How Product Co-Creation Could Reshape Football Commerce
A footballer appears in a campaign. A logo is seen by millions. A brand reports its reach. What happens next?
Visibility remains valuable in football. The more consequential question is whether a partnership also helps create something people want to use, return to and participate in. That requires a different relationship between the brand, the athlete and the communities around the game.
On's entry into football offers a timely example. The Swiss brand says it is co-creating football products with Kylian Mbappé, Thierry Henry and Sydney Schertenleib. The products have yet to establish their place in the market, but the approach raises a useful strategic question: what becomes possible when athletes contribute to product-development, instead of simply lending their image to promote it?
The strategy: from endorsement to contribution
An athlete can bring more to product development than recognition. They understand how equipment behaves under pressure, which details affect confidence and performance, and what existing products fail to address. A brand brings design, engineering, manufacturing and distribution. Those contributions become more valuable when they inform each other early and repeatedly.
Co-creation must mean more than an athlete testing a finished prototype or appearing in a development video. It should give the athlete a meaningful opportunity to shape the brief, challenge assumptions, test alternatives and see how their feedback changes the result. The contribution can then continue through launch and subsequent improvement.
This doesn’t imply that every athlete partnership requires equity. The commercial arrangement will vary. What matters is clarity about creative input, decisions, credit and how value is shared. Without that clarity, the language of partnership can outrun the reality of participation.
When does a partnership become an ecosystem?
It is tempting to call any collaboration involving a brand, an athlete and fans a platform. An ecosystem is built when those relationships produce recurring value for the people involved.
Imagine a football product developed through a continuing cycle. Athletes and players identify needs. Designers turn those insights into prototypes. Testing reveals what works across different playing conditions and levels of the game. Communities see parts of the process, respond to the result and help the brand understand how the product performs beyond an elite setting. Those lessons inform the next iteration.
Content may invite people into that journey, but an audience is not the same as a development community. The test is whether feedback has a route into decisions and whether the resulting product earns continued use and trust. That is where a campaign can begin to become a durable commercial relationship.
For football organisations and rights holders, this creates opportunities beyond selling access to attention. Their knowledge of players, participation pathways and local communities can help brands understand whom they are designing for. They also have responsibilities: access to those communities should be earned, and the benefits of collaboration should reach further than a single launch.
Women's football as a test of product ambition
Women’s football makes the distinction between endorsement and co-creation particularly clear. A campaign can celebrate women players while leaving the underlying product brief unchanged. A more serious commitment asks whose experience defined that brief in the first place.
That means involving women and girls in research and testing across levels of play, listening to different preferences and use cases, and allowing those findings to influence design, fit, performance and availability. No single elite athlete can represent every player. An elite collaborator can, however, help open a broader and better informed development process.
I saw in my work developing women's football internationally that lasting growth depends on connected investment. Participation, talent pathways, leadership, competitions and commercial opportunity reinforce one another. Product development belongs in that picture. If more women and girls are entering the game, their needs deserve attention as part of the core business, from early research through to distribution.
UEFA's business case for women's football likewise frames growth through deliberate investment across sporting, commercial and engagement opportunities. For brands, the opportunity is to develop products and relationships with the women's game on their own terms, rather than treat it as an extension of a men's product line.
Innovation needs evidence and governance
New production methods introduce further possibilities for product development. On’s LightSpray technology, already used in selected running footwear, offers one example of an alternative approach to manufacturing. Its application in football will need to be assessed against the demands of the game, including performance, durability, comfort and production scale. Any environmental benefits will also need to be demonstrated for the specific products concerned.
The same discipline applies to the partnership. Who may use an athlete's ideas and image? Who owns the resulting intellectual property? What happens to information gathered from players during testing? How will the brand evaluate performance, participation and commercial return? These are design decisions as much as contractual or governance questions. Resolving them early gives collaboration room to grow.
A leadership question for the next cycle
The opportunity is to connect functions that often work in sequence: partnership teams secure talent, product teams design, marketing teams tell the story and commercial teams assess the results. Bringing those perspectives together earlier creates a better chance of building a product around a genuine need and a partnership around shared goals.
For leaders, three questions can keep that ambition practical:
Who helps define the need? Include athlete expertise and insight from the wider group of people the product is intended to serve.
How does contribution shape decisions? Set clear ways to test, respond to and credit input throughout development.
What value lasts beyond launch? Measure product use and improvement alongside reach, sales and the quality of the relationships created.
Football will continue to sell attention. Its next commercial advantage may come from what its participants can build together: products informed by the game, partnerships with substance and systems that keep learning after the campaign ends.