With the U.S. seeking to host the World Cup in either 2018 or 2022, the battle to protect marketing rights and to gain rights to visual branding being seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide will only intensify.

If you are going to invest in sponsorship rights, you need to make sure they are optimally activated. In order to do that, you need to measure your sponsorship ROI. There is clear evidence of upside potential.

At the risk of further propagating the sound byte society, I'd maintain that social media, in concert with formal research, is a conversation that sports marketers should be paying attention to.

There's way too much gloom and doom around, not to mention a little bit of schadenfreude from those in other sports. Let's look at some of the claims and try to put an objective lens on them.