Protecting the biodiversity brand through sport

15 04 2026

Using animals as sport symbols reflects the integration of biodiversity into cultural identity and the transmission of collective values. This raises the possibility that the economic muscle of the sport industry could translate its symbolic capital into tangible commitments to biodiversity conservation.

Those who have had the privilege of travelling in remote areas might have come across an unexpected scene: a football pitch in the middle of the Amazon rain forest or on the slopes of the Andes, a basketball court on the side of a Buddhist temple, or an ice hockey rink on a snow-ploughed lake in remote northern Canada.

Sport is a global industry that generates identity, belonging, education, and shared emotions for both athletes and their avid spectators (1). Sporting affinities now rival the sense of nationhood once shared by citizens during warfare (2).

Now in our heavily monetised world, sport clubs rely on their fans through tickets and merchandising, and indirectly through television rights and advertising. In this both emotional and commercial relationship, expressions such as being true to the badge reflect the central role of corporate symbols in building bonds between a club and its supporters (3).

^{Sport club logos with animal iconography. Top row: examples of the grey wolf (Canis lupus) in Neftekhimik Nizhnekamsk (ice hockey, Russia), Warrington Wolves (rugby, England), Wolverhampton Wanderers (football, England), and Roma (football, Italy). Second row: bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) in Essex Eagles (cricket, England), Adler Mannheim (handball, Germany), and Philadelphia Eagles (American football, USA). Third row: Free State Cheetahs (represented by the cheetah Acinonyx jubatus; rugby, South Africa), Toronto Blue Jays (blue jay Cyanocitta cristata; baseball, Canada), Memphis Grizzlies (grizzly bear Ursus arctos horribilis; basketball, USA) and Hisamitsu Springs (Japanese white-eye Zosterops japonicas; volleyball, Japan). Fourth row: six Spanish football clubs. Clubs featuring wolves and eagles are often associated with the symbolic qualities of these species (e.g., intelligence, prowess, fealty, bravery, strength). In football, animals reflect represent the history and heraldry of cities and regions, as seen in the crests of in Atlético de Madrid (brown bear Ursus arctos), AS Roma and Athletic Club (wolf), Cultural Deportiva Leonesa and Atlético Osasuna (lion Panthera leo), CD Castellón (raptor) and Levante UD (bat). Photos: Gary Kramer (wolf) and Andy Morffew (eagle).}

In professional sport such as football, clubs increasingly function as brands (4) where even traditional logos are modified to enhance a team’s commercial value and strengthen audience loyalty (5). In this process, biodiversity becomes relevant because the iconography of many sport organisations incorporates representations of plants and animals.

Sport fauna

To quantify this phenomenon, Ugo Arbieu and collaborators analysed the presence of animals in club names, crests, and fan nicknames among 10 professional team sports across 50 countries (6). They found that 727 teams use 161 different animal species in their corporate imagery. Football and basketball lead in the number of species represented due to the large number of clubs worldwide, but American football, rugby and baseball display greater symbolic fauna diversity per club. Mammals and birds are the most common, particularly carnivores and raptors.

^{Animal symbols in club iconography (names, logos, fan nicknames) for the sports with the largest audiences (6): basketball, handball, baseball, cricket, football, American football, ice hockey and volleyball. The sample excludes 106 teams that use domesticated species as identity symbols, includes 163 men’s leagues and 67 women’s leagues, respectively, and the animal species depicted in the emblems of 48 teams could be identified. Horizontal bars above show the most represented animal groups (top panel), and the 15 species most frequently featured (middle panel). Bottom panel: percentage of symbols according to the IUCN’s conservation status of the species, where ‘threatened’ includes the categories Near Threatened, Endangered and Extinct. The trend indicates that sport clubs prefer to identify themselves with large mammal species that are threatened.}

This pattern is not coincidental, for it reflects the historical bias of science and conservation towards large, charismatic vertebrates (7), but also the uneven availability of biological information and our social preferences for certain species (8). These preferences are even reflected in the animal emojis we share regularly on social media (9).

Arbieu’s study also revealed that clubs tend to favour images of threatened fauna (6), possibly due to their higher symbolic impact and media visibility (10). Moreover, although clubs in Europe and the Americas more often depict exotic animals, native species dominate in Africa, Asia, and Oceania (6). This suggests that the choice of an animal as an emblem is the product of not only aesthetic or symbolic criteria, but also of cultural roots and the historical relationship of societies with their local fauna.

Cultural service

Using fauna as corporate symbols goes beyond the stadium. Many socio-economic sectors adopt animals in their branding strategies (11), because they are often more effective than human figures in conveying socio-cultural values (12). Adverts can feature jaguars on wheels, swans endorsing diamonds, or even tigers eating breakfast cereals. Animals embody qualities projected onto products and brands, such as strength, elegance or tradition. Some species serve as totems of regional or national identity, while others acquire an almost magical dimension as fetishes attributed with powers that people wish to possess (13).

However, this symbolic appropriation is rarely accompanied by support for any concrete biodiversity conservation (14). Moreover, consumers rarely associate the image of an animal on a product or badge with its conservation status (15), and media exposure of charismatic species can convey the mistaken impression that these species are abundant in their natural habitats (16).

Corporations using fauna in crests, logos, and advertising gain profit and reputational benefits that can be interpreted as a cultural ecosystem service (17). Recognising this value could pave the way for compensation measures for such benefits (18). Within the framework of collective commitment to biodiversity (19), the corporate use of animal imagery could be regulated through a system of taxes under a legal framework, or integrated into species donation or sponsorship programs promoted with tax benefits.

Beyond emblems

The United Nations’ program Sport for Nature aims to catalyse this type of action, playing the role of a fund for sports organisations wishing to contribute to a sustainable world (20) by, for example, reducing the environmental impacts of sporting events (21). However, the program’s penetration into major professional clubs is limited, and it does not link sport emblems with the conservation of the species they represent.

For clubs with a global reach (4), integrating an environmental profile would strengthen their image of social responsibility and could attract new audiences internationally. More importantly, if even a small fraction of the profit turned for selling access to sporting events could be transferred to on-the-ground conservation of species, biodiversity loss could be lessened substantially.

The message to fans is simple but powerful: enjoying a match, whether in the stadium or on television, can be a tangible way to support the conservation of the animals that identify the club, adding meaning to the bond between teams and their supporters.

Salvador Herrando-Pérez & Corey Bradshaw

References