It might feel like you’ve been hearing your neighbor talk about their pickleball habit since, well, forever. But it’s only been about five years since the first Major League Pickleball (MLP) matches.
Your neighbor likely isn’t a pro, but it’s still a fast-changing space, and racket sports are rapidly becoming more and more popular in the US—so it follows that the state of pro pickleball sponsorships is also in constant flux.
In the early years of the sport’s popularity surge, more than 150 brands rushed to get involved, seemingly without much rhyme or reason. By last year, after continued growth and a merger between MLP and the PPA Tour, pickleball sponsorships began to resemble deals in other pro sports, with big-name brands like DoorDash and Anheuser-Busch buying up league, team, and tour naming rights.
This year, the sport has shifted even closer to mainstream sponsorship structures, with growing interest from brands in individual team deals, an indication that pro pickleball’s audience size could be reaching a tipping point—though pro pickleball is still young enough to flex outside of sponsorship norms.
“Last year, we were just in a different place with how many people were fans and aware of professional pickleball,” MLP commissioner Samin Odhwani told Marketing Brew. In the early days of emerging sports, marketers can be hesitant to get involved because they’re not sure a new league will last, he said. Now, with pickleball, “it’s just a question of, ‘How big are we going to be?’ I think that’s really helped unlock a new set of partners.”
Bran deal
Among those new partners, Raisin Bran is perhaps one of the more surprising. After running a memorable Super Bowl ad this year, the cereal brand pivoted to pickleball and announced a deal with the New Jersey Fives team in early July, just in time for MLP’s mid-season tournament in Raisin Bran parent company WK Kellogg Co.’s home state of Michigan.
Showing up at both the Super Bowl and at a pickleball tournament in half a year might seem diametrically opposed strategically speaking, but it was a well-thought-out use of the brand’s media budget, Doug VandeVelde, Kellogg’s chief growth officer, told us.
“One of the concepts we love is this notion of underpriced attention,” he said. “A lot of [sports inventory] is super expensive to be part of, because people are passionate about it and they pay attention to it. It’s rightly priced, but it’s super expensive, so we’re looking at…something that’s getting a lot of attention, [but] maybe isn’t fully priced yet to where it can ultimately be.”
As part of the deal between Raisin Bran and the Fives, the team was temporarily renamed “the Fibes” to promote the brand’s messaging around fiber consumption. The deal also includes heavy emphasis on social content from the brand, team, and players, a strategy that will continue into MLP’s upcoming semifinals and finals in Central Park this weekend, VandeVelde said.
“That mid-season tournament…was a really fun, casual atmosphere to introduce this to, but that also excites me that much more for New York City, because it’s almost the antithesis,” with a vibe more akin to other pro sports, said Ryan Harwood, co-owner and GM of the Fives. “It’s like we graduated from the grassroots casual, and we’re going big stage, corporate, big lights.”
Magic in the air
Brands need not have health messages to get in on the pickleball. The Walt Disney Company also broke into the sport this year: The Orlando Squeeze, the MLP team started by Ryan DeVos and other members of his family, partnered with the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World Resort to host this year’s regular-season finale earlier this summer, where MLP teams competed for playoff spots.
There’s some continuity between partners of the Squeeze and partners of the other teams owned by the DeVos family—including the Orlando Magic, the Osceola Magic in the G League, and the Orlando Solar Bears in the developmental hockey league ECHL—but it hasn’t always been easy to secure sponsors for the Squeeze, DeVos told us.
“It was a more challenging conversation than I was expecting early on in the process,” he said. “The first year was all education…It shifted from education to now our partners are really starting to see the value in it.”
The regular-season finale represented the first two arena sellouts in MLP history, at 2,500 seats per day, and a total of almost 7,000 attendees across all four days of play, according to the league. Coverage of the Squeeze v. the St. Louis Shock also had the highest viewership of any pickleball event on FS1, averaging 146,000 viewers, per MLP.
Follow the leader
Not every MLP team has the level of access to big brands as the Fives, which happen to be co-owned by marketing mogul Gary Vaynerchuk, and the Squeeze. But interest from the likes of Fortune 500s and global companies could raise the profile of the league as a whole.
“Having them start to dive in and dip their toes into the water gives other brands more comfort and confidence that they’ve done their work [and] they’re seeing some value here,” DeVos said.
The league has its own partners, including title sponsor DoorDash, but it generally encourages its teams “to get creative” and think outside the box when it comes to sponsorships and activations as long as they don’t conflict with an existing league partner, Odhwani said. MLP focuses on selling “the events themselves,” but there are more opportunities that teams have to offer, he added.
The Fives, for instance, “cut our players into our deals because we want to use them as influencers,” Harwood said. The team and its players’ willingness to engage with Raisin Bran was part of what the brand’s marketers liked about the Fives, VandeVelde told us.
With individual teams and players catching the eyes of brands with significant budgets, Odhwani said he anticipates interest in pickleball media buys to follow, especially as the audience for the sport expands. For now, though, MLP is making do with what’s unique about its fans—and it’s not just the growing number of them.
“The tier-one sports leagues are just so centered around the live game, where [with] pickleball, the beauty of it is the access, and that anyone can do it at any time, anywhere,” Odhwani said. “Why not use that same through line in how we allow our teams to activate?”
