Designing Fair Entry into Sport Sponsorship Platforms: The Open Entry Framework and a Trust-First Prototype

Access to sport sponsorship remains uneven, often privileging athletes with existing visibility, institutional affiliation, or social media reach. This paper introduces the Open Entry Framework, a design-oriented approach that reframes sponsorship access as a progressive, trust-first pathway rather than a gated threshold. The framework prioritizes values alignment, needs-based support, and privacy-preserving transparency over early performance metrics or popularity signals. To operationalize the framework, a pilot-aligned prototype was developed, illustrating how Open Entry principles can be embedded in interface-level decisions for athlete onboarding, sponsor selection, and impact visibility. The paper contributes a conceptual framework alongside illustrative design artifacts, highlighting the role of interaction design in shaping equitable participation within emerging sport sponsorship platforms.