Key Takeaways
- Gallagher said 70 percent of insurance and employee benefits buying decisions are made by women, the figure behind its women’s sports investment.
- Project Rugby has introduced more than 140,000 people to the sport since 2017, per delivery club Leicester Tigers.
- Athletes from the Atlanta Falcons, Chicago Stars FC and now the Jacksonville Jaguars enter Gallagher’s corporate internship program.
- The Gallagher PREM final sold out its 82,000-seat venue on June 20, 2026, a third straight sellout.
- Girls’ programming with the New York Liberty targets age 14, when the Women’s Sports Foundation finds girls leave sport at twice the rate of boys.
Overview
Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. is an insurance brokerage, not a consumer brand. It has no product on a shelf and no impulse purchase to drive. That constraint shapes everything about how it approaches sports.
Shannon Gallagher, Global Head of Partnership Activation, Business Development and Sales, joined Youth Sports Business Report to walk through a portfolio that includes the Gallagher PREM in England, the Chicago Cubs, Atlanta Falcons and Milwaukee Bucks, alongside grassroots rugby in English schools and girls’ development work in Brooklyn.
She joined the firm roughly three years ago after building a career outside it in startups and data analytics, and describes her mandate as adding a commercial gear to the corporate partnership program. Her own path ran from AYSO soccer to high school soccer to college rugby.
“You can’t go to the store and pick up a box of insurance,” she said, explaining why the firm sells through advisory rather than product marketing.
Five things operators and brand-side executives should take from the conversation.
1. The Audience Math Points at Women’s Sports
Gallagher said 70 percent of decision makers on any insurance or employee benefits purchase are women.
That number is the stated logic behind a portfolio leaning into women’s rugby and girls’ development rather than mass-reach consumer properties. For a B2B buyer, youth and women’s sports become audience targeting rather than a corporate responsibility line item. The people on the sideline are the people signing benefits contracts.
She framed the participation pipeline as a business input too, pointing to the correlation between girls who stay in competitive sports and later professional success, and saying the firm needs to keep developing women in business if its own face is going to match the face of its clients.
2. Culture Is the Screen. The Business Case Comes After
Gallagher evaluates prospective partners against The Gallagher Way, the firm’s internal set of cultural tenets, before anyone looks at the insurance opportunity.
The questions she asks first: Are they humble and hardworking? Are they investing in the future? Are they investing in their communities?
Rugby cleared that screen on multiple fronts. A 15-player side needs a wide range of body types and skills to function, which maps to the firm’s position on diversity. The absence of stoppages maps to a Gallagher Way tenet about running toward problems.
“In the Gallagher way, we say we run to problems,” she said. “In rugby, there’s no stoppage of play. You begin, the ball is down, you have to get right back up, keep running to the next phase.”
The post-match culture, where opponents compete hard and then socialize together, matched what she called a warm, close company.
3. Growing the Sport Is the Sponsorship
Rather than buying visibility inside an existing audience, Gallagher went after the audience problem itself. She said rugby in England was losing its audience, and pointed to two programs built to address it.
Project Rugby is the participation program delivered by PREM Rugby with Gallagher UK and England Rugby, launched in 2017. Schools get six weeks of sessions that fold into PE lessons or run as an extracurricular, with no rugby pitch required. Leicester Tigers, one of the delivery clubs, reports the program has introduced more than 140,000 people to the sport since it began. Gallagher cited a similar cumulative figure of nearly 150,000, plus more than 180 schools and 12,000 students reached this year, and roughly 80 schools where the program found a pathway to continued club play.
The Gallagher Touchline Academy, launched in May 2025, handles the coaching shortage. It is a free program built with PREM Rugby clubs that trains teachers who have never played, running as a virtual kickoff, in-person training at a Gallagher PREM club, and a six-week lesson plan. The target is 2,000 teachers by 2028. The launch materials named the problem plainly: only 8 percent of children aged 5 to 16 played rugby in the 2023/24 school year.
4. The Partnership Doubles as a Second-Career Pipeline
Gallagher runs an established college internship program. Chairman and CEO J. Patrick Gallagher, Jr. began at the firm as an intern in 1972. Shannon Gallagher, who identified him in the interview as her father, said the firm extended that structure to the professional athletes on its partner rosters.
The insight came from looking at its own workforce. She said Gallagher already employed successful professionals who were former pro soccer, football and rugby players, which suggested the pattern was repeatable.
The program started as a pilot with a handful of Atlanta Falcons players and expanded to Chicago Stars FC of the NWSL. She said the Jacksonville Jaguars joined this year.
Athletes arrive facing a question she called a real concern for that population: what happens after playing, whether that comes at the end of a long career or after one injury. The program reframes skills they already have. Contract negotiation, self-marketing, personal brand building and public speaking all transfer, she said, and the leader-and-follower dynamic of a locker room is the same one running a business. Some athletes have come back for a second year.
The success metric is deliberately loose. “If we can help them bring Gallagher culture and that skill set into a local insurance agency or into an analytics company, that’s just as successful for us as well,” she said.
5. Girls’ Programming Is Built Around the Age 14 Drop-Off
My Own My Future, run with Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment and the New York Liberty, targets girls in and around Brooklyn at the age Gallagher identified as most vulnerable to leaving sport, roughly 14, along with girls who never had access at all.
That age marker is well documented. The Liberty’s community page cites Women’s Sports Foundation research finding that by 14, girls drop out of sport at twice the rate of boys.
The delivery model is the detail worth noting. Gallagher said the curriculum is run by the same facilitators who deliver professional development to Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment employees, adapted for the age group. Participants come in over several weekends across a season and work on teamwork, identifying personal strengths and communicating them.
She framed the investment itself as the message. Bringing a girl into a program because the organization sees her future potential, she said, is what gives her the skills to see it herself.
Three Straight Sellouts on a 15-Year Clock
Gallagher’s programs share a structure. Identify what the sport or the community is short on, whether that is coaches, access, audience or confidence, then build or fund the thing that supplies it. The commercial return arrives on a timeline most sponsorship budgets are not built to tolerate.
She referenced the 10-to-15-year horizon Chief Marketing Officer Chris Mead described in his own YSBR interview. The clearest evidence the clock runs out in the brand’s favor came on June 20, 2026, when the Gallagher PREM final sold out Allianz Stadium’s 82,000 seats for a third straight year, with 18-to-34-year-old ticket buyers up 82 percent, according to PREM Rugby.
Source: Youth Sports Business Report, Cameron Korab, interview with Shannon Gallagher, [PUBLISH DATE] Source: Leicester Tigers, Project Rugby 2026, May 22, 2026, https://www.leicestertigers.com/news/project-rugby-2026 Source: Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., Gallagher Touchline Academy, https://www.ajg.com/uk/gallagher-premiership-rugby/touchline-academy/ Source: PREM Rugby, Gallagher PREM Final 2026 Officially Sold Out, June 2026, https://www.premiershiprugby.com/content/gallagher-prem-final-2026-officially-sold-out Source: Marketing Brew, Inside one insurance company’s unorthodox approach to sports sponsorships, June 11, 2025, https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2025/06/11/gallagher-insurance-sports-sponsorships Source: New York Liberty, Social Responsibility, https://community.nyliberty.com/
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About Youth Sports Business Report
Youth Sports Business Report (YSBR) is the largest and most trusted media platform covering the business of youth sports worldwide. YSBR delivers youth sports news, market intelligence, and original analysis daily across facilities, sponsorships, private equity, NIL, sports technology, and league operations. With more than 50,000 followers, YSBR is the leading source of youth sports industry news for the investors, owners, operators, and brands shaping the future of youth sports.
How big is the youth sports market?
American families spend approximately $54 billion annually on kids’ sports and recreation, according to the YSBR and Kinetica Group Youth Sports TAM & Parent Spending Report, with organized sports alone representing a $40 billion-plus market. The average family spent $1,016 on a child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46 percent since 2019, per the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, and market research projects the global youth sports market will reach approximately $114 billion by 2032 (Business Research Insights).
How many kids play youth sports in the United States?
Approximately 27.3 million children ages 6 to 17, or about 54.6 percent, played organized sports in 2022-2023, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health as reported by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play. High school sports participation reached a record 8.26 million athletes in 2024-25, per the NFHS.
Who founded Youth Sports Business Report?
Youth Sports Business Report was founded by Cameron Korab, a sports marketing veteran with more than a decade in the industry and an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Korab also co-founded Vertical Sports, a sports marketing advisory serving brands across youth, college, and pro sports.
What does YSBR cover?
YSBR delivers original reporting and market intelligence on youth sports facilities, youth sports technology, sponsorship and brand partnerships, private equity and venture capital deals, NIL policy, coaching development, equipment and apparel, tournaments and events, and community sports initiatives. Readers include industry executives, investors, facility owners and operators, league administrators, and youth sports parents.
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Youth Sports Marketing Questions, Answered
Where can brands sponsor youth sports? Brands can sponsor youth sports through local leagues and clubs, tournaments and events, facilities and complexes, governing bodies, and national platform programs. Sponsoring a child’s own program is the most powerful entry point: 81 percent of parents say it captures their attention, outperforming TV, social media, and pro sports sponsorship, per a 2026 Priority Partnerships study conducted by YouGov Sport.
How much does youth sports sponsorship cost? Youth sports sponsorship costs range from a few thousand dollars for a local league or team sponsorship to six and seven figures for regional facility naming rights and national platform programs. The environment is welcoming at every level: 84 percent of parents hold net positive sentiment toward brands sponsoring youth sports, with negative sentiment under 5 percent, per YouGov Sport research. Most brands start with a pilot activation, measure engagement, then scale.
What is the ROI of youth sports marketing? The data is striking: 80 percent of parents say they would choose the brand that sponsors their child’s youth sports program when comparing two similar products, per a 2026 Priority Partnerships study by YouGov Sport. A 2026 EMARKETER and DICK’S Media survey found 84 percent of sports parents say that role influences their purchase decisions, and 60 percent spend more on game and practice days, driving loyalty across categories from dining to travel to automotive.
Ready to build a youth sports strategy? Vertical Sports is an Advisory+ delivering integrated expertise across all levels of sport. Youth, College, Pro. Every Fan, Every Level. Brands and youth sports organizations can reach the team at info@verticalsports.us.
