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Imagine you’re marketing a product to active mums who make many of their households’ everyday purchasing decisions. You could pay for a sponsored post from a popular lifestyle influencer presenting your product poolside in Dubai. Or you could work with a local girls’ football team whose Instagram account these very same mums follow.

Either way, your product would appear on social media. With the team, though, viewers would have a very personal reason to pay attention: on screen are their own child, familiar teammates and a community they’re part of.

That’s the idea behind TGC, or Team Generated Content. A sports club or team creates content for a brand’s campaign in its own voice, in its own style and for its own channels. Sport Vertical brings together the right communities and manages the campaign.

A message from your own team means something

Marketers working with UGC already understand the value of content made by real people. In paid UGC, a creator produces content for a brand to use. Influencer partnerships also give the brand access to the influencer’s own audience. With TGC, the content is created and published by a sports community speaking to its own members, families and followers.

Let’s return to that football team. In their video, the girls could try a partner’s products and thank the brand for supporting their sport. For a mum watching, the partnership would mean something beyond the phone screen. She would know what the team does and why supporting it matters.

In that situation, it’s easy to feel warmly towards the brand. They’re helping our team.

Price, quality and suitability still matter, of course. But when two products on the shelf are otherwise equally appealing, supporting your own team could be a good reason to choose one over the other. We believe that kind of personal relevance deserves a place in the marketing budget.

K-Citymarket and Hope gave clubs a good reason to share

In K-Citymarket and Hope’s Back to School campaign, sports communities came together around something people could easily relate to: starting school.

In HJK Women’s video, two players chat on the touchline about their own school memories. They encourage viewers to visit their nearest K-Citymarket and donate a backpack at Hope’s collection point. It’s a simple, relatable moment: familiar players in their everyday surroundings, sharing memories that might bring back your own. For the team’s followers, the invitation to help comes from people they already enjoy hearing from.

Eighteen sports clubs from across Finland took part. They worked from a shared brief but told their own school memories. Each memory came with a practical invitation to help: donate a new backpack for a child who needs one at a K-Citymarket collection point.

The content generated 130,000 organic views in a week and 3,500 likes, shares, saves or comments. The posts also reached people beyond the clubs’ existing followers. Across K-Citymarket and Hope’s entire collection, 7,141 backpacks were donated to children from low-income families. Sport Vertical’s TGC campaign helped bring visibility to the collection.

What we particularly loved was how naturally the clubs made the subject their own. A national message took on local faces and a personal tone. At the same time, K-Citymarket became visible as a brand making something good possible, among people for whom the start of school was part of everyday family life.

Let the real moments show

TGC can have a few rough edges. A player might glance at a teammate halfway through a sentence. The team’s own sense of humour can come through. Their usual training ground is a perfectly good place to film. There’s no need to polish everything away.

That everyday feel also fits the way content is made for social media. For example, TikTok’s own guidance for advertisers notes that authentic, lightly produced videos often outperform polished production. Production budget alone doesn’t determine how well content works.

With TGC, there’s no need to stage that everyday setting. These people really do play on the same team, know each other and spend time together. Their shared experiences continue after filming ends. That makes the content an interesting alternative to AI-generated filler and perfectly rehearsed advertising scripts.

Even a rough-around-the-edges video needs a clear idea behind it. What do we want to say? Why is this community right for the message? What would we like the viewer to do? Sport Vertical’s process includes briefing, production coordination and content approval, while leaving the team room to sound like themselves.

Local connection can work nationwide

A partnership with one team is easy to picture. For a major consumer brand, the next question is how to make it work at a meaningful scale.

If you already build campaigns around several micro-influencers, imagine a similar approach with sports communities. A campaign could involve football, basketball and gymnastics clubs across Finland. Each community would give the shared idea its own interpretation and bring it to an audience that already has a connection with the publisher.

Through Sport Vertical, you can buy this under one agreement. We bring together clubs and teams that fit your objectives, and centrally manage coordination and reporting. Paid distribution can extend the content’s visibility, so a campaign doesn’t have to rely solely on the communities’ existing followers.

K-Citymarket and Hope’s campaign is a practical example: the same objective reached 18 communities without requiring every club to look or sound the same.

There’s room for much more than sports products in this setting. A campaign could start with family meals, a holiday or the beginning of the school year. A good idea comes from understanding what matters to people in the community and the natural role a brand could play in their everyday lives.

Athlete creators can be part of the campaign too. Sport Vertical Creators connects brands with Finnish athletes, and these partnerships can be combined with content and distribution through sports communities. The strengths of teams and individual creators are worth bringing together whenever it serves the campaign’s objectives.

The team benefits from your advertising budget too

A club or team taking part in a TGC partnership receives an agreed fee. The brand’s marketing budget also brings revenue into Finnish club sport.

That’s worth considering when allocating a budget. If two approaches delivered equally good commercial results for the same money, which would you choose: a single sponsored post far removed from your audience’s everyday lives, or a campaign that also supports the teams they care about?

You’d find us on the touchline.

Tell us who your brand wants to reach and what you’d like the campaign to achieve. Let’s find the communities where your message would mean something special.

Let’s plan your TGC campaign

Read the article on Markkinointiuutiset →

The creator’s own voice, the scale of a community network

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.”

Four athletes, four different audiences

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

A commercial campaign can strengthen grassroots sport at the same time

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.”

From zero to a network of approximately 700,000 social media followers in six months

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.

A growing platform for collaboration between brands and athletes

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.

Further information and interview requests

sportvertical.fi

Sport Vertical in brief

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 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 turns the community into the media

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.

Results that went beyond visibility

The campaign content generated:

• 130,000 views
• 3,500 likes, shares, saves or comments
• 7,141 donated backpacks for children from families with limited means

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.

The remarkable work of HOPE ry

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.

A meaningful purpose makes marketing stronger

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.

Explore the campaign results

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.

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.

A warm welcome to Sport Vertical's new advisory board members:

Jukka-Pekka Vuori – Marketing Director, FISU

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 Korkka – Managing Director, Finnish Floorball Federation

Ville-Mikko is an expert in commercial strategy and growth, with extensive experience in sports, media, and digital businesses.

Masa Peura – SVP Everyday Banking, OP Financial Group

Masa is an expert in strategy and business development, with a strong background in finance, media, and building digital services.

One seat is still open

We are looking for a fourth advisor with, for example:

• experience in building and scaling SaaS platforms
• a track record in social media marketing and digital growth leadership
• the ability to spar on product, GTM, and commercial models

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.

Why did we establish an advisory board?

• Fast, practical sparring and decision support — well-founded feedback for tough choices; helps avoid common pitfalls.
• On-demand senior expertise without full-time executives — available when needed.
• Better decision-making and risk management — diverse perspectives improve strategic planning.
• Support for concretizing and scaling growth — helps build repeatable processes and a working GTM model.

Welcome once again, our new advisors — let's get the game going and make Sport Vertical a champion!

The Finnish sports model has been exceptional

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.

But the funding model has already changed

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.

The pressure ultimately reaches the clubs

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:

• more sponsorship
• more corporate advertising
• more fundraising
• more events and collaboration programs

And often also that participation becomes more expensive.

The other side

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.

What thoughts does this raise?

Does the Finnish sports funding model need to be rebuilt – or is there still a sustainable solution within the current model?

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 offers a new way to fund club activities

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.

Driven by the need to modernise club fundraising

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."

An invitation to clubs and brands

Sport Vertical now invites Finnish sports clubs and advertisers to join in building a new model that:

• supports Finnish sports hobbies
• brings clubs additional revenue without burdensome fundraising
• offers brands an effective, community-driven marketing channel
• strengthens well-being and physical activity across Finland

Clubs and advertisers can sign up at: sportvertical.fi