More than a game: the hidden scale of innovation in sport
Sport is often viewed as entertainment, as competition and as physical excellence. Yet behind every match, race and performance lies a vast and largely invisible innovation ecosystem. From equipment and apparel to data systems, broadcasting tools and medical technologies, sport is underpinned by thousands of technological solutions, and many of them are protected by IP. This chapter reveals the sheer scale of innovation embedded in modern sport, showing that sport is not just played on the field, but built through sustained technological development.
Sports-related patents
Patent data offer a structured way to observe how modern sport is shaped by technology. Over the last decade, sports-related patent filings reveal both the breadth of innovation – spanning equipment, training systems, wearable technologies and performance aids – and the dynamic shifts in where and how innovation takes place. Even within a relatively narrow scope limited to human-centered sport, the volume of protected inventions is considerable and highly diversified across sports disciplines and geographies.
Over the last decade, this overview captured over 65,700 inventions, reflecting an annual growth rate of 7.6%. By technological volume, golf constitutes the largest field with almost 19,000 inventions, followed by swimming, racket sports (which include tennis, badminton, table tennis, padel, pickleball, squash, etc.), basketball and football (soccer). These sports combine sizeable participation bases with mature equipment and training markets, creating consistent demand for incremental and performance-enhancing innovations. Meanwhile, sports such as cricket and volleyball are smaller in absolute numbers but have posted notable growth rates, suggesting expanding technological engagement and emerging commercial opportunities.
Growth patterns add further nuance. From 2016 to 2020, racket sports, basketball and swimming recorded the fastest expansion, reflecting increased investment in equipment materials, sensor integration and training technologies. Between 2021 and 2025, the leading growth areas shifted toward golf, cricket and hockey, indicating a reallocation of innovation attention and capital within the sports ecosystem. Over the past decade, cricket has outpaced all other sports: it had double-digit growth, despite currently holding the smallest overall share. These transitions suggest that innovation in sport is not static, but adjusts as technologies mature and new drivers of demand emerge.
Note: All counts represent the number of inventions, measured in terms of the number of published patent families. One-to-many AI-based tagging was used to classify patents within specific sports. “Inventive location” is based on original patent applicant address. “Patent owners” is based on the current patent assignee’s ultimate owner but simplified to show the related, and more well-known, sports brand instead of, for example, the holding company.The global sports technology market is expected to more than quadruple in just a few years – growing from around USD 30 billion today to nearly USD 140 billion by the early 2030s.
Geographically, patenting activity is highly concentrated. Asia accounts for the largest patenting share, followed by North America and Europe, signaling both strong domestic technology ecosystems and active multinational participation in Asian sports markets. Over the past decade, China and India have emerged as the fastest-growing regions. At the same time, rapid growth in markets such as India and China from 2016 to 2020, and in South Africa and India from 2021 to 2025, demonstrates that innovation hubs in sport are becoming more distributed, diversifying beyond traditional centers.
A similar dual structure is visible at the patent owner level. The landscape includes established global brands and specialized sporting goods manufacturers. It is particularly notable that sports innovation is significantly driven by specialized golf brands, standing out alongside multi-sport giants such as Nike and Adidas. For the past decade, leaders like Misto Holdings (whose key brands include Titleist and FootJoy), Sumitomo Rubber (Srixon), Nike and Karsten Manufacturing (PING) have established large patent portfolios. In terms of recent growth, TaylorMade Golf and Adidas lead the pack with portfolio growth of 38% and 26% respectively, signaling a powerful surge in innovation from 2016 to 2025.
From 2016 to 2025, patenting trends in sports technology show that China maintained the highest volume of patents despite a decline from its 2018 peak, while the United States experienced significant growth toward the end of the period. Analysis of the top sports by inventive location reveals that golf is the leading category for patents in Japan (42%), the Republic of Korea (35%) and the United States (18%), whereas swimming ranks as the top category in France (19%) and India (11%) and also appears in the top three for the majority of other listed regions. Other specialized regional leaders include racket sports in China (14%), football in Germany (9%), gym and fitness in the Russian Federation (13%), and hockey in Canada (18%).
Taken together, sports-related patenting activity illustrates that innovation is fundamental to the evolution of sport. The scale, complexity and changing geography of the patent landscape shows that new performance margins increasingly depend on sustained research and development (R&D), specialized materials, data-rich training systems and increasingly global participation in the sports technology economy.
Note: All counts represent the number of inventions, measured in terms of the number of published patent families. One-to-many AI-based tagging was used to classify patents within specific sports. “Inventive location” is based on original patent applicant address.Sports-related trademarks
Trademarks play a central role in sport. They protect the names, logos, symbols and identities that fans recognize instantly – from clubs and competitions to apparel, equipment and entertainment. However, interpreting trademark data in the sports context requires care. Unlike patents, where innovation activity can often be compared quantitatively, trademark systems operate differently, and those differences shape how the data should be understood.
How trademarks operate
First, size does not equal importance in trademarks. Some of the most valuable sports brands in the world – such as major football clubs, international sporting federations or global sporting events – may rely on a relatively small number of trademark registrations. A single trademark can carry enormous commercial and cultural value. Conversely, holding a large portfolio of trademarks does not necessarily indicate greater influence or success in sport. Trademark counts therefore should not be read as rankings, but rather as indicators of branding and market protection strategies.
Second, trademarks can last indefinitely. Unlike patents and designs, which have a maximum term of protection and expire after a fixed period, trademarks can be renewed perpetually as long as they are in use. This has important implications for trademark analysis: a newly filed trademark does not necessarily reflect new innovation or market entry, while some of the oldest trademarks may also be the most valuable and strategically important. For this reason, the following trademark analysis applies no time-based limitations and, unlike the patent and design sections of this report, considers all registered trademarks regardless of filing date.
Third, sports trademarks are not only filed by sports companies. Many non-sports brands register trademarks for sports-related goods and services as part of broader brand protection strategies. Entertainment companies, media groups and consumer brands may all file sports-related trademarks even if sport is not their core business. This means trademark data capture the commercial reach of sport across multiple industries, not just within the sports sector itself.
Fourth, identifying sports trademarks is inherently imperfect. Trademark searches rely heavily on “goods and services” descriptions and classification systems such as the Nice Classification, which were not designed specifically for sports analytics. As a result, searches may include trademarks that only loosely relate to sport (false positives), while missing others that are clearly sports-related but are described using broader terminology (false negatives). For this reason, the sports trademark dataset should be understood as a best-effort approximation rather than an exhaustive list.
Finally, categorizing trademarks by individual sports is particularly challenging. Trademark “goods and services” descriptions often list a wide range of activities to maximize legal protection, even if the brand is not actively operating in all of them. As a result, sport-by-sport breakdowns provide directional insight rather than precise segmentation.
The role of trademark analysis
Despite these limitations, trademark analysis remains highly valuable. Trademarks reveal how sport is branded, commercialized and monetized, how fan engagement is built beyond the sports arena, and how sports identities extend into media, merchandise and global markets. When interpreted carefully, and alongside wider IP data from patents and designs, trademark information offers many interesting insights on how sport functions as both competition and commerce.
Growth patterns and market dynamics
Of the 1.7 million sports-related registered trademarks currently active worldwide, 1.25 million were registered in the past decade (2016 to 2025), thereby offering the most reliable picture of trademark activity. Trademarks are subject to 10-year renewal cycles, and many marks registered more than a decade ago were not renewed at the end of their first renewal period. As a result, counts for earlier years under-represent historical trademarking activity and should not be interpreted as a decline in brand creation at the time.
From 2016 onwards, the number of active sports-related trademarks increased sharply, highlighting a sustained intensification of branding activity across the sports ecosystem. This growth aligns with the expansion of digital sports platforms, direct-to-consumer business models, fitness technologies and data-driven fan engagement services, all of which depend heavily on brand recognition and differentiation rather than purely technical protection. This trend underscores the role of trademarks as a leading indicator of commercialization and market formation in sports technologies. While patents capture upstream technical invention, trademarks reveal how innovations are packaged, positioned and scaled in the marketplace, making them particularly well suited to analyzing the evolving business and consumer dimensions of sport.
Trademark registrations peaked around 2021, potentially reflecting accelerated digital adoption and brand expansion during the COVID-19 period, when sports organizations, technology providers and new market entrants sought to secure brand assets amid rapidly changing consumption patterns. Although inconclusive, the slight decline and stabilization observed after 2021 could suggest a normalization following this exceptional surge, rather than a contraction in sports innovation.
Sport-by-sport trademark counts show some clear patterns. Golf and swimming-related trademarks stand out, reflecting the strong role of lifestyle branding, apparel, equipment and training services in sports with high participation rates and year-round consumer markets. American football and rugby, football (soccer) and racket sports also show substantial trademark activity, consistent with their global reach and deep commercial ecosystems which span products, events, media and digital services.
Importantly, while trademarks are less tightly coupled to a specific sport than are patents or designs, this perspective remains valuable in comparative analysis. Contrasting trademark distributions with patent and design data helps distinguish between where technological innovation is occurring and where brands are positioning themselves commercially, offering a more complete picture of how sports technologies move from invention to market and consumer engagement.
For example, among the sports analyzed, American football and rugby rank third in trademarks but eleventh in both patents and designs. Football (soccer) and baseball also exhibit higher rankings in trademarks compared to patents and designs. In contrast, gym and fitness has a lower ranking (eighth) in trademarks compared with its ranking in the data for patent (sixth) and design (first). This divergence correlates with structural differences in how value is generated across sports. League-centric sports such as American football, rugby, football (soccer) and baseball operate within highly brand-intensive ecosystems, where team, league and event identities drive extensive trademark activity. By contrast, gym and fitness is a more technology-driven domain characterized by sustained equipment, wearable and performance-related innovation, resulting in comparatively higher patent and design activity relative to trademarks.
Geographic distribution and market hubs
The geographic distribution of owners of sports-related trademarks highlights the global commercial footprint of sport, with trademark activity concentrated in large consumer markets and established branding hubs. As with other aspects of trademark analysis in this report, these patterns differ from those observed in patent data. Trademark ownership is typically less concentrated, with a wider range of actors holding medium-sized portfolios rather than a small number of highly specialized leaders. China and the United States emerge as the leading locations for trademark owners, reflecting the scale of their domestic markets, the commercial intensity of their sports industries and the strong role of trademarks in protecting brands across apparel, media, digital platforms and retail services. The United Kingdom also features prominently, which is consistent with its role as one of the leading centers globally for sports governance, media rights and brand-led sports businesses. Beyond the leading economies, a broad group of countries – including Australia, France, Germany, India and Italy – show substantial levels of trademark ownership, pointing to the importance of national and regional sports markets alongside global brands.
Leading trademark owners: a cross-industry view
The leading owners of sports-related trademarks illustrate the cross-industry commercial pull of sport, rather than a ranking of sports companies alone. Sports trademarks are not filed exclusively by sports organizations or equipment manufacturers. Many entertainment companies, media groups, automotive firms and consumer brands register trademarks covering sports-related goods and services as part of broader brand protection and licensing strategies, even where sport is not their core business. As a result, trademark data capture how sport functions as a commercial and cultural platform that extends well beyond the boundaries of the sports sector itself.
This helps explain the prominence of applicants such as entertainment and media groups (such as Disney or Viacom), professional sports leagues and event organizers (e.g., National Basketball Association (NBA) or World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)), alongside global consumer brands (such as Apple or Amazon) and automotive companies (for example, Hyundai). These actors are active in areas such as broadcasting, merchandising, sponsorship, events, digital fan engagement and branded experiences, all of which rely heavily on trademark protection. In contrast to patent data, which often highlight a smaller number of highly specialized technology leaders with very large portfolios, trademark ownership is more broadly distributed, with a larger number of applicants holding medium-sized portfolios rather than a few dominant filers.
Viewed alongside patent and design data, this pattern reinforces the complementary role of trademarks in sports innovation analysis. While patents tend to reveal where technical development is concentrated, trademarks show where commercial positioning, brand extension and market-facing activity are taking place, offering insight into how sports-related technologies and experiences are scaled, marketed and monetized across industries.
The distribution of sports-related trademarks across the Nice Classification for trademarks highlights the commercial and experiential core of the sports ecosystem. Registrations are dominated by Class 25 (clothing and apparel) and Class 41 (education and entertainment), each accounting for close to 40% of all registered sports trademarks, underscoring the central role of merchandise, lifestyle branding, training and organized sporting activities in sports markets. Strong representation in Class 9 (software and electronic technologies) and Class 35 (advertising and retail services) reflects the growing importance of digital platforms, data-driven services and direct-to-consumer business models, while Class 28 (games, toys and sporting goods) continues to ground the sector in its traditional product base. It is important to note that a single trademark may be registered across multiple Nice classes, which explains why the combined shares exceed 100%. This multi-class filing behavior reflects both the increasingly cross-sector nature of sports innovation and strategic brand management choices.
Sports-related designs
Over 70,300 sports-related designs have been filed between 2016 and 2025, reflecting an annual growth rate of 8.3%. Asia is the dominant region for design innovation, holding a 76% share of global volume, followed by Europe at 13% and North America at 8%. Within this design landscape, gym and fitness equipment represents the largest category at 21%, while golf (18%) and swimming (12%) also maintain significant shares. Top design owners are distributed globally, led by companies such as Sumitomo Rubber (whose key golf brand is Srixon), the French sporting retail giant Decathlon, and several US-based golf manufacturers including Topgolf Callaway Brands Corporation (Callaway) and Karsten Manufacturing (PING). This distribution highlights a diverse competitive field where both specialized equipment makers and mass-market retailers drive technical and aesthetic progress.
Building on this competitive design landscape, Adidas provides a clear example of strategic design protection through the Trionda football, filed in October 2024 under the Hague System as international design DM/241148. The Adidas Trionda is the official match ball of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States, that was introduced in October 2025. The ball is constructed from just four thermally bonded polyurethane panels, the lowest number used in a World Cup ball. It features textured macro- and micro-patterns intended to improve flight stability, swerve and grip in wet conditions. It also integrates “connected ball technology,” incorporating an inertial measurement unit that provides highly accurate movement data for video-assisted refereeing. The visual identity of this ball draws on the iconography of the three host nations, using red, green and blue elements alongside symbols such as a maple leaf, eagle and star, while the name combines “tri” (three) and “onda” (wave in Spanish). From a design analytics perspective, this case illustrates how leading sports manufacturers increasingly embed performance technology and symbolic event branding into protected product aesthetics, aligning design filings with major global tournaments to strengthen both market visibility and IP positioning.
