The athlete endorsement deal is dying

Last month, I met Boardy.

Since then, it’s already led to five meetings.

That caught my attention.

I get introduced to plenty of people, but most networking tools create more noise than opportunity. Boardy feels different. It learns who you are, what you’re building, and who might actually be worth knowing… then makes the introduction.

No endless scrolling. No cold outreach. Just relevant conversations with founders, operators, investors, and people who can help move an idea forward.

Five meetings in a month were enough proof for me.

If you’re building something, you should probably meet Boardy too.

Not tomorrow. Not completely.

But the model Nike spent decades perfecting is starting to look old, and Kylian Mbappé just gave us one of the clearest examples yet. Nike generated roughly $46.4 billion in revenue in fiscal 2026 and has approximately $15.5 billion committed to future athlete endorsements and associated marketing.

On generated just over CHF 3 billion last year. Nike should win that fight every time. Except Mbappé just left Nike for On, and I don’t think this was simply a bidding war. I think On changed what it was bidding with.

Mbappé’s new partnership reportedly includes cash and equity. That matters because it moves the conversation beyond the traditional endorsement structure of “wear our shoes, appear in the campaign, collect the check.”

On is effectively asking him to help build football inside the company. That is a very different proposition, and I think it could reshape how athletes think about partnerships across sports. Golf might be one of the most interesting places to watch that evolution happen.

Nike, of course, helped perfect one of the greatest athlete-marketing machines ever created. I grew up watching Nike turn athletes into cultural icons. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. Cristiano Ronaldo.

Nike understood earlier than almost anyone that people don’t fall in love with shoes; they fall in love with stories. The athlete became the vehicle, Nike built the narrative around extraordinary performance, and that performance became consumer demand.

But the underlying economics were still fairly straightforward. The brand paid the athlete, the athlete wore the product, the audience saw the logo, and the brand captured most of the enterprise value created by that attention.

That model worked beautifully when brands owned distribution. Athletes needed television, magazines, retailers, and massive advertising budgets to reach consumers. They needed Nike’s machine.

Today, that relationship has changed. Athletes now own YouTube channels, Instagram audiences, podcasts, newsletters, production companies, communities, teams, and sometimes their own brands.

The athlete is no longer simply the talent inside someone else’s media machine. Increasingly, they are the media company too.

That is what makes On so interesting. On is still tiny compared with Nike, yet it grew revenue by roughly 30% last year to CHF 3.014 billion, with direct-to-consumer revenue growing even faster.

It cannot realistically beat Nike by simply spending more money, so it appears to be playing a different game.

Roger Federer was an early example. He didn’t simply become another sponsored athlete. On has described the relationship as entrepreneurship, with Federer involved across product, marketing, fan experiences, and broader brand building.

Now Mbappé enters with an equity component, while Thierry Henry has taken on a leadership role inside On’s football strategy.

Put those pieces together, and it starts to look less like a traditional sponsorship roster and more like a collection of people helping build the category. That distinction matters because it changes the athlete’s role from hired attention to strategic participant.

Golf is already giving us examples of what that could look like.

Tiger Woods didn’t simply replace Nike. He helped replace the traditional endorsement model. When Tiger ended his 27-year relationship with Nike, most of the conversation focused on which apparel logo he would wear next. I think that I missed the more important story.

Tiger didn’t simply sign another apparel deal. He helped create Sun Day Red with TaylorMade as a standalone brand with dedicated employees, designers, headquarters, and direct Tiger involvement in product development.

That is fundamentally different from paying an athlete to sell someone else’s shirt. The traditional model says, “We’ll pay Tiger to create attention for our brand.” The newer model says, “Let’s build an asset around Tiger’s knowledge, identity, experience, audience, and intellectual property.”

One transaction produces exposure. The other can create enterprise value that compounds over time.

Bryson DeChambeau gives us another version of the same shift. Reebok wanted to re-enter performance golf, and instead of simply signing several golfers, putting its logo on a few shirts, and running a traditional campaign, it built much of that return around Bryson.

The partnership extends beyond Bryson himself to Crushers GC, footwear, apparel, content, activations, and future co-branded products.

Think about everything Reebok gets in that relationship. It gets Bryson the golfer, Bryson the entertainer, Bryson the YouTuber, Bryson the product nerd, Bryson’s audience, and Bryson’s team. That is not simply an endorsement. That is distribution. And once athletes own distribution, the entire sponsorship equation changes.

Twenty years ago, an athlete’s commercial value was easier to define. Performance, television exposure, and popularity did most of the work.

Today, I think brands have to evaluate a much broader set of factors. The modern athlete stack includes performance, audience, trust, storytelling, content, product expertise, distribution, and intellectual property. That is why world ranking alone increasingly feels like an incomplete way to evaluate sponsorship value.

A golfer ranked 70th in the world with an obsessed audience, strong content, a recognizable personality, and real product credibility may create more commercial value for the right brand than someone ranked 20th who rarely communicates outside tournament weeks. That would have sounded ridiculous twenty years ago.

Today, I’m not sure it is controversial at all.

I don’t think sponsorship disappears. Companies will still pay for hats, shirts, bags, commercials, and television exposure. Logo placement increasingly looks like the lowest layer of what an athlete partnership can become.

The more interesting deals can include cash, performance bonuses, royalties, equity, licensing, product collaboration, content rights, revenue sharing, and sometimes entirely new businesses.

Once an athlete owns meaningful distribution, they can start asking an obvious question: why should I spend five years helping increase the value of your company without participating in the value I am creating?

Sophisticated athletes and agents will understand that question, and golf brands should too.

That changes who can win these partnerships. The companies that attract the next generation of athletes may not always be the companies writing the biggest checks. They may be the companies offering the biggest opportunity. A traditional endorsement pitch says, “Here’s what we’ll pay you.” The new pitch says, “Here’s what we can build together.”

Those are completely different conversations.

That is why I don’t see Mbappé leaving Nike as just another sportswear headline. I see it as a signal. Nike built perhaps the greatest endorsement machine sports has ever seen. On appears to be betting that the next generation of superstar athletes will want something more than endorsements. They will want ownership, participation, and upside.

Golf brands should pay close attention, because the next generational golf partnership may not be a $20 million deal to wear a logo.

It might be a conversation about building the next $200 million company together.

If I’m an athlete with leverage, I know which conversation I’d rather have.

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