Governments pour billions into tourism campaigns every year, from glossy ads to trade fairs and international roadshows. Almost none of it delivers the kind of global visibility that a single football club can generate for free.
In today’s attention economy, a world-class football club isn’t just a sporting institution. It’s one of the most powerful tourism marketing platforms a city can have, yet most policymakers still aren’t treating it that way.
The numbers don’t lie. VisitBritain found that 1.5 million international visitors attended a football match while touring the UK in 2019, contributing £1.4 billion to the visitor economy, up 84% since 2011. Football tourists spent an average of £909 per trip, 31% more than the typical international visitor, and stayed longer too.
Manchester is the proof of concept. Every United or City match broadcast beams the city’s image to every continent, with zero additional marketing spend. Old Trafford alone attracted roughly 226,000 international visitors in 2019, generating an estimated £225 million in tourism revenue. Few conventional advertising campaigns can offer that kind of exposure.
Now scale that logic to Trabzon. Imagine a global icon like Mohamed Salah in a Trabzonspor shirt. With over 100 million followers across social platforms, Salah isn’t just a player; he’s a brand with its own gravitational pull. His arrival alone could put Trabzon on the radar for millions of fans across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and Asia. Airlines could fill more seats. Hotels could fill more rooms. Restaurants could welcome more customers. And the city’s international profile could grow in ways that would be difficult for a tourism board to replicate on its own.
For a destination already sitting on a stunning Black Sea coastline, with a rich history and a cuisine worth travelling for, football could be the missing catalyst, the thing that turns Trabzon from a seasonal regional draw into a year-round international destination.
The takeaway for policymakers is blunt. Stop budgeting football as a sporting line item. Start treating it as an investment in destination branding, economic development and international competitiveness. Cities are already competing hard for global attention. The ones that win will be the ones who grasp a simple truth: sometimes the most effective tourism campaign runs for 90 minutes, on a pitch.
