As marketers center sports, athlete injuries can be a bigger risk—here’s how they navigate them

When Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles tendon during Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinals last May, it wasn’t just Celtics fans who were crushed.

“In that moment, it feels like your world is ending,” Tory Pachis, EVP and CMO of Amica Insurance, a jersey-patch sponsor of the Celtics, said. “You’re like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’”

When athletes are injured, diehard fans count down the days to their favorite player’s return, and marketers who’ve inked deals with athletes are also quite literally invested in their return. Marketers continue to allocate more ad dollars to sports sponsorships and athlete deals, recognizing sports as one of the few remaining water-cooler opportunities, making it all the more likely they’re keeping an eye on the injured list, too.

So what happens when an athlete is away from the action in the midst of a sponsorship deal?

In the evolving sports sponsorship landscape, where some fans are more loyal to athletes over teams, the ways brands react in those crucial moments could have an impact not only on their own relationship with the player, but also on their bottom line, making it a crucial moment for brand marketers to get right.

“Ending the partnership or doing anything different never crossed our mind,” Pachis told us. “The next day, it was, ‘How do we leverage or find an opportunity in this to tell the Amica story aligned with his comeback story?’”

Comeback kid

Ahead of Tatum’s return to the court in early March, Amica rolled out a new campaign, “Back to Zero,” with a countdown to Tatum’s return, playing on his jersey number, 0, and the swelling anticipation of his return. In a 60-second spot that aired during the Lakers-Celtics game on February 22, Tatum showed what’s truly involved in recovery for an athlete.

“The idea of a comeback is something you don’t necessarily want to feel like you’re glossing over,” said Patrick Horton, creative director at Mother, which worked with Amica on the spot. “This is a really big point in his career, and so it would have felt odd to us if we just glossed over it and pretend it didn’t happen, and it felt better going right at it and finding a very personal and authentic way to tell that story.”

To do that, Mother worked with Tatum to highlight the support system he had in place to help him through the recovery, with the goal of telling the story of his rehab realistically.

For marketers, embracing athletes at various stages of their journeys can tap into the emotional highs and lows of the sport and go beyond pure celebrity. “In the past and historically, especially in the work that we do, brands are accustomed to buying an athlete’s fame alone,” Evan Giordano, group strategy director at Mother, said. “In a lot of ways, smart brands are buying their humanity.”

Tatum certainly has a significant platform—including the massive Celtics fandom, 7.3 million Instagram followers of his own, and a leading role in the first season of Netflix’s Starting 5 NBA docuseries—but Amica wasn’t his only sponsor that continued to actively work with Tatum even while he wasn’t playing. Gatorade, too, has created content tied to its work with Tatum through his recovery.

Pivot, pivot!

Scrubs and medical apparel brand Figs also recently pivoted a campaign when one of its sponsored athletes went down with an injury. A week before the Milan Cortina Olympics, skiing legend Lindsey Vonn, who had come out of retirement after a partial knee replacement to compete this year, tore her ACL. She went on to race anyway, but a devastating crash during her first Olympic competition shattered her leg and any plans of a comeback narrative that ended on the podium.

Instead of pausing a campaign starring Vonn, Figs recut its ad creative to shift the spotlight even more on Vonn’s medical team in an effort to “reinforce the narrative” it was already communicating about the role of medical professionals in sports, while still respecting Vonn, acknowledging her contributions to the sport, and maintaining its relationship with her, CMO Bené Eaton previously told Marketing Brew.

“It felt very natural, a way to honor her, but at the same time, [we could] have this real, authentic voice of the healthcare team in that moment,” Eaton said.

Both the Amica and Figs campaigns include training footage, but neither focus entirely on outcomes like winning, an approach that could give some sports marketers more leeway regardless of an athlete’s injury status. In recent years, some marketers have also started building player campaigns around mental health instead of focusing on physical fitness alone.

Still, “most athlete endorsement deals are built around the highlight reel,” Douglas Brundage, founder and CEO of brand studio Kingsland, wrote in an email. “This is obviously problematic if the person gets injured…This is where brand planning gets genuinely difficult with athletes. When your spokesperson gets injured, most brands go quiet.”

Brundage described Amica’s effort as “the smarter play,” and one that makes particular sense for an insurance company when “insurance is fundamentally about what happens when things go wrong.” It may take some additional creativity for brands in other categories to do the same.

Some brands are happy to work with injured athletes ahead of their return to the playing field. Dick’s Sporting Goods and Nike, including its Jordan and Converse brands, recently worked with Tatum for a co-branded campaign running throughout March Madness. Brand execs started discussions and filming with Tatum before his official comeback, and they knew the release of the ad might coincide with his return, Dick’s VP of Brand Building Melissa Christian said.

The company has worked with athletes during rehab in the past, she said, and relies on the players and their teams to decide exactly what kinds of action content they may be comfortable with. In the case of Tatum, his role in the ad would have been in an off-court scenario regardless of his injury, and the Dick’s team felt his presence would be additive either way, Christian told us.

“Of course, we wanted Jayson’s health and well-being to be first and foremost what dictated timing, but we knew that his place in this story made sense, whether he was on the court or not,” she said.

While it can be a challenge for marketers to navigate the narratives surrounding athlete injuries, those difficult moments may also present opportunities for execs to rethink what athlete partnerships look like altogether. If a brand is only invested in an athlete when they’re on top, it could miss out on an opportunity to build stories of triumph and tribulation that resonate with fans beyond the game.

“Fans can smell fake endorsements,” Giordano said. “Tying into a real aspect of that athlete’s life will always make the work ring true.”