There was a time when sport didn’t have to worry about authenticity.

Clubs existed for their communities, athletes let their performances do the talking and brands were largely there to sponsor shirts rather than shape the conversation. It wasn’t perfect, but it felt honest because clubs and players were judged on what they did, not what they claimed.

Fast forward a couple of decades and almost everyone in sport is a brand. Clubs have become content creators, athletes are media channels and every campaign speaks to 'belonging' or 'meaning more'. It’s all a bit 'blah' and, somewhat ironically, as branding has become more sophisticated, it seems authenticity has become much harder to recognise.

That’s not because sport has lost what made it special. If anything, the opposite is true. The passion, drama and emotion is still there — the problem is that they’re often buried beneath layers of messaging, content strategies and carefully managed narratives that all start to look and sound the same.

Perhaps we’ve reached the point where branding has become so good at talking about authenticity that it’s forgotten where authenticity comes from in the first place.

At Thisaway we’ve always believed that sport has something most industries would die for. It creates genuine emotion, brings people together, builds lifelong loyalties and instils unforgettable memories. But those aren’t things that need inventing or embellishing, they’re branding gold, already there waiting to be uncovered.

That’s why we don’t start by asking a sport brand how it wants to be positioned — we start by uncovering what’s already true. What does this club genuinely mean to its supporters? What role does this competition play in people’s lives? What belief already exists that deserves to be unearthed or amplified?

But finding those truths is only half the job. It’s also about having the confidence to express them with clarity instead of trying to be everything to everyone.

Now that every sports brand has an internal creative team, our role as an external partner is to work with, not instead of, them. It's a collaboration that helps uncover those distinctive brand stories, that shapes them into narratives that resonate and frees internal teams from the day-to-day churn of social comms. Allowing them to be a bit more single-minded. And a bit braver.

Because, in an age where AI can write copy, generate images and produce endless content, the temptation will be to create even more. To go wide. To chuck stuff at the wall to see what sticks. But we think the opportunity lies in doing the opposite. To earn authenticity through consistency of belief and behaviour. Doing things not to be ‘liked’ but because it’s the reason they’re loved already.

Of course, modern sport is a commercial business and there’s nothing wrong with that. Clubs need investment, governing bodies need partners (but maybe not the way Gianni Infantino would like) and athletes have every right to build careers beyond competition. Most fans understand those realities. What they struggle with is when commercial ambition overtakes the values that made them care in the first place.

And maybe that’s the real challenge for sports branding today. Not performatively creating authenticity but daring to recognise it when it’s already there.