Sports sponsorship has exploded in value over the last decades, and is a multi-million pound industry. This text explores the development of a sponsorship strategy as well as the practical implementation of sponsorship operations including targeting and negotiating with sponsors, signing a deal, and providing a quality service to sponsors.

The Olympic Games have become the definitive sports event, with an unparalleled global reach and a remarkably diverse constituency of stakeholders, from the IOC and International Federations to athletes, sponsors and fans. It has been estimated, for example, that 3.6 billion people (about half of the world population) watched at least one minute of the Beijing Games in 2008 on television. The driving force behind the rise of the modern Olympics has been the Olympic marketing programme, which has acted as a catalyst for cooperation between stakeholders and driven the promotion, financial...