For centuries, sports have given people a reason to rally around their shared passions, and today that instinct is showing up in innovative new ways. Fans are building smaller, more engaged communities around the sports they love and creating online spaces and retail stores designed with inclusivity in mind.

That’s why Mastercard went straight to the grassroots during 2025 to give sports-happy creators, club leaders and small businesses from New York to London the support they need to inspire athletes and pull together their own dynamic teams.

Here are a few stories that show precisely why sports matter.

Growing up near Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, digital creator Tyler Webb became obsessed with the Green Bay Packers football team as a kid. The football clips and commentary he posted on Twitter as a teenager soon proved a hit with fans, and his popularity began to take off.

Now he’s translating that early passion into Uncle Charlie, a sports marketing agency he co-owns with his college friend Jeff Kranz. Together, they produce short-form videos on sports from football and golf to bare-knuckle boxing.

This year, Webb joined the Mastercard Creator Studio at the Arnold Palmer Invitational where he got to interview PGA Tour golfers and Mastercard ambassadors Billy Horschel and Curtis Strange about their career highlights.

Thanks to a new Mastercard educational program, Gen Z creators like Webb can get guidance on brand partnerships and daily operations. Learning to use Small Business AI to streamline admin can help free up digital creators to produce the content their followers want to see.

“Sports matters to people,” Webb says. “When you dig into the human story and the history and tradition, you cast a much wider net to bring people into the fold.”

U.K. athlete and entrepreneur Laura Youngson helped score a world record in 2017 when she led a group of women up Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro to play the highest-ever altitude game of soccer.

The only hitch were the blisters and sores the team suffered from wearing cleats made for men and kids, in the absence of specially made women’s shoes.

Back in the U.K., Youngson decided to set up IDA Sports to make women’s cleats but struggled to convince large retailers to stock them. She finally decided to launch her own women’s sports store and entered a pitch contest earlier this year run by London’s Westminster Council for emerging brands.

Youngson and her IDA team tapped Mastercard for assistance in writing up a plan. Her pitch beat over 1,000 applicants to win first place and the funding to open her Style of Our Own women’s sports gear pop-up that included indoor turf to test shoes.

Amid the soaring popularity of women’s soccer, rugby and cricket, the Regent Street store drew about 1,500 visitors a day its opening month as it tapped into high demand for dedicated women’s sports gear.

“When you watch people walk through the space of the store, they get this sense of relief,” Youngson says. “You see them visibly think, ‘Ah, I’ve found a place.’”

Mallory Kilmer moved to New York hoping running would help her meet people. She tried training alone, but long runs on city streets, often before sunrise, made the city feel larger instead of friendlier. To change that, she posted a public message on social media inviting anyone to join her for a casual weekend run in Central Park. Those early buddy workouts eventually became No More Lonely Runs club, which now draws around 200 people to its twice-weekly runs and has sparked numerous friendships, and even romantic relationships.

As she built brand partnerships for the club, Mastercard gave Kilmer a bib to wear in the 2025 TCS New York City Marathon, which she passed to her clubmate Rossi Weinberg. One of the VIP benefits he received through the Mastercard Priceless Start program was the chance to start the marathon before the professional runners.

Now, as Kilmer runs pop-ups and activities to support the club, she passionately promotes the physical and mental health benefits running can bring.

“Just keep moving,” Kilmer says. “Don't worry about what your pace is or your distances are. Just push past that pain zone, because, on the other end, it's euphoric.”