Legia's Żyleta, Baník's ultras, Raja's songs. Decades of banners, typography and local myth, and almost none of it made into anything. I find the fit between a property and a brand, build the activation, and produce the thing that carries it.
Como 1907 plays in a town of 84,000 people. It hired a fashion designer as chief brand officer, sold out a Rhude kit, rebuilt its feed around the lake rather than the football, and now takes around 40% of its ticketing revenue from international visitors. It had to manufacture a lifestyle out of scenery.
Legia has the Żyleta. Widzew, Ruch Chorzów and Baník Ostrava have decades of banners, songs and typography built by their own supporters. Hajduk, Partizan and Raja have fan cultures that travel further than their results. None of it is product. These clubs never had to invent anything, and have sold almost nothing they already own.
The reason is not laziness. Nobody inside the club sees it as product, and nobody outside can read it. The material is local and linguistic: the chants, the fanzines, the archive, the slang, which musicians carry weight in that city. A London agency cannot brief that out.
It fails from the other side too. A coffee roaster, a fashion label or an entertainment platform that wants to be near this ends up buying logo placement, because nobody can tell them what the culture actually is or which part of it is free to use.
Born and raised in Brussels. Six years in football, four of them on the brand side of the table at adidas and Unisport, across Central and Eastern Europe. At adidas I ran kit design programmes end to end for three properties: Legia Warszawa Ladies, the Legia AMP team and the Latvian Football Federation. Brief, design approval, production, launch, with the product budget held jointly with Finance.
The same scene kept repeating: a major European club with a Polish international and millions of Polish fans, and no commercial presence in Poland. Across the table, Polish banks and retailers with budget and appetite, thinking about how to get into European football.
Nobody connected them. The global agencies cover the region from London. The local agencies have rarely sat inside a club's commercial department. I’ve done both, in both languages. I wrote my MSc thesis on fashion’s influence on football, which is why the cultural side of a partnership is part of what I sell.
I work in the languages the material is written in. Polish and French natively, which covers most of the territory. The research for this is forums, fanzines, club archives and local press, none of which survives translation. Most recently I worked on R-GOL’s partnership with LKS Tajfun, the club backed by the rapper Mata: music, a club, a kit supplier and an activation, which is this job in miniature.
MOST is the Polish word for bridge.
Every engagement starts with a written deliverable. What follows depends on how far you want to take it.
Fixed fee. Two to four weeks. A written document, delivered whether or not anything comes of it. It is commissioned from either side of the same question.
"Most sponsorships are sold once the shirt already has a shape. This maps the opportunity before that shape exists."
Quoted case by case. Introductions and representation live here, under a written mandate with defined targets and a defined time window. A "no" from a target is a normal outcome, reported as soon as it happens.
What the club owns, what is already licensed to somebody else, who should be attached to it, and what the first product should be. Nine pages, unsolicited, including a section listing what I could not verify. Exactly what a commissioned Fit looks like.
These are the places whose sport culture can be read without a translator, which is also the list of places this practice can work. Two markets are primary. Central & Eastern Europe, where I have on-the-ground commercial experience, native Polish and an existing network inside clubs, brands and agencies. Francophone Europe and North Africa, grounded in a Brussels upbringing, native French and Belgian citizenship.
MOST covers the markets it knows from the inside, and declines the ones it does not.
Orlen's deal lapsed, Biedronka left after sixteen years, and the Polish federation published a list of what it had lost. Lidl replaced one of them.
Polish media read the XTB deal at Porto as a national moment. The man who signed it says the three Polish internationals were a bonus.
UEFA removed a 32-year sponsor, doubled the contract length and rebuilt the table less than a year before a new cycle.
The most commercially interesting part of the World Cup was off the pitch, in what a casting decision says about brand strategy.
The Warsaw label has a new owner who wants cultural collaborators. A brand mid-repositioning is the easiest pitch in sponsorship.
Chicago Fire didn't sell Lewandowski a sporting project. They sold him a city, a market and a platform.