The Sports Asset Activation Framework
Score, plot, activate. A way for a city to decide which of its sports assets to move on this year, which to prepare for, and which to leave alone on purpose.
Most destinations do not have a sports tourism problem. They have a sequencing problem.
A city with a serious tourism plan usually already knows what it has. The stadium, the marathon, the altitude, the league, the diaspora, the calendar of continental fixtures. What it rarely has is a defensible answer to a harder question: of everything on this list, which two things should we move on in the next ninety days, and which are we deliberately not touching until 2029?
Without that answer, attention distributes evenly across a portfolio — which in practice means the most visible asset absorbs the most resource, regardless of whether it is the one with the most value left on the table. This framework exists to force that distinction, and to make it defensible to someone who was not in the room.
Score every asset on four things
Take the assets straight out of the plan you already have. Score each one on four axes. The scoring is deliberately coarse — three or four bands, no decimals. Precision here is false comfort, and it slows the exercise down.
| Axis | Question | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Moat | Why here and nowhere else? | None / Weak / Strong |
| Ceiling | How big is the visitor economy at full realisation? | Niche / Small / Mid / Large |
| Gap | Potential value minus value realised today? | Small / Medium / Large |
| Clock | How long until it can be activated? | 0–12mo / 1–3yr / 3yr+ |
Reach — who travels for the asset, and how far — is worth writing down beside each score, but do not score it. It is evidence for the ceiling rather than a fourth judgement, and turning it into a band invites an argument about geography when the question is size.
Why four axes when you only plot two?
Gap and Clock tell you what to do. Moat and Ceiling tell you what to do first. When several assets land in the same quadrant — and they will — you sequence them by moat, then by ceiling. A strong moat means nobody can copy the position out from under you; a large ceiling means the upside is worth the effort. Two assets can be equally ready and equally underpriced, and still deserve very different amounts of attention.
Plot gap against clock
Gap on the vertical axis, clock on the horizontal. Four quadrants, and — this is the part that matters — four genuinely different jobs. An asset's quadrant does not tell you how important it is. It tells you what kind of work it needs this year.
Wide and narrow split at the midpoint of the gap scale, which sits below the Large band — an asset can score Medium on the axis and still belong in the upper half.
Activate
This is the 90-day list. Underpriced and ready now. The work is commercial, not strategic — pick the metric, name the owner, start collecting.
Build toward
The job today is not revenue, it is pre-positioning. Decide now what data, what technical specification, and what event calendar the asset will need — those get roughly ten times cheaper to embed before construction finishes than after.
Maintain
Already working. Protect it, do not over-invest attention in it. The temptation is to keep optimising the asset you already understand.
Park
Not abandoned — scheduled. Naming the binding constraint is the output here. If the constraint is roads rather than strategy, say so and set a date to revisit.
The Park quadrant does more work than it looks like it does. Every portfolio contains an asset that matters politically but cannot move this year — a domestic product blocked by road quality, a regional circuit blocked by air links. Parking it explicitly, with the constraint named and a review date attached, is what lets a team honour the ambition without pretending it is actionable. The alternative is that it quietly consumes attention every quarter and produces nothing.
Working tool Score and plot your own assets The four axes plus sellability, plotted live into this matrix. Free, runs in your browser, exports a chart.One metric, one owner, one collection method
This is the step that makes the rest real, and it is the step most often skipped. Every asset gets exactly one metric, and a way of collecting it that exists today. Not a dashboard. Not a measurement framework to be procured next year. One number, one named person responsible for it, one method that can run this quarter.
If you cannot name the collection method, the asset is not ready to activate — regardless of where it plotted.
That test is unforgiving on purpose. It is also more often passed than people expect. The instinct in a low-data environment is to assume nothing is measurable and to design a survey instrument from scratch. In practice the number usually already exists inside somebody's business — it has simply never been asked for. A camp operator knows their bed-nights. A club knows its gate. A federation knows its registered participants. A monthly one-line return from four operators is a functioning measurement system, and it can be running within a quarter.
The gap in most emerging sports markets is not the absence of digital infrastructure. It is the absence of instrumentation — nobody has been asked to collect, in a structured form, what they already know.
Apply the three multipliers
Technology, health and MICE adjacency are not separate assets and should never be scored as such. They are layers applied to an existing asset to raise its ceiling. The same asset, higher potential value — which moves its gap score, and can move it into a different quadrant.
Technology
Instrumentation layered onto an existing asset — testing, wearables, recovery and performance data. Raises what a visitor is willing to pay without changing the underlying asset.
Health
Facilities built for visitors have off-peak capacity that serves residents and local clubs. Same asset, second constituency — and a domestic political story rather than only a foreign-currency one.
MICE adjacency
Conferences, federations, and governing-body meetings attached to sporting events. High spend per head, and it uses infrastructure a destination has usually already built.
Altitude running
Plots into Activate.
A strong moat and a niche ceiling is not a contradiction. The global pull is real — athletes fly in from three continents — but the number of people who will ever do this is a few thousand a year, and today they are long-stay and low-spend. That is the ceiling. It is also why the multipliers matter more here than volume does.
The metric: international camp bed-nights per quarter. The collection method: three or four camp operators already exist and already know this number. A monthly one-line return, not a survey instrument. No new system, no procurement, no budget line.
The multipliers change what the product is. Lactate testing, wearables, sleep and recovery data move the offer from run where the greats ran to train with instrumentation most amateurs cannot access at home. That is the difference between a low-spend long-stay traveller and a high-spend one, and it is a change in pricing power rather than a change in volume.
The health layer compounds it. A testing and recovery facility built for visiting athletes has capacity off-peak that serves residents and local clubs. Same asset, second constituency — and it converts a foreign-currency argument into a domestic one, which is usually what a public body actually needs in order to fund it.
Now score the stadium
Run the same four axes on a stadium under construction and it lands somewhere else entirely: wide gap, long clock — Build toward. Same portfolio, same scoring, completely different job this year. The stadium's near-term work is not revenue. It is deciding, now, what data capture, what technical specification and what event calendar the building needs — because embedding those before completion costs a fraction of retrofitting them afterwards.
That contrast is the lesson. The framework does not rank assets. It assigns them different work.
Running it with a team
- 15 minutes — score and plot. Teams take four or five assets straight out of their own plan. Not hypotheticals. The exercise only works on real assets the team already argues about.
- 10 minutes — one activation card. Pick a single asset from the Activate quadrant and fill in: the one metric, who owns it, how it gets collected this quarter, one multiplier to test, and what "working" looks like in 90 days.
- 5 minutes — report out. One card per team, read aloud. The cards are the artefact people leave with; the scorecard is the tool they re-run later.
An honest note on football
In most emerging markets the domestic club game today is a maintain-or-build asset with a strong domestic economy story and a weak international tourism one. The stadium plus continental fixtures is a separate asset, and it sits in Build toward — with rising continental competitiveness as the case for why its ceiling is going up.
International football tourism is a hard market to enter. The realistic near-term prize is regional and diaspora travel plus event hosting rights. That conclusion is less exciting than the alternative, and it is the one the scoring keeps producing.
Where this comes from
The framework is assembled from what has worked elsewhere, and from what those cases cost. Three worth studying:
- Iten, Kenya. The clearest case of an altitude-running asset converted into a durable visitor economy — camps, accommodation, coaching, and a global reputation built over decades. Worth studying for the shape of the demand and for how little of the value was captured formally in the early years.
- Rwanda. A destination-marketing strategy executed through sport sponsorship at scale. Instructive on both sides: it demonstrably moved brand awareness, and it drew sustained public argument about cost per visitor. Any city considering the approach should be able to answer that second question before it spends.
- Morocco. Sustained investment in hosting capability and training infrastructure, paying off across multiple sports over a long horizon. The relevant lesson is about the length of the clock, not the size of the budget.
Each of these is a starting point for your own reading rather than a settled conclusion.