Sponsorship Inventory: How to Track What You Have Sold

Sponsorship inventory is every asset a rights holder can sell to a partner, from LED minutes and shirt sleeves to naming rights, content, hospitality and access. Tracking it means keeping one register that shows, for each asset, how much of it exists, who holds it, until when, and what is still free. Get it right and you never sell the same thing twice, and you see exactly what is left to pitch.

For what happens once a deal is signed, see our sponsorship management guide.

What is sponsorship inventory?

It is the full list of rights, assets and access you can offer a sponsor, and it is much wider than boards and logos.

Partnership Group's Brent Barootes counts access (such as your chief executive speaking at a sponsor's sales conference), data assets such as a member database, and programme elements (Partnership Group). The Sponsorship Collective argues intangibles such as access, content, cause and endorsement are what sponsors value most, because logo placement is widely available (The Sponsorship Collective).

What counts as inventory at a sports club?

Ten broad categories cover most clubs. Use them as the top level of your register.

Treat each team as its own shelf. Blinkfire describes organisations keeping separate inventory lists for the men's team, women's team, academy and esports side (Blinkfire). Even non-league Spennymoor Town's 2025 brochure splits inventory across the men's first team, ladies' team, college teams and community teams (Spennymoor Town FC).

The women's shelf matters commercially. In research from around 2019 (now dated), Deloitte found that 60% of clubs with a men's equivalent in the top women's leagues of France, Germany, the UK and the USA had a different front-of-shirt sponsor from the men's team (Deloitte). If women's kit sits on the same register line as the men's, you cannot see that it is available.

How do you run a sponsorship inventory audit?

Walk the venue, list every channel, count capacity and confirm who controls each asset, before you build packages.

1. Walk and photograph everything. Every board, fascia, screen and lounge. Photos later feed pricing and mockups.
2. List every channel. InCrowd recommends auditing web and app, CRM and email, social, in-stadium screens and streaming, and asking which digital inventory is already sold (InCrowd).
3. Count capacity. Boards, seconds per match, posts per season, hospitality covers.
4. Check who controls it. The league, an agency, the venue owner or the local council may hold or approve some assets. CoachingArea advises confirming you have the right to sell each space before you list it (CoachingArea).
5. Get a second pair of eyes. A fresh review often finds assets the team has stopped noticing. Barootes reports that his firm's inventory work for a CFL team took its list from 75 assets to more than 400, with sponsorship revenue rising from under $1.2m to over $3m (the consultancy's own account) (Partnership Group).

What should a sponsorship inventory register include?

A register needs one row per asset and columns that answer three questions: what is it, is it free, and what stops you selling it.

Give the register one owner. At City Football Group, a Partnerships Operations Executive role, delivering partner rights across the men's and women's clubs, includes keeping documentation that tracks inventory and usage (City Football Group). At a smaller club it can be the commercial manager. Restrictions such as gambling, alcohol and HFSS rules are covered in our sponsorship contract clauses guide.

How much LED and matchday inventory do you actually have?

Matchday inventory is measured in time, so it is finite and perishable: a fixed number of seconds per match, multiplied by the fixtures you can sell. An LED minute not sold for a game cannot be sold after it.

Cambridge United's 2024-25 LED deck sells LED in 15-second slots across all 23 league games, with separate exclusive packages for half time and for all additional time in both halves (Cambridge United). Edinburgh Rugby sold LED for its remaining four URC home fixtures in January 2025, splitting each minute into two 30-second slots and pricing by board length (25m, 50m, 100m) (Edinburgh Rugby).

A 2016 US college tender from the University of South Carolina set per-game caps on PA announcements and reserved LED units for university messages (University of South Carolina).

A worked example (hypothetical). Say a club has 20 sellable LED minutes per league match, outside premium windows, and 23 home league fixtures. That is 460 minutes for the season (20 x 23). If 300 are sold on season packages before the first game, 160 remain, about seven per fixture, and each home game that passes takes its unsold minutes off the table for good. Track PA reads, big-screen slots and match sponsorships the same way.

Which matches change what you can sell?

Cup, televised and European fixtures often change your inventory, hence the "availability by match type" column. Oxford United's 2021 LED package covered all 23 home League One fixtures but excluded televised fixtures and home cup draws, with priority pricing on those games for season buyers (Oxford United).

European nights are stricter. Under UEFA Conference League regulations for 2025/26, the host club must supply LED boards free of rental cost to UEFA's specifications, its LED technicians work under UEFA's direction, and clean stadium principles apply (UEFA). For Champions League matches the Etihad becomes "City of Manchester Stadium" and the Emirates becomes "Arsenal Stadium", with in-stadium sponsor branding covered (Football Ground Guide).

Some inventory is not yours to sell. SPORTFIVE says it is the largest exclusive rightsholder for LED advertising in UK football, working with 12 Premier League clubs (SPORTFIVE). If an agency sells your LED, the "controlled by" column says so.

How do you avoid double-selling and category clashes?

Use a status ladder every salesperson follows, and check the category column before any proposal goes out. Partnership Group stresses that an inventory control system is what stops you selling more than exists (Partnership Group).

The status ladder:

1. Available. Free to pitch.
2. Pencilled (with an expiry date). Held for one prospect, say for 14 days, then back to available unless extended.
3. Proposed. In a sent proposal.
4. Sold. Contract signed, partner and dates filled in.
5. Delivered. Rights fulfilled for the period.

Pencilled and proposed are the states that matter. They stop two people promising the same sleeve to two brands. Rule of thumb: nothing goes into a proposal until it is pencilled, and pencils are reviewed at the weekly sales meeting.

Category clashes need the same discipline. Add league and competition partner categories to the register as blocked lines. When cinch became SPFL title sponsor in 2021, Rangers refused to display its branding at Ibrox and on kit because it conflicted with the club's existing deal with Park's of Hamilton. About a year later the SPFL revised the cinch deal so Rangers no longer had to supply that inventory (Sky Sports). For how to draft exclusivity itself, see our contract clauses guide.

What should you do with unsold inventory?

Review it at least once a season, then repackage it, retire it or pitch it to the right brands, rather than simply discounting it. Two Circles estimated in 2019 (a dated, global estimate) that rights holders would leave £14bn of sponsorship value unrealised that year, citing unsold inventory, unreported engagement and outdated packaging (Advanced Television).

• Repackage around a goal. Robinson's Sport Club Management recommends packaging inventory to solve a specific partner's problem rather than selling one-size-fits-all deals (Human Kinetics).
• Retire what does not sell. The Sponsorship Collective advises discarding assets with little value (The Sponsorship Collective).
• Offer it to current partners first. They already know you and may want an upgrade; put the offer alongside your end-of-season sponsor report.
• Target open categories. If "official car partner" is empty, list the brands in that sector. Our guide to which industries sponsor football clubs helps with the list.
• Show the brand on the asset. Our sponsorship mockups guide explains how.

Is a spreadsheet enough to track sponsorship inventory?

For most clubs, yes, if one person owns it, holds expire and it is updated after every fixture and signature. Larger portfolios with many salespeople may outgrow it. Our sponsorship management guide covers the tools question and fulfilment tracking.

How Sportworks helps

Sportworks.io is the AI platform for sports commercial teams, and it picks up where the register ends: turning what is still available into personalised pitches in minutes. Your register tells you what is left; Sportworks helps you sell it. (Sponsor management is on the Sportworks roadmap.)

• Designs mocks up a prospect's logo on each unsold asset, whether kit, LED boards, stadium signage or social content, from your own inventory photos with set placements, matching colour, sizing and perspective.
• Studio uses those mockups as references to create activation visuals, and Video turns them into short clips such as LED animations.
• Decks turns your PowerPoint or PDF into a reusable template and builds a personalised deck for each brand with visuals, inventory and pricing. Export to PPTX or PDF.
• Scale takes a whole industry for an open category, such as every car brand for an empty "official car partner" slot, and generates personalised pitch assets for every prospect in one run.
• Deck tracking sends open notifications and shows per-viewer sessions, dwell time and a slide-by-slide heatmap, so you know which asset to lead with in the follow-up.

Onboarding includes loading your inventory, brand assets and deck templates, so your audit becomes pitch-ready material. MK Dons' Chief Commercial Officer says Sportworks lets the club show prospects exactly how their brand looks on its inventory before they have signed. Sportworks reports, from its own client data, 10x faster production, 50% lower cost, 3x more conversions and average payback in under 30 days from first use (Sportworks customers).

FAQs

How often should you audit sponsorship inventory?

At least once a season, and before launching new packages. Update the register after every fixture and signed deal.

Who should own the inventory register?

One named person in commercial or partnerships operations. Salespeople pencil assets; only the owner confirms sales and clears expired holds.

Should women's team assets be sold separately?

Always track them as their own entity. Selling them separately is a commercial call, but separate lines show what is genuinely available.

Do league sponsors limit what a club can sell?

Often. League and competition partners can block categories or claim club inventory, as the Rangers and cinch dispute showed. List them as blocked lines.

Sell what is still on the shelf

Your register shows what is left. Sportworks turns it into personalised mockups, decks and campaigns for the right brands in minutes. Book a 30-minute demo or see pricing.