Impact and development of sport sponsorship: a three-decade bibliometric analysis (1993–2024)

Purpose This study aims to provide a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of sports sponsorship research over the last 3 decades (1993–2024). By mapping the intellectual landscape of this field, the study seeks to identify key trends, prominent themes and the most influential authors and journals. Furthermore, the research addresses the ongoing challenge of evaluating the effectiveness of sponsorship investments, particularly in the digital age. The goal is to highlight emerging research areas. Design/methodology/approach This study employs a bibliometric analysis using the SPAR-4-SLR protocol to systematically review the literature on sports sponsorship from 1993 to 2024. Data were sourced from the Web of Science (WoS) database, filtering results for articles written in English and excluding non-academic publications. A combination of bibliometric techniques – co-citation, co-word and co-authorship network analysis – was applied to examine intellectual structures and trends in the field. The Bibliometrix software was used for data analysis, providing a comprehensive evaluation of research productivity, collaboration patterns and emerging themes. Findings The bibliometric analysis reveals a significant increase in global sports sponsorship research, with a 12.69% annual growth rate from 1993 to 2024. Key themes such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), consumer behaviour and government regulation emerged as central topics. The study also highlights growing research interest in digital sponsorships, particularly within the eSports industry. Additionally, co-authorship analysis demonstrates increasing international collaboration, with 30.2% of publications involving multiple countries. The findings provide a clearer understanding of the intellectual landscape of sports sponsorship and suggest emerging research opportunities, particularly in digital marketing and advanced data analytics. Research limitations/implications The analysis relies solely on the WoS database, which may have excluded relevant publications indexed in other databases such as Scopus or Google Scholar. Although WoS provides high-quality data, future research should integrate multiple databases to achieve a more comprehensive coverage of the field. Additionally, this study focuses primarily on articles published in English, potentially overlooking significant contributions from non-English sources. Originality/value This study provides a unique contribution by conducting the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of sports sponsorship research over a 30-year period (1993–2024). By applying the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, it identifies emerging research areas such as the integration of big data and the role of psychophysiological methods in measuring sponsorship effectiveness. The research also highlights the increasing importance of digital sponsorship in industries like eSports. This work offers new insights into global collaboration patterns and reveals underexplored topics like the balance between global and local sponsorship strategies, thus providing valuable directions for future research and practical applications.