What Arts Can Learn From Sports
I’m a lifelong sports fan, and a huge NFL fan. As I was watching some football games this past Sunday, I began thinking about the extraordinary financial success of sports and the enormous public and private investment behind it. And I wondered, why has sports been able to attracts that level of commitment while arts and culture continue to fight for support?
The 2026 FIFA World Cup filled stadiums across U.S., mobilized host cities, and drew investment in transportation, security, visitor services, public celebrations, and the overall fan experience. Across the NFL, billion-dollar stadiums continue to advance through combinations of private financing, public bonds, dedicated taxes, and surrounding development. Sports is treated as something worthy of a long-term risk.
Sports are not the enemy of arts and culture and we can learn a lot from how it operates. I enjoy many sports, and understand the hold it has on its audience, and recognize the sense of belonging it creates. Its success offers useful lessons about how a sector builds loyalty, attracts capital, creates political influence, and secures a place within the economic and civic life of a city.
Cities rarely describe a stadium as an amenity, it is presented as infrastructure, a visitor attraction, a development anchor, and a symbol of regional importance. Transportation, hotels, restaurants, public space, commercial activity, and tourism become part of the case for development. Tax credits are also a very appealing incentive to a city willing to take on a major sports project.
However, a theater, museum, creative workspace, or neighborhood cultural center, is more likely to be treated as a discretionary expense, even when it supports many of the same businesses and contributes just as powerfully to the identity of a place. Cultural organizations are still required to prove their worth repeatedly, often one grant cycle at a time.
Private funding follows a clear structure in sports with media rights, tickets, hospitality, naming rights, merchandise, and licensing, provide recognizable ways to generate a return. Arts and cultural organizations are more often positioned as charitable recipients. That framing keeps the sector dependent on generosity rather than establishing it as a source of economic and cultural value in which businesses can participate.
Sports Fans Make the Difference
Sports audiences do not merely watch a team, they are part of the team. Seasons across all sports create rhythm, rivalries build anticipation, and family traditions carry allegiance from one generation to the next. Media, merchandise, statistics, commentary, youth programs, fantasy leagues, and community activities keep the relationship active between games.
Someone can follow a team every day without entering the stadium. Fans go crazy supporting their favorite teams, wearing team colors proudly. Tell me, when was the last time you saw people dressing up like Mozart for a concert? We can be quite stuffy in the arts and not allow our audience to be themselves.
Many cultural organizations, by contrast, have to rebuild an audience for every exhibition, production, performance, or festival. Communication intensifies when tickets go on sale and recedes when the event ends. The relationship remains tied to a particular offering instead of becoming part of someone’s identity or regular life. Arts and culture may bring people together, but the sector has not consistently converted participation into the durable loyalty that sports understands so well.
The arts financial model adds to that vulnerability of audience building. SMU DataArts reported that contributed income represented an average of 59 percent of unrestricted revenue among the organizations it studied in 2024, while earned income accounted for 40 percent. Foundation support fell 25 percent from the previous year and government support declined 26 percent. When a sector depends so heavily on grants, donations, and shifting institutional priorities, artistic independence can become less secure rather than more protected.
Arts and culture can respond by building relationships that extend beyond individual events. Organizations should communicate frequently throughout the year, connect separate programs through a larger story, welcome new ways for people to participate, and give people reasons to return when they are not buying a ticket. The aim is to create a sustained connection rather than repeatedly assembling a temporary audience.
Greater investment will also require more varied ways to generate income. Experiences, intellectual property, memberships, venue use, licensing, hospitality, consulting, digital products, and related commerce can strengthen the creative mission when they are chosen carefully. Partnerships with tourism, real estate, economic development, technology, local employers, and small businesses can be structured around ongoing shared interests instead of occasional requests for support.
Diversification also protects creative control. No foundation, company, public agency, donor, or institution should have enough influence to redirect an organization’s entire mission. Commercial agreements can define artistic authority before money changes hands, while meaningful community participation can broaden the work without asking creatives to surrender their standards.
The sector also needs measures that reflect lasting value. Attendance is useful, but repeat participation, audience retention, paid opportunities for creatives, local spending, and the duration of community relationships reveal whether cultural work is becoming embedded in a place. These measures can strengthen the case for investment without reducing artistic value to numbers.
Sports has built an interconnected system of audiences, media, businesses, public agencies, investors, and places. Arts, culture, and the creative economy remain more fragmented and too dependent on funding theories developed for another era.
Reaching a higher level for arts investment will require more than another argument about why the arts matter. It will require new ways of reaching people, generating revenue, forming partnerships, and financing the work. Let's learn from what sports is doing successfully and apply what works to the arts.
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