How DIGIDECK Sets The Standard For The NFL's Global Sponsorship Pitches
Scaling Global Fanbase + Sponsorship Revenue Growth
The Background
The NFL will play a record nine international games in 2026, across seven countries, with three cities hosting for the first time: Melbourne, Paris and Rio de Janeiro. Off the field, all 32 clubs now hold international marketing rights through the Global Markets Program, which spans 22 markets this year with the addition of Italy.
For a sponsorship seller, that expansion is not an abstract growth story. It’s a workload. Every new market means new prospects, new categories, new local brands who have never bought an NFL asset before and a partnership team that has to explain, from scratch and in a different business culture each time, what a global NFL platform is actually worth.
Which raises a question worth sitting with if you sell sponsorship for a living: what happens to your pitch process when your market map grows faster than your team does?
Before DIGIDECK
Before DIGIDECK, the NFL’s Global Partnerships team pitched the way most properties still pitch. PowerPoint decks and PDFs, built by hand, emailed out to prospects.
The team also didn’t have a dedicated graphic designer. So every pitch was a tradeoff between speed and polish and for a league that sets the standard on the field, the tools behind the sponsorship pitch weren’t keeping pace with the product they were selling.
The bigger constraint was what the format could and couldn’t show. Sponsorship gets sold on how an activation comes to life: the commercial spot, the on-site footprint, the game-day moment. A static slide can only offer a flat photo or a link out to something else. When the team wanted a brand to understand what a Super Bowl fan activation felt like, the deck couldn’t bring it into the roomThat gap widens every time you enter a new market. In a mature market, a prospect already has a mental model of what NFL sponsorship looks like. In a first-year market, they don’t and a JPEG of a stadium won’t build one.
The Move: One Pitch Standard, Everywhere
DIGIDECK is now the standard for how the NFL Global Partnerships team pitches. Every new-business pitch is built and customized in DIGIDECK from first meetings, scaled-down deal versions, asset development for partner upsells, all the way to high-end custom slides for the league’s largest platforms.
“DIGIDECK is now fully incorporated into our entire global sales team, not just in the U.S., but the entire globe for us.” – Mike Minnella, Senior Director, Business Development, NFL
The word doing the work in that quote is entire. Standardization is the strategic decision underneath the technology, and it’s the part most properties skip.
When one platform carries every pitch in every market, a few things stop being problems. Brand consistency no longer depends on which rep opened which file. A scaled-down version for a smaller deal starts from the same foundation as the flagship pitch. High-end custom slides live in the same system every seller works out of, rather than on one designer’s desktop. And the answer to “what does our best pitch look like?” is the same answer in every time zone.
That’s the difference between scaling a sales team and just adding people to it.
Interactivity Travels Better Than a PDF
The reason the standard is worth adopting in the first place is what a rep can do once they’re inside it.
Instead of a picture or a link, the team drops real commercial spots, immersive activation footage and video highlights directly onto the slide and runs them live in the room. A video walkthrough of the Super Bowl fan activation shows a prospect exactly what their own footprint could look like.
For international selling, that matters more than it does at home. A prospect who has never attended an NFL game or, in a first-year market, never seen the league activate locally can’t fill in the gaps from memory. Showing beats describing, and it beats translating.
What The Standard Bought them
DIGIDECK now plays a pivotal role across the NFL Global Partnerships team’s entire sales process — no deal gets done without it in the mix. What that looks like in practice:
- Adopted across global sales. Every new-business pitch runs through DIGIDECK, in the U.S. and in every international market — one standard way to pitch, and therefore central to the team’s growth.
- Behind marquee new partners. The league has significantly grown its new-business partnerships in recent years, with brands including Jersey Mike’s, Abercrombie and Toyota.
- Best-in-class perception to match the brand. The team has received more compliments on presentations and proposals than ever before.
“From a business perspective, pitching to corporate America, we need to be best-in-class, and DIGIDECK has certainly helped us elevate ourselves in the sponsorship space.” — Mike Minnella, Senior Director of Business Development, NFL
The Market Context
Sponsorship is growing, and it’s growing internationally. NFL team sponsorship revenue reached $2.7B in the 2025 season, up 8% year over year, and the league counts 183 million fans across its nine international markets, an active fan base that has grown by 10 million since 2021. The league has set a $25B league-wide annual revenue target for 2027.
These are league-wide public figures, shown as market context rather than results attributable to DIGIDECK. Sources: SponsorUnited NFL Marketing Partnerships Report 2025; NFL Global Markets Program.
The takeaway for anyone selling partnerships: growth of that shape doesn’t get absorbed by working harder. It gets absorbed by a pitch process that scales: one standard, reusable assets, live storytelling, and signal on who’s actually paying attention.