This article examines advertising in top-level commercial sports for its rhetorical content and shows the decisive role that various top play on the content level around morality, fairness and friendship. These meanings are determined by factors outside of sport, and not within. Interestingly enough, exactly this works just fine. However first, the mass media sports report is presented as an indispensable part of sports. This is because the media create a communicative frame of meaning through permanent reporting. This can, at the same time, be described as a - of course abstract - form of sports advertising. Subsequently, the various advertising strategies come into focus: The advertising formats with and in sports become clear, that sport as a whole, spans a fictitious space, in which the companies not only attract enormous attention; much more, the companies can generate in a best case scenario a very effective image advantage. Advertising for sports proves to be particularly effective, when events are staged less as a sporting ritual and addressed to the respective fans, but especially more so as an event and spectacle: Then that too is sport - in this way, a much wider target group can be reached and activated.