Commercial Director (Sports)

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Company

WME is a global talent agency representing artists, athletes, brands, and intellectual property across sports, entertainment, media, and related industries.

What you will do

• Source, establish, develop, and manage relationships with Japanese brands, partners, and commercial stakeholders, primarily across golf, tennis, winter sports, and related disciplines.
• Identify and develop new business opportunities across sponsorships, endorsements, partnerships, rights, and other commercial initiatives.
• Lead deal discussions from opportunity identification through execution, including scoping, pricing, commercial structuring, proposals, contracts, and approvals.
• Coordinate Creative, Social, Legal, Finance, and Operations teams to deliver client-facing commercial partnerships.
• Manage project plans, revenue-related budgets, scope changes, forecasting, and reporting.
• Maintain client relationships, track deliverables and timelines, and address issues affecting commercial performance.

Requirements

• Minimum 5 years of experience as a sports marketing executive.
• Significant sales or business development experience, ideally in sports, media, entertainment, or events.
• Demonstrated ability to sell against and exceed challenging financial targets and grow new business assets.
• Proven team management experience in a mid-sized to large organizational structure.
• Fluent written and spoken Japanese and English required.
• Strong negotiation, problem-solving, communication, presentation, planning, and follow-through skills.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, results-driven work within the WME Sports Commercial team.
• Cross-functional collaboration across commercial, creative, social, legal, finance, and operations functions.
• Work in a highly matrixed organization with rapidly changing priorities and environments.
• Focus on high-value, revenue-generating partnerships aligned with business objectives.