These days, almost every team in major professional sports leagues has an official airline. These official airlines put their name on the big screen at the stadium, appear on local advertisements boasting their status as the "official airline of your team", and sponsor merchandise promotions at the team's home venue. Normally, these are airlines that operate a hub at the local airport or at a nearby major city's airport. But that is just about where the similarities end. Different airlines have very different relationships with their sports teams; some relationships are intimate and rather exclusive and sometimes airlines will have so many teams, that they can number more than 30.
The reason airlines sponsor teams is to attach their name to local fans' favorite teams. In this day and age, here in America and around the world, people are very tightly connected to their favorite team, sometimes even giving their favorite players nicknames or using the pronouns we, us, and our when referring to their favorite team. Advertisers will pay top dollar to be associated with these cultural icons, and airlines are no exception. To an airline, associating with a team means that when fans go to book a flight, they're more likely to think of the airline that has giant billboards at their favorite team's home venue.
But some airlines are a lot less passive in their approach to marketing their brand to sports fans. Just in the US, airlines like JetBlue and US Airways have created special liveries for the teams they sponsor. Internationally, airlines like Air New Zealand and Turkish Airlines have also created special liveries for sports teams; Turkish has even painted the entire roster of FC Barcelona on the side of a 777-300ER. When people see their favorite team's logo flying through the sky, they will clamor to choose that airline the next time they fly, in hopes of being able to fly that special plane.
Other airlines host contests for the team, with the prize ranging from free round-trip tickets to one of their destinations to a season-long vacation following the team to every road game; Everyone loves free things, even if one of those free things is a cramped economy class seat in a plane flying 5 hours across the country, sandwiched between the crying baby and the person who talks too much. These airlines know that by tapping into the sports market, and properly engaging in their communities, they can potentially draw hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of fans, if they form as tight a bond with the fans in the same way the fans have formed a bond with their team, a challenge some airlines have mastered, while others have yet to come close to achieving.
