after Jordan retired. That was the moment marketing moved from “talent renting their face to a brand” to “partner creating long-term business value.”

The model today is equity-based. Instead of a one-time fee for a campaign appearance, leading athletes want ownership stakes, revenue shares, and real partnership in value creation.

LeBron James, Serena Williams, Kevin Durant. They’re not just talent. They’re business platforms.

Lionel Messi’s move to MLS showed exactly what one athlete can do. It shifted subscriptions, revenue, brand value, and business performance across tech companies and media partners.

This is no longer advertising. It’s a go-to-market strategy.

The Management Takeaway

It’s easy to get lost in data, automation, and analytics models. Sport pulls us back to something more fundamental.

People buy with emotion and justify with logic.

The job of a marketing leader isn’t just to buy ad space or put a logo on a jersey. It’s to understand how to translate the energy, community, and authenticity that sport generates into a brand narrative tied to business goals, grounded in data, and capable of producing measurable impact.

Sport is not in the business of games.

It’s in the business of emotion.

The more precise technology gets, the more valuable authentic human experiences become.

The question for marketers is no longer whether to invest in sport. It’s how to turn the energy, community, and authenticity it creates into a lasting competitive advantage.