The NBA’s historic media rights deal announced in July was valued at $76 billion over 11 years beginning with the 2025-26 season. The length and value of the contract highlights the league’s continued growth and the potential to bring even more attention to the world’s best basketball league.
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The NBA has renewed its partnership with Disney and signed new agreements with NBC Universal and Amazon Prime Video. ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon will broadcast NBA games throughout the 2035-36 campaign.
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With the increased exposure among streaming game fans, comes an intense race among sponsors for increased brand visibility.
Jersey patches took over the NBA starting with the 2017-18 season, when the league became the first major North American men’s professional sports league to allow a sponsor on the front of uniforms. Initially introduced as a three-year trial, jersey patches helped increase the NBA’s sponsorship revenue from $861 million to $1.12 billion in the span of a year, according to Statista.
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It was a watershed moment for the league, although the growth of the trial’s first year could not be replicated in the years that followed. All 30 teams had a jersey patch during the trial period; today, this is not the case.
However, the majority of NBA teams have jersey patch sponsors locked in, and even more are in the works, said Andrew Feinberg of Klutch Sports Group. He believes every team will soon have a jersey crest again.
“In the beginning, it was a sensitive topic for every league and every team,” Feinberg said. Newsweek Sports. “It was almost untouchable, for a while.”
The Miami Heat and Memphis Grizzlies recently announced multi-year deals with Robinhood, including a jersey patch that will debut in the regular season on Wednesday. Four other teams – the Knicks and Celtics, as well as the Lakers and Timberwolves – begin their regular season on Tuesday.
Klutch negotiated both Robinhood deals and has also negotiated jersey patch deals in other sports. Both World Series entrants, the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, are sporting a jersey sleeve patch that is expected to generate immense brand exposure on baseball’s biggest stage.
Major League Baseball discovered the risk of jersey patch deals when cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy in 2022. FTX became “the official cryptocurrency partner” of MLB in 2021, and referees wore an FTX patch on the front of their jerseys that year.
The patch turned into a black eye for the league when FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with multiple counts of fraud, sentenced to 25 years in prison, and ordered to forfeit 11 billion of dollars. Since then, brands and teams have slowed down and become more deliberate in their due diligence before signing a deal, Feinberg said.
With these selection processes in place, Feinberg believes we could see longer-term deals for jersey sponsors in the future.
“I think these brands, since they’ve become so sophisticated over the last few years about how they spend their money in sports, are just scratching the surface of how to get the most value out of these partnerships,” he added. “The data that companies like Klutch show brands in terms of what they get in exchange for these partnerships allows them to navigate and move these partnerships forward.”
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