Sponsorship Mockups: How to Show a Brand Its Logo on Your Inventory

A sponsorship mockup is an image or short clip of a prospect's logo on your real inventory, so the brand can see the partnership before it signs. The best ones are built from your own photos, at the correct size and position, for the specific assets you are proposing. It is one part of a strong sponsorship proposal.

What is a sponsorship mockup, and why does it help you sell?

It is a visual of the deal itself, turning a line in a rate card into something a marketing director can picture and argue for internally. Three reasons it works:

• It proves the pitch was made for them. Sponsorship consultant Kim Skildum-Reid warns that sponsors dislike generic, search-and-replace proposals (Power Sponsorship).
• People understand it better. Learning research (not sales research) by Richard Mayer found people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone (Mayer, Multimedia Learning, Cambridge University Press).
• It travels. Your contact rarely signs alone, and a clear image is easy to forward to the CMO.

Clubs treat this as a core sales task: AFC Bournemouth has advertised for a commercial graphic designer to "create mockups, visualisations and branding concepts for prospective and existing partners" (Jobs in Football), and Chicago Fire FC's creative presentation designer role includes "sponsorship mockups, renderings, signage concepts" (Mediabistro).

Which inventory should you mock up?

Mock up the three to five assets in the package you are actually proposing, not everything you own. The RFU's sponsor asset list makes a good checklist for any club sport (RFU What to Offer a Sponsor).

How big can a sponsor logo be on a football shirt?

In English football, the FA allows one sponsor area of up to 250 cm² on the shirt front and up to 100 cm² each on the back, the back of the shorts and each sleeve (where competition rules permit).

Points that change how the mockup should look:

• Logo shape matters. 250 cm² is roughly a 25 x 10 cm rectangle and 100 cm² roughly 10 x 10 cm. A long wordmark and a square icon fill them very differently.
• Separation and consistency. The FA requires sponsor advertising to be clearly separate from club identifiers and identical on all players.
• Different deals per kit. Home and away kits can carry different sponsors, and a club with more than one team can hold a separate shirt deal for each.
• Youth teams. For teams where all players are under 18, the FA says alcohol, breweries and gambling products are unlikely to be permitted at all. Never mock a betting or drinks brand onto an academy shirt.
• Category rules. Premier League clubs have voted to ban gambling sponsors from shirt fronts from 2026-27, with sleeves still allowed (Inside World Football). Our sponsorship proposal guide covers the wider gambling and alcohol rules.

Other sports have their own kit and livery rules, so check your governing body's regulations.

How do you make a mockup look real?

Start from your own high-quality photos and make the logo follow the asset's angle, curve, light and scale. A mockup that looks pasted on undermines the pitch.

1. Use your own photography. A broadcast-angle matchday shot, a close-up and a wide venue shot.
2. Use official logo files from the brand's press kit, not a screenshot.
3. Read the brand guidelines. Most set clear space, minimum sizes and approved colour versions, and forbid stretching, recolouring or adding effects to the logo (IQM logo guidelines is a typical example). On a coloured shirt, the brand's approved mono or reversed version is often what will actually be printed.
4. Remove the current sponsor's branding from the photo.
5. Match perspective and surface. Follow the angle of the board, the curve of the shirt and the folds in the fabric. Photoshop's Perspective Warp helps here (Adobe).
6. Match light and colour to the surroundings.
7. Respect LED proportions. LED strips are long and thin. Swansea City's sponsor specification, for example, asks for LED banner artwork at 896 x 64 px and advises dark backgrounds, large bold fonts and showing logos enlarged and in sections, since detail is lost at 64 px high (Swansea City).
8. Show the format you are selling. SPORTFIVE describes LED rotation formats from a full rotation (one sponsor across the whole board) to 4:4 splits and multisession layouts with up to 14 sponsors at once, with rotations typically lasting 30 seconds (SPORTFIVE).
9. Pair a wide shot with a close-up, to show presence and detail.

Can you use a prospect's logo without permission?

Treat it with care: do not use it publicly without permission, and be careful even in a private pitch. Skildum-Reid argues that you have no licence to use a sponsor's logo and should not put it on your proposal cover; where the logo is integral to the deal, such as car livery or event naming, she suggests offering a mock-up, with permission (Power Sponsorship).

Big brands control their marks tightly: Google's sponsorship guidance says partners may use its name or logo only once approved, must use the approved, unmodified logo supplied, and should not describe the relationship with words such as "partner" or "endorsed by" (Google).

A sensible approach:

• Put the logo on the asset, never on the cover.
• Treat it as a private concept for that prospect, labelled "concept", using official files and the brand guidelines.
• Never publish it or imply a partnership exists.
• If unsure, or before anything goes public, ask the brand.

This is general practical guidance, not legal advice; trade mark rules vary, so take legal advice if you are unsure. Once a deal is signed, the contract should set out how each side may use the other's marks: see our guide to sponsorship contract clauses.

How do commercial teams make mockups today?

Most use an in-house designer, Photoshop, an agency or an AI tool built on their own photos. The trade-off is time per prospect.

• In-house designers give control, but mockups queue behind matchday graphics and sponsor deliverables.
• Photoshop by hand means placing the logo as a smart object, using the transform, perspective and warp tools to fit the surface, and adding adjustment layers to match colour and tone (ExpertPhotography). Repeat for every asset and prospect.
• Stock mockup templates are quick, but they show someone else's venue.
• Agencies add cost and lead time to each pitch.
• AI tools for rights holders work from your own inventory photos and apply the logo at fixed placements, which makes it practical to send personalised mockups to a long prospect list.

How many mockups should a pitch include, and where do you use them?

Three to five: one per asset in the proposed package, plus a hero image. Use them beyond the deck too.

• First contact. One strong image in a cold email or LinkedIn message earns a reply.
• The deck. Place each mockup next to the asset, the audience it reaches and the price. Our guide to building a sponsorship pitch deck covers slide order and follow-up.
• Renewals and upsells. Show an existing partner a new asset, such as a sleeve or a stand name, with their logo already on it.

LED boards, big screens and broadcast graphics move, so show them as a short clip; kit and signage work as stills.

A hypothetical example

A League One club is pitching a regional building firm on three assets: the shirt back, a 4:4 LED rotation and a named hospitality lounge. The commercial manager uses the firm's approved white reversed logo within 100 cm² on a matchday shirt photo, builds a dark-background LED frame plus a short animation, and adds the name to a photo of the lounge entrance. Each image is labelled "concept" and goes into a short deck with prices. (An illustration, not a real deal.)

How Sportworks helps

Sportworks.io is the AI platform for sports commercial teams, built for exactly this job: creating personalised sponsorship pitches, including branded mockups, activation images, videos and pitch decks, in minutes.

• Designs builds mockups from your own inventory photos. It adds sponsor logos to kits, LED boards, stadium signage and social content with set logo placements, matching colour, sizing and perspective, so each logo sits in the space you have defined. It also removes existing branding, clearing a current partner off a photo first.
• Studio combines reference images (uploads, designs or past creations) with a written concept to create branded activation visuals in the aspect ratio you need, which can then be turned into video.
• Video turns a Designs or Studio image into a short clip, covering LED animations, apparel, broadcast graphics and social formats, and can map existing ads onto your LED screens.
• Decks turns your own PowerPoint or PDF into a reusable template with linked image placeholders, then builds personalised decks with visuals, inventory and pricing for each brand you select. Deck tracking adds open notifications, per-viewer analytics and a slide-by-slide heatmap, so you can see whether a prospect lingered on the mockups.
• Scale generates personalised pitch assets for several brands, or a whole industry, in one run, with batch download and team sharing: a whole outbound campaign, not one prospect at a time.

Onboarding includes building your first design templates and loading your inventory and brand assets, and every plan includes all features and unlimited design templates. MK Dons' Chief Commercial Officer says the platform lets the club show prospects exactly how their brand looks on its inventory before they sign. Sportworks reports, from its own client data, 10x faster production, 50% lower cost and 3x more conversions (Sportworks customers).

Coming soon: Showcase, an interactive 3D world where a prospect can walk through your venue and see their brand in place on the LEDs and other assets.

FAQs

Are there free sponsorship mockup templates?

Yes, stock sites offer jersey and scoreboard templates, but they show a generic venue, not yours.

Should I put the prospect's logo on the proposal cover?

No. Use their company name on the cover and save the logo for the asset itself, where it shows what they are buying.

What size should LED artwork be?

It depends on your LED system, so ask your supplier. Swansea City, for example, specifies 896 x 64 px.

Can AI make sponsorship mockups?

Yes. Tools built for rights holders, such as Sportworks Designs, work from your own inventory photos. Still check every placement against your competition's kit and advertising rules.

Should mockups go in the proposal or the deck?

Both: in the deck for the pitch, and the key images in the written proposal. See the sponsorship proposals pillar for the full process.

See your inventory with your next prospect's logo on it

Book a 30-minute demo to see how Designs, Video and Decks turn your own inventory photos into personalised pitches. Or see pricing.