There is a particular kind of intelligence that does not announce itself loudly. It shows up in the way a room shifts when someone walks in, in the quality of attention a person brings to a conversation, in the way complexity seems to soften in the presence of someone who has spent years learning to hold it. Therése Sundling Larsson has that kind of intelligence, and it has taken her into the highest levels of the live entertainment industry.
As Senior Vice President and Head of Media and Sponsorship for Live Nation EMEA and International, Therése sits at the center of one of the most consequential businesses in global culture. Live Nation Entertainment is the world’s largest live entertainment company, a sprawling operation that connects hundreds of millions of fans with the artists they love across continents, time zones, and vastly different market conditions. To lead media and sponsorship across the EMEA and international territories is to manage a portfolio of relationships, responsibilities, and opportunities that would be daunting for almost anyone. For Therése, it seems to feel like home.
From MTG to Live Nation
What makes Therése’s story so compelling is not a single defining moment, but rather the accumulation of experience across some of the most dynamic organizations in European media and entertainment.
Before arriving at Live Nation, she built her foundation at MTG, the Modern Times Group, a company that emerged from the Swedish investment firm Kinnevik and became a major force in Scandinavian media. Her years there were formative in the truest sense. She was developing the skills, instincts, and strategic vocabulary that would eventually allow her to operate at the highest level of international entertainment partnerships.
Her expertise spans a range that is genuinely unusual: leadership, sales and negotiation, strategic communication, marketing, business development, entertainment, music industry operations, brand positioning, organizational growth, and capability development. That breadth is not accidental. It is the product of sustained curiosity and a refusal to remain comfortable inside a single discipline.
The Architecture of Partnership
To understand what Therése actually does, it helps to understand what live entertainment sponsorship means today. It is no longer simply a matter of attaching a logo to a stage. The most successful partnerships are built on genuine alignment between a brand’s identity and the emotional experience of live music and entertainment.
Getting that right requires a depth of market understanding, a sensitivity to audience expectations, and a creative ambition that extends far beyond conventional marketing thinking.
Therése drives this work across the EMEA region, a territory that encompasses dozens of distinct markets, each with its own cultural textures and commercial rhythms. The strategic partnerships, sponsorships, and innovative brand collaborations she oversees must resonate in Stockholm and Johannesburg, in London and Dubai, in markets with mature live entertainment ecosystems and in markets that are still evolving.
The range of that challenge is extraordinary, and it rewards exactly the skills Therése has spent her career developing.
People First
Ask Therése how she leads, and the answer is immediate and consistent: “Passion, energy, and a people-first mindset.”
In another person’s hands, those words might sound like corporate language. In hers, they describe something genuine. She is known among colleagues and collaborators as a leader who sincerely invests in the people around her, not through abstract conversations about workplace culture, but through the day-to-day practice of building teams with clear goals, strong communication, and a shared understanding of success.
High-performing teams do not emerge from good intentions alone. They are built through deliberate choices about how work is structured, how achievement is recognized, and how setbacks are absorbed and learned from.
Therése has made those choices across multiple organizations and multiple phases of her career, and the consistency of her approach reflects a settled philosophy rather than a management style borrowed from a trend.
Beyond the Role
What is perhaps most telling about Therése’s sense of professional purpose is how much of her energy extends beyond the formal boundaries of her executive role at Live Nation.
She serves as an advisor, mentor, and coach to professionals across the media and entertainment industries, approaching that work with the same seriousness she brings to executive leadership.
Her industry engagement also includes involvement with SES, Sponsrings & Eventsverige, one of Sweden’s leading professional organizations in sponsorship and events. Through this work, she contributes to conversations that help shape how the industry understands itself and where it hopes to go.
She has also been associated with Gyllene Hjulet, widely recognized as one of Sweden’s most respected awards in sponsorship and brand experience, a benchmark recognition in a field she has spent years helping to elevate.
The Long Game
The live entertainment industry is in the middle of a period of real reinvention. Audiences are returning to live experiences with remarkable intensity. Sponsorship models are evolving. The relationship between physical and digital engagement continues to shift in ways the industry is still learning to understand.
Into this changing landscape, Therése brings a perspective shaped by years of operating at the intersection of culture, commerce, and human connection.
Her vision is built on a belief that the best partnerships are the ones that feel inevitable, where the brand and the experience are so well matched that audiences cannot imagine one without the other.
Getting to that feeling requires patience, craft, and relationships built over years rather than assembled in a single quarter.
Therése Sundling Larsson is not a leader who makes noise for its own sake. She is a leader who builds things that last: partnerships, teams, standards, and careers, including the careers of many people she has mentored along the way.
In an industry that often mistakes spectacle for substance, she is a reminder of what substance actually looks like.
Read more: The Most Trailblazing Live Entertainment & Music Marketing Leaders
