An audience. Three groups make their living from it — and the sports industry has a name for what each one is doing.
Marketing of sport means selling the sport itself — the tickets, the memberships, the TV subscriptions, the shirt on the pitch.
Marketing through sport means using someone else's sport to sell your own product — an airline, a bank, a beer.
They own neither the sport nor a product to sell through one. They earn from the two boxes above — a fee for the work, or advertising against an audience they've built around the sport.
Nike and adidas. They sell trainers and kit to fans, which is marketing of sport. They also pay athletes and teams to wear the stuff, which is marketing through sport. Same company, both jobs.
Sky, DAZN and ESPN. They pay rights holders for the rights, then sell subscriptions and ad slots off the back of that audience. They buy like a sponsor and sell like a rights holder.
Neither buys rights. They get access, build an audience around a sport they don't own, then work with both sides at once — helping rights holders reach fans, and helping brands reach those same fans. Marketing of and through, in the same week.
How that differs from the first box: a rights holder owns the sport, and the audience follows from owning it. Media and creators own only the audience. Take the sport away and a club still has a stadium; a publisher has nothing left to write about.
Media has worked this way for a century. Creators are the new part — same position, no rulebook yet.