News and press releases from Sport Vertical.
IN THE MEDIA
Finnish marketing trade publication Markkinointiuutiset covered Sport Vertical’s new athlete creator team and the model that enables brands to combine one or more creators with selected sports communities in a single campaign. The article also highlights Sport Vertical’s growth to a network of 50 sports communities and a combined social media audience of approximately 700,000 followers.
PRESS RELEASE
Sport Vertical’s new creator team brings together Olympic cross-country skier Vilma Nissinen, Olympic medallist and World Champion Riitta-Liisa Lassila, ultrarunner Noora Honkala and sprinter Jadelen Knös. A brand can now build one campaign with one or more selected athlete creators and dozens of sports communities – through one partner, one agreement and one managed solution. In roughly six months, Sport Vertical has grown into a network of 50 sports communities, four creators and approximately 700,000 social media followers. Brands already marketing through Sport Vertical include Kesko, DNA and Finnlines.
An influencer partnership does not have to end in the creator’s own channel. Sport Vertical Creators combines an athlete’s personality, credibility and own audience with distribution across Sport Vertical’s nationwide sports community network.
An advertiser can, for example, create content with one Sport Vertical Creator and publish it not only on the creator’s own channels but also across the sports clubs and teams selected for the campaign. Communities can be chosen based on criteria such as region, sport, target audience and campaign objective. Sport Vertical centrally manages partner selection, agreements, briefing, coordination and reporting.
Ilmari Piela, Chief Product Officer, Sport Vertical
“Influencer partnerships often remain confined to one person’s channels. We combine an athlete’s own voice and credibility with the scale of a community network. A brand can build content with one interesting athlete and take the same campaign into dozens of carefully selected sports communities. The result is a combination of creative content, targeted distribution and measurable execution.”
Vilma Nissinen is a Finnish Olympic cross-country skier whose content combines elite sport, wellbeing, recovery and the everyday life of a modern athlete.
Noora Honkala is an internationally successful ultrarunner and endurance athlete. Her world highlights exceptional endurance, determination, the outdoors, travel and an active lifestyle.
Riitta-Liisa Lassila is an Olympic medallist and World Champion, and one of the best-known personalities in Finnish cross-country skiing. Her content world includes an active life, holistic wellbeing, food and an approachable everyday life.
Jadelen Knös is a sprinter, engineering student and content creator whose energetic world brings together ambitious sport, technology, cars, studies, fashion and lifestyle.
Explore the Sport Vertical Creators team
For the members of the creator team, it has also been important to be part of a model that supports Finnish grassroots sport. When creator content is shared through the channels of the sports clubs and teams participating in a campaign, the communities receive an agreed compensation for their participation.
In Sport Vertical’s model, a brand’s marketing and social impact are not separate from each other. A campaign can help a company reach active Finns in a trusted environment while bringing new revenue to the clubs that enable children, young people and adults to stay active across Finland.
Pasi Bruun, CEO, Sport Vertical
“In this model, good business and doing good reinforce each other. The brand gets engaging athlete content, targetable distribution and a measurable campaign. At the same time, the participating clubs gain new revenue for their activities. Every well-executed partnership can therefore also support grassroots sport and, through it, the wellbeing of the whole of Finland.”
Sport Vertical launched at the end of February 2026. In roughly six months, it has grown into a network of 50 sports communities and four athlete creators. The network’s communities represent 26 sports across 15 localities.
Sport Vertical’s total audience is now approximately 700,000 social media followers. Marketing campaigns have already been carried out across the network with brands including Kesko, DNA and Finnlines.
The rapid growth shows the need for a new model: brands are looking for effective, targetable and measurable ways to reach consumers, and sports organisations need new commercial revenue streams. Sport Vertical brings these needs together into one offering that is easy to buy and manage.
Sport Vertical builds tactical campaigns and long-term sponsorships for brands around one or more creators and selected sports communities – together or separately.
The creator team will be expanded carefully with new athletes whose personalities, stories and audiences are a natural fit with Sport Vertical’s operating model. The aim is to build a new commercial environment for athlete creators, where partnerships can be combined with broader community distribution and support for Finnish grassroots sports.
Lisätietoja
Pasi Bruun
CEO, Sport Vertical / Vertical Group Oy
+358 44 989 4326
Sport Vertical is a Finnish sports media and sponsorship network that connects brands with sports clubs, teams and athlete creators. Through a single partner, advertisers gain access to local, sport-specific or nationwide audiences. Sport Vertical centrally plans and coordinates campaigns and sponsorships while creating new commercial revenue streams for sports organisations.
K-Citymarket and HOPE ry’s Back to School campaign demonstrated what can happen when Team Generated Content, trusted sports communities and a genuinely meaningful cause come together.
K-Citymarket and HOPE ry’s Back to School campaign showed how marketing can generate visibility, engagement and tangible social impact at the same time.
The campaign encouraged people across Finland to donate a new school backpack to a child who needed one. The message was brought into sports communities through Team Generated Content, or TGC: 18 sports clubs across Finland created their own content based on a shared brief and published it through their social media channels.
Team Generated Content is created by the club or team itself, in its own voice. In this campaign, players, coaches and other representatives of the participating sports communities shared personal memories about starting school and invited their audiences to donate a backpack.
For marketing decision-makers, the strength of the model is clear. The brand retains a coordinated message, but that message is delivered by people the community already knows and trusts. Instead of feeling like advertising placed in a club’s channel, the content becomes a natural part of the community’s own communication.
The model is also scalable. Sport Vertical coordinated the briefing, club participation, content production and publishing as one managed campaign, while the actual content was created locally by each community.
The campaign content generated:
The content also travelled beyond the clubs’ existing audiences. More importantly, the campaign did not stop at awareness: it inspired people to take action.
This is marketing impact at its best. Attention becomes participation, and participation becomes a tangible outcome.
Not every child begins the school year with the same opportunities. A new backpack may seem like a small thing to an adult, but for a child it can represent joy, belonging and a more confident start to school.
HOPE ry does exceptionally valuable work for children and young people from families with limited financial means. The Back to School campaign brought attention to that work while giving people a simple and concrete way to help.
For Sport Vertical, it was both a pleasure and a privilege to take part in a campaign that used the power of sports communities for such an important purpose. We are especially proud of how enthusiastically the clubs in our network embraced the cause, told the story in their own voices and helped the message reach families across Finland.
The campaign offers marketing leaders an important lesson: community-driven content becomes especially powerful when people are given a genuine reason to stop, care and participate.
In this campaign, TGC combined a nationwide concept with the trust of local communities. The result was content that felt personal, scaled across 18 sports clubs and led to measurable action.
The community was not merely the campaign’s target audience. It became the media, the content creator and the force for change.
Markkinointiuutiset published an article today about Sport Vertical and its role as an innovator in brand and sports club collaboration. The article highlights how Sport Vertical offers brands a scalable way to reach active families while helping clubs raise additional funding without extra administrative work.
The article emphasizes the network's rapid growth and the ability to target campaigns regionally — in a way that traditional influencer marketing cannot match.
👉 Read the full article from Markkinointiuutiset: markkinointiuutiset.fi
Finnlines has launched a collaboration with Sport Vertical to reach Finnish sports communities in a modern and impactful way. Ten clubs and teams take part by sharing Finnlines' cruise offers in their own channels and activating their communities around the collaboration.
Finnlines has launched a collaboration with Sport Vertical to reach Finnish sports communities in a modern and impactful way. Ten clubs and teams take part by sharing Finnlines' cruise offers in their own channels and activating their communities around the collaboration.
Sport Vertical's model enables companies to reach genuinely engaged audiences – while at the same time supporting youth sports and the vitality of club activities. Collaboration carried out through sports communities offers advertisers a combination of targeted visibility, trust, and distribution that emerges through the clubs' own channels.
Finnlines' Sport Vertical collaboration page can be found here:
finnlines.com/fi/matkustajat/sport-vertical
The collaboration shows how brands can combine commercial goals with social impact – and reach sports communities in a way that feels authentic and meaningful.
Sport Vertical has established an advisory board to help us navigate growth challenges and bring expertise in marketing, commercialization, and scalable concepts to the table.
A warm welcome to Sport Vertical's new advisory board members:
Jukka-Pekka has over 25 years of experience in marketing, branding, and business management. He has held CEO and executive team roles in international sports organizations.
Ville-Mikko is an expert in commercial strategy and growth, with extensive experience in sports, media, and digital businesses.
Masa is an expert in strategy and business development, with a strong background in finance, media, and building digital services.
We are looking for a fourth advisor with, for example:
If this sounds right – or you know someone who fits – get in touch.
Sport Vertical is building a modern way to connect sports clubs and advertisers. The concept is based on a clearly productized and scalable operating model that benefits everyone: advertisers, clubs, teams, sports participation, and through that, everyone's well-being.
The market is in transition and the need for a more efficient model for collaboration between sports communities and businesses is clear.
Welcome once again, our new advisors — let's get the game going and make Sport Vertical a champion!
Finland is currently debating government grants for organizations. The government's austerity pressures have raised the possibility of significant cuts to organizational funding. The discussion currently focuses on social and health organizations. But looking further ahead, one thing is clear. The entire Finnish organizational funding landscape is in transition, and it may have a surprisingly large impact on sports.
In Finland, sports clubs have largely been built on a model where public funding has played a central role.
Funding has roughly flowed like this:
This model has made it possible for approximately 8,000–9,000 sports clubs to operate in Finland, with over two million participants. Club activities have been one of the strongest community structures in Finnish society.
Many may not have noticed an important change a few years ago. Veikkaus revenues were transferred directly to the state budget. In practice, this means organizational funding is no longer earmarked money – but part of the normal budget, making it an easier target for cuts. If organizational grants are cut more broadly, the pressure will inevitably extend to sports organizations.
If federation funding decreases, the impact doesn't stay at the federation level – it quickly becomes visible in clubs too, and clubs then have to raise more money themselves.
This can mean:
And often also that participation becomes more expensive.
When public funding decreases, the role of sports clubs may change. Clubs are not just hobby communities – they are also a vast network of communities. From a marketing perspective, this is one of Finland's largest community networks.
Finland's sports model has long been built on public funding. In the future, funding will likely come increasingly from companies. In many countries, this change happened years ago, and in Finland it is just beginning. When it happens, it will change the sports ecosystem more than many yet understand.
Does the Finnish sports funding model need to be rebuilt – or is there still a sustainable solution within the current model?
Finnish amateur sports are suffering from a growing funding gap, and club fundraising is becoming increasingly difficult. Now a new service, Sport Vertical, has entered the market, offering sports clubs a modern, market-driven way to generate revenue – without volunteer work.
The funding of Finnish amateur sports is undergoing a significant transformation. Government grants remain a key pillar of support, but their adequacy has weakened. For example, the Finnish Model for Hobbies grants totalled 14 million euros in 2024, even though applications exceeded 21 million euros. At the same time, declining revenues from Veikkaus threaten to cut sports and physical activity funding by tens of millions of euros in the coming years.
In many clubs, this is felt in daily life: fundraising is laborious, and running operations still relies on parents' volunteer work and traditional bazaars.
Sport Vertical is a new activation network that connects brands and sports clubs through community activations. Companies can purchase collaboration programs that clubs share on their own social media channels. Clubs can also choose to activate their own community to participate in collaborations.
Brands gain impactful visibility across sports community channels – clubs receive funding for their activities without administrative burden.
Finnish sports need new, sustainable funding models. Public funding is under pressure, and traditional fundraising is no longer enough to cover rising costs. Sport Vertical offers an alternative based on market-driven collaboration and community activation.
Pasi Bruun, Co-founder, Vertical Group Oy
"Finnish club activity is enormously valuable, but its funding is too vulnerable. We want to bring a new, modern and market-driven alternative. Sport Vertical makes fundraising easier while offering brands a genuine opportunity to activate communities in a way that feels meaningful. This is a win-win model that benefits the entire Finnish sports landscape."
Sport Vertical now invites Finnish sports clubs and advertisers to join in building a new model that:
Clubs and advertisers can sign up at: sportvertical.fi
Sport Vertical Pulse brings you the latest network growth, new campaigns, standout cases and emerging opportunities in sports marketing.
