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A new study from BITmarkets puts some of the world’s biggest sports names at the center of the crypto economy — and it’s not just about logo placement on a jersey anymore. The report, titled “Crypto and Elite Athletes: More Than Just a Sponsorship,” ranks athletes by how deeply they’ve actually plugged into digital assets, from NFT launches to salary conversions to equity stakes in crypto firms.
Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tom Brady, Shaquille O’Neal, Serena Williams, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, and Stephen Curry all make the list. What’s interesting is how different each arrangement looks. Brady didn’t just slap his name on a banner — he took an equity stake. Thompson and Iguodala converted portions of their salaries into bitcoin, which is a pretty different kind of bet than a standard endorsement deal. O’Neal’s involvement leaned into fan-facing crypto promotions. Ronaldo and Messi, the two biggest names on the planet by most measures, both ran NFT projects that drew massive attention, though the reception from fans and critics was mixed depending on the timing and the market conditions at launch.
The numbers behind all of this got big fast.
$742 Million and 230 Contracts in One Year
In 2022, crypto sports sponsorships crossed $742 million across 230 separate contracts. That’s a lot of deals happening in a short window. The NBA was probably the most visible arena for it — crypto went from basically a footnote in league sponsorship revenue to the second-largest category, pulling in somewhere between $100 million and $150 million annually. Arenas got renamed. Jersey patches appeared. And individual players started cutting their own side deals on top of whatever their teams had already signed.
The BITmarkets study doesn’t just track the money, though. It tries to map out the structure of each arrangement — who got tokens, who got equity, who got paid in bitcoin, who took on an ambassador role that involved actual participation in a project versus someone who just showed up for a photo shoot. That distinction matters more than it might seem. An ambassador who runs bitcoin giveaways and engages with fan communities is a different kind of asset for a crypto company than a famous face on a billboard.
And then 2022 happened.
After the Crash: Compliance Over Hype
The market blew up mid-2022. Several major crypto platforms collapsed or faced serious legal trouble, and the sponsorship landscape shifted pretty fast. Regulatory scrutiny picked up. Companies that had been spending aggressively on athlete deals pulled back or started renegotiating terms. The study notes that BITmarkets sees a clear before-and-after in how these partnerships get structured now.
The post-crash approach is more cautious. Deals today tend to focus on compliant financial infrastructure, clearer disclosures, and benefits that fans can actually use — stadium privileges, voting rights on certain decisions, access tied to digital collectibles or fan tokens. It’s less “here’s a celebrity telling you to buy crypto” and more “here’s a concrete thing you get for holding this token.” Whether that’s a better model is debatable, but it’s the direction the market moved.
The appetite for big splashy campaigns has pretty much faded. What’s replaced it is a more selective approach — fewer deals, but ones that try to deliver something real. BITmarkets frames it as the market learning from the overreach of the boom years. Probably accurate.
The full study is available on the BITmarkets website and goes into detail on each athlete’s specific deal structure. For anyone trying to understand how elite sports figures have woven themselves into the crypto space — and how that relationship has changed since the market’s roughest stretch — it’s a fairly useful breakdown. It’s not a light read, but the data is there.
Worth noting: the study doesn’t pretend every deal was a success. Some of these partnerships landed during the worst possible market conditions. Ronaldo’s NFT collection, for instance, faced criticism at a time when NFT sentiment had already soured broadly. The study seems to treat that context seriously rather than just listing wins.
Iguodala and Thompson converting salary into bitcoin remains one of the more concrete examples of personal conviction in the space — not a promotional deal, just a financial decision that happened to be public.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Which athletes ranked highest in the BITmarkets crypto study?
The study ranks Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tom Brady, Shaquille O’Neal, Serena Williams, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, and Stephen Curry among the top athletes involved in crypto partnerships.
How large did crypto sports sponsorships get in 2022?
Crypto sports sponsorships surpassed $742 million across 230 contracts in 2022, with the NBA generating between $100 million and $150 million annually from crypto-related sponsorship revenue alone.
Why It Matters
The acknowledgment of top athletes like Ronaldo, Messi, and Brady engaging in the crypto economy highlights a significant trend where the influence of sports figures transcends traditional sponsorships, potentially driving mainstream adoption of digital assets. Their involvement not only legitimizes cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies but also attracts a broader audience, bridging the gap between sports and the evolving financial landscape. This may lead to increased investments in crypto-related ventures, shaping both the sports industry and the future of digital finance.
