Andy Devaney
If you thought Matt Richards was dangerous with a pair of goggles and a relay takeover, wait until you see what he’s doing with a cap table. The double Olympic gold medallist has dived head-first into the world of sports tech, spearheading the launch of Sponza – a new platform that aims to drag athlete sponsorship out of the dark ages and into something that looks suspiciously like the 21st century.
This time, instead of chasing split times, Richards is chasing a different kind of performance metric: helping brands actually find, work with and scale campaigns around athletes without the usual mess of guesswork, gatekeepers and “have you got five minutes for a quick call?” emails.
From lane four to founder
Richards didn’t exactly creep onto the scene. He became one of the youngest Olympic gold medallists in British history at Tokyo 2020, then followed it up with a second Olympic title and a haul of world-level medals that would make most swimmers consider early retirement and a sun lounger.
But while his career in the pool looked smooth as silk, the world of sponsorship behind it felt more like swimming through concrete. “Despite competing at the highest level, accessing brand opportunities wasn’t straightforward,” said Richards, Founder of Sponza.
“The process was often manual, unclear and limited to a small group of athletes. At the same time, brands want authentic partnerships without inflated costs or unnecessary friction. That disconnect is what led me to build Sponza.”
So, rather than accept the old playbook – where a lucky few hoover up most of the deals while everyone else refreshes their inbox – Matt Richards decided to rebuild the system from the ground up.
Fixing a broken sponsorship game
Athlete marketing has quietly become one of the most powerful performance channels in sport. Every brand wants authenticity, credibility and reach, and athletes tick all three boxes before breakfast. The problem? Execution is still stuck in the era of fax machines and file-a-fax haircuts.
Deals get stitched together across agencies, internal teams, spreadsheets and email threads that stretch longer than a 10k open-water race. Campaigns slow down. Great, “non-obvious” athletes never get seen. And brands end up paying for inefficiencies rather than outcomes.
Sponza’s solution is to serve as the operational backbone for the entire ecosystem.
Built as modern infrastructure for athlete marketing, Sponza gives brands direct access to a broad and relevant athlete ecosystem, streamlining everything from talent discovery and campaign creation to activation management – without the bloated overheads of traditional approaches.
And the early interest has looked more like a championship final than a quiet warm-up lane.
The market’s response to that solution has been immediate. During a brief pre-launch window, Sponza has already seen more than 5,000 athletes and brands from over 50 different sports join the waitlist to be part of the platform’s ecosystem.
Not bad for something that started as Matt Richards grumbling about how unnecessarily hard it was to get a fair crack at sponsorship.
“At its core, Sponza is infrastructure”
Athletes tend to talk about strokes, splits and “trusting the process.” Founders talk about infrastructure, scalability and operational efficiency. Richards now does both.
“At its core, Sponza is infrastructure,” Richards added. “We’ve built a system that allows brands to scale athlete marketing programmes without increasing headcount, agency fees or operational complexity. It’s about making athlete partnerships work with the efficiency and accountability of any modern marketing channel.”
In plain terms, Sponza is trying to do for athlete marketing what modern ad-tech platforms did for digital media: make it faster, more accountable and far less reliant on who happens to know whom.
Beyond follower counts: unlocking the wider athlete ecosystem
One of the more interesting parts of Sponza’s model – and one that will appeal to brands without Super Bowl budgets – is its refusal to worship at the altar of follower counts alone.
Rather than chasing just the top-tier, mega-famous names, Sponza helps brands unlock value across a much wider athlete ecosystem. The platform surfaces relevant talent based on performance, audience alignment and campaign objectives, allowing brands to activate cost-effective campaigns at scale.
That means a nutrition brand could find the perfect mix of elite pros, up-and-coming talents and niche-sport specialists in one place, without needing an army of interns trawling Instagram at midnight.
For athletes lower down the food chain than Matt Richards, it’s a chance to be discovered for what they actually bring to the table – not just how shiny their medal cabinet is.
Built to plug into how brands already work
Crucially, Sponza isn’t trying to bulldoze existing relationships with agencies or in-house teams. The platform has been designed to complement what’s already there – not replace it with a black box and a shrug.
It provides tools and visibility to execute athlete marketing with greater speed, consistency and confidence, while keeping brands firmly in control of how campaigns are run and measured. For time-poor marketing teams, that means less herding of cats and more focus on creative, strategy and results.
A big vision for a global athlete economy
Strip away the tech jargon and Sponza’s mission is simple enough: modernise athlete marketing by giving brands a faster, fairer and more scalable way to work with athletes.
The long-term ambition is anything but modest. Sponza wants to become the underlying infrastructure brands use to power athlete partnerships globally – the rails on which this growing part of the sports economy runs.
If it works, Richards might end up being remembered for more than just those Olympic relay heroics. He could be the swimmer who helped rewrite the sponsorship rulebook – turning a messy, opaque process into something that finally moves as quickly as the athletes at the heart of it.
