Background – The sports industry is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing business sectors.For its financing, sponsorship has come to play an increasingly important role. Sports sponsorship tend to stand for significant proportions of companies’ marketing budgets, and its outcomes are wellresearched. However, little research has previously been conducted from the perspective of sport organizations.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how sport organizations work towards creating and maintaining value for themselves and their partners in strategic sponsorship alliances, and the underlying reasons for these actions. Researchers will study Swedish and Canadian sport organizations, representing different cultures, motives and business models, to better understand factors influencing the reasoning behind currently used partnership strategies.

Method – The thesis is designed as multiple case studies of sport organizations. Empirical data was collected through semi-structured interviews with representatives from selected sports organization.

Findings – The analysis of empirical findings suggest value is created through various ways including; knowledge sharing, business opportunities, relationship building, exposure, personal need satisfaction and goodwill among others. Differences in how sports is perceived in different markets have been found to influence motives aims of corporations and sport organizations.

Key words – Value creation, strategic sports sponsorship alliances