Lipstick where lager used to be

Sport sponsorship has long been defined by beer froth, petrol fumes and betting slips. It still is, by and large – the backdrop of most arenas remains beer brands, car companies and bookmakers jostling for space. But in one corner of the sporting world, the palette is starting to look very different. On the nose of an F1 Academy car sits Charlotte Tilbury, the beauty brand – not as a token decal, but as a headline sponsor: funding grassroots karting sessions, featuring teenage drivers in glossy campaigns and presenting speed as a stage for glamour rather than grit.

The same shift was visible when Arsenal women’s team stepped onto the pitch in a bespoke away kit designed with Stella McCartney. Fashion and football have always flirted, but this was no gimmick – it was a statement that women’s teams could command collaborations on their own terms, and turn aesthetics into a fresh revenue stream.

This isn’t women’s sport borrowing the ledger of men’s deals. It’s a deliberate rewrite, carving out a parallel economy that speaks to new audiences. Where men’s sport remains flavoured by lager and odds, women’s sport is beginning to paint in different colours.

From beauty brands in Formula One to high-fashion kits in football, the trend is less about novelty than about new doorways. These sponsors are not attaching themselves to women’s sport as a gesture; they are opening fresh consumer pipelines. Charlotte Tilbury is not chasing the same audience that Heineken courts on a Champions League night. Stella McCartney is not pitching to the same shoppers who browse replica shirts by the dozen in the men’s game. The effect is a broadening of the funnel – drawing in fans who may never have seen themselves reflected in sport before and, crucially, turning them into buyers.

In men’s sport, sponsorship often functions as reinforcement: beer sold to beer drinkers, cars to people already sold on cars. Women’s sport, by contrast, is expanding the guest list. It is treating the match not as a locked clubhouse, but as a shopfront where identity and aspiration can meet. That is why the categories look so different: less lager and betting slips, more lipstick and lifestyle. It’s not a softer market; it’s a bigger one.

Global revenues for elite women’s sports are expected to reach at least $2.35 billion before the end of the year, climbing sharply from $1.88 billion in 2024 and marking a 240% rise over the past four years, according to Deloitte. Commercial income remains the linchpin, accounting for roughly 54% of that total, while broadcast brings in 25% and ticket driven matchday revenues make up the remaining 21%. Basketball and football stand out as the leading revenue generating sports, together comprising nearly 80% of total earnings.

This is not flickering momentum, but tectonic movement, the kind of growth that transforms sponsorship from hobby to headline act. It’s one thing for brands to posture; it’s another for them to follow the money, in earnest, into a market that’s redefining what sport can sell and who it sells to.

If sponsorship is the money flowing in, branding is the plumbing that makes sure it doesn’t leak away. Nowhere has that been clearer than in the Professional Women’s Hockey League. Ahead of its second season, the PWHL unveiled full team identities – names, logos and colours, the kind of detail that men’s leagues have taken for granted for a century. The effect was immediate and measurable. Merchandise sales doubled. Social media engagement jumped 68%. Attendance rose by more than a quarter. Within months, the league was talking expansion into Seattle and Vancouver.

This is not window dressing. It’s the hard graft of building an economy from scratch. In women’s sport, brand architecture is business architecture: the badge you wear, the scarf you buy, the colours you rally behind all translate directly into revenue streams and staying power. These are not trimmings on the table; they are the bread itself. Where men’s leagues can fall back on decades of inherited identity, women’s leagues are proving that design and storytelling are not decoration but capital.

The difference is not only who sponsors women’s sport, but how the scaffolding is built. Too often, new leagues were cast as satellite operations, the junior wing of a men’s empire, waiting for scraps of attention. The Professional Women’s Hockey League broke that pattern. That independence matters because it proves women’s sport can grow without being tethered to the economics of the men’s game.

The same goes for sponsors. Betting firms and beer brands typically buy eyeballs: logos on shirts, signage on boards, their presence measured in seconds of exposure. But the new wave of sponsors in women’s sport are buying alignment. Charlotte Tilbury isn’t in motorsport because it needs to flog more foundation to petrolheads – it’s there because visibility of young female drivers aligns with its own brand narrative. The same logic applies to fashion houses and lifestyle companies.

That distinction explains why this isn’t lip service. Exposure fades; identity endures. And when fans buy in at the beginning, not out of loyalty to a grandfathered institution, but because the league itself speaks to them, the stickiness is stronger. In other words, this is durability through distinctiveness.

What’s emerging is not a pale imitation of the men’s playbook, but a different volume altogether. Women’s sport is proving that sponsorship can be more than a logo on a jersey or a thirty-second TV slot. It can be a redefinition: of who the fan is, what the product looks like and how the business sustains itself.

That’s the real breakthrough – not that women’s sport is catching up, but that it is showing the industry a new way forward.

Durability will not come from mimicry. It will come from difference. And in that difference lies the most hopeful line of all: women’s sport is building something that might just outlast the fashions of sponsorship – because it has finally learned to sell itself on its own terms.