Vehicle manufacturers dominate the automotive sector’s sports sponsorships, as they have the biggest marketing budgets and use sponsorships to build broad brand awareness and support new model launches across large regions. Across the Americas region, automotive brands’ sports sponsorship spending has risen by 18.6% since 2020. Toyota is the largest spending and most active automotive brand across the region in 2025, followed by Ford, according to GlobalData, a leading intelligence and productivity platform.

GlobalData’s latest report, “Sponsorship Sector Report: Automotive – Americas 2026”, reveals that Chevrolet matches the spend of Toyota and Ford, but with fewer deals, while other brands tend to skew either toward higher-value, lower-volume programs or higher-volume, lower-spend activity. Chevrolet’s sports sponsorship strategy has become more selective, with deal volume decreasing by 27.6% since 2020, while annual spend has remained relatively flat.

Olivia Snooks, Sport Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “Since 2020, despite Toyota’s deal volume rising by just 13%, its annual spend is up 104.2%. The increase is driven by a shift toward fewer, premium, high-visibility partnerships—the NFL, the Nascar Truck Series, Joe Gibbs Racing, and the TGR Haas F1 Team—which require larger investments but deliver outsized reach and brand impact.”

North America leads in both deal volume and spend, with a much higher average deal value, driven by access to premium properties, larger broadcast audiences, and stronger sponsorship valuation models—ideal for automakers’ mass-reach brand building and EV messaging. South & Central America is characterized by more “a small number of small deals” than by “a few big bets”. A lower average deal value compared to North America properties indicates that automotive brands are prioritizing cost-efficient, local-market sponsorships that are easier to activate with dealers and retail promotions.

Snooks continues: “The value gap between North America and South & Central America indicates that North America’s inventory carries a premium. North America’s average deal value, which is over three times higher, reflects higher media-rights pricing, stronger corporate hospitality demand, and more integrated media/content/digital/data packages—attributes automotive marketers prefer for national campaigns and measurable reach.”

In 2025, automotive brands focused their spending on motor racing. This is because it best showcases engineering, performance, and electrification narratives that translate directly to vehicle marketing in the Americas. On the other hand, soccer leads partnership activity because car brands use it for scale across the Americas and to target younger, diverse buyer segments through club and league assets.

Snooks concludes: “Soccer is the fastest-growing growth engine for automotive sponsorship, with deal volume increasing by 107.1% since 2020, alongside a significant increase in annual deal value by 74.2%. The pattern suggests that automakers are using soccer to build broader, activation-heavy sponsorship portfolios across leagues and teams (MLS/Liga MX/CONMEBOL and growing women’s properties), driven by soccer’s younger and more multicultural fanbase and its suitability for always-on digital content and localized dealership activation.”