IF YOU ever needed proof of the power of brands, look no further than the ubiquity of Team GB over the past few weeks. Thirty years ago, it did not exist; and it has the least organic origin story imaginable. “Team GB” was invented in 1997 in an office by a marketing executive, Marzena Bogdanowicz; and yet, nowadays, it is part of the national discourse. The BBC gives Team GB ten mentions for every one mention of Britain.

It sounds unlikely, but, in terms of performance, the brand change seems to have worked. Infamously, at the Atlanta 1996 Summer Olympics, the sportsmen and women of Great Britain and Northern Ireland brought back just 15 medals, with a solitary gold. The turnaround started at the first “Team GB” Games at Sydney, in 2000, when Britain took 28 medals; and, since 2012, Team GB has brought home 60 or more medals every time.

There are a host of other factors — crucially, the National Lottery — but the perceived success of Britain’s marketing strategy has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the world. The Netherlands, for example, arrived at these Games branded heavily not as “the Netherlands” but as “Team NL”; copying not just the letters, but actually using the English word for “team” in their official branding. And so, intriguingly, did “Team Ireland”.

Back in 2009, the Northern Ireland sports minister, a certain Gregory Campbell, complained that the abbreviated “Team GB” “excluded, and indeed alienated the people of Northern Ireland”. This clearly had not been deliberate. But Campbell may have been prophetic, although not in a way that he might have expected.

Athletes from Northern Ireland are given the choice whether to represent “Team GB” or “Team Ireland”, and there’s a new dynamic at work. Take this year’s gold medal-winning long-distance swimmer Daniel Wiffen, who grew up in Northern Ireland, and competed for Northern Ireland in the Commonwealth Games two years ago; but, in Paris, he chose Team Ireland. Or Rhys McClenaghan, on the pommel horse; he likewise represented Northern Ireland in the Commonwealth Games, but was a gold medallist in Paris for Team Ireland. Other Northern Irish athletes, such as the rower Hannah Scott and the swimmer Jack McMillan, went the other way, and competed for Team GB.

There has been something so loaded about nation states and flags that it is possible that people have become uncomfortable with them. The concept of a “team” has freed Northern Irish sportsmen and women to choose a national side, but in a way that does not give their decision the political weight that once would have been allotted to it. And, on the ground, the Northern Irish people seem to have been happy to support all of them. Arguably, it points to a happier and more accommodating Northern Irish identity that is both British and Irish. This was not the point of creating “Team GB”, but it may be an unintended consequence.

The Revd Robert Stanier is Vicar of St Andrew and St Mark, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark.