"Your heart will keep beating for Sport in someone else's body. Your eyes will keep watching our team play."
That is the core message of the "Immortal Fans" campaign launched in 2012 by Brazilian soccer club Sport Club do Recife, together with a regional organ transplant center and the advertising agency Ogilvy Brazil. The club created its own organ donor card built around the idea that a soccer fan who donates organs can, even after death, live on in another person's body and stay with the team. By drawing on the trust and sense of belonging already established between a club and its fans, the campaign reframed organ donation not as an unfamiliar and frightening matter of death but as a choice to continue a relationship with a team the fan loves.
According to medical industry sources on the 4th, organ donation in Brazil requires family consent after death even when the person expressed a wish to donate while alive. Strictly speaking, that means a card issued by a club cannot serve as a legally valid organ donor registration. From the planning stage, the card was designed less as a way to increase donor registrations than as a device to help fans disclose their intentions to their families and start a conversation naturally.
The response was strong. According to the organizers, about 51,000 people obtained the organ donor card after the campaign began, more than the capacity of Sport's home stadium. Within a year of the campaign's launch, organ donations in Pernambuco state, where the club is based, rose 54%.
Britain is cited as a model case for using professional sports as a whole, rather than the fan base of a single club, as a medium for organ donation campaigns. A leading example is the "Sign for Life" campaign launched in 2015 by NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), part of Britain's National Health Service, in partnership with professional soccer clubs. The organizers proposed linking "sign," in the sense of signing a player, with signing up as an organ donor. Premier League clubs including Chelsea, Manchester City, Everton, Crystal Palace and Aston Villa took part, along with clubs in the Championship and League One. Each club used match programs, stadium screens, websites and social media to encourage fans to register and to tell their families of their wishes. The following year, participation expanded to 40 soccer and rugby clubs and sports organizations, with the campaign continuing through stadium advertising, player interviews and social media posts.
Rangers, one of Scotland's leading clubs, used a player's shirt number as a key to family conversations. Working with Nicky Law, then wearing No. 7, the club ran a "7 Word Campaign" encouraging fans to say seven words to their families: "I'd like to be an organ donor." The number also carried the message that a single donor can save several lives. The organizers focused not simply on increasing the number of registrations but on making sure people clearly conveyed their donation wishes to their families while alive.
In NASCAR, the popular U.S. auto racing series, a "moving memorial wall" appeared. Joey Gase, a professional race car driver and racing team owner, began a campaign to promote donation after his mother's organs were donated. He raced with photographs and names of donors and messages from bereaved families displayed on his car, and directed fans at the track to an official donor registration page. In 2021, he brought back the No. 28 car, the number worn by legendary driver Davey Allison, who donated his organs after dying in an accident. The aim was to share with fans the meaning of a life carried on in others through organ donation, rather than remembering a famous athlete's death only as a tragedy.
