How To Become a Sponsored Athlete
in 4 steps

Developing an audience is vital to get sponsored, which makes sense.

As mentioned above, the purpose of sponsoring athletes is to promote a product or a service. Therefore, the larger your audience is, the more likely you will get sponsored. However, the story does not end here.

To understand this point, let us take the example of YouTubers:

When you are growing on YouTube, you will inevitably receive offers from various companies that want to sponsor you.

The first request of these companies is the statistics of your channel. In other words, they want to know how many views you get, who is watching you (e.g., women, men, kids), how old are they (this is extremely important as it determines the buying intent of your audience), and other helpful statistics.

Similarly, as an athlete, it is incredibly beneficial to get to know your audience, which will make it much easier for you to get sponsored.

Obviously, quantifying these parameters as an athlete is much more challenging relative to being a YouTuber.

For this reason, you need to do more than just appearing on TV.

You see, building an audience requires some effort from your side, as simply winning games is not enough to make you a known public figure, unless you are an exceptional athlete, such as Michael Jordan or Tom Brady. These elite athletes have such massive media coverage that they do not need to promote themselves.

For regular athletes, you need to know your audience and promote yourself in an efficient manner. This means becoming familiar with social media networks and hiring someone to run your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.

Sponsorships come in various forms. You could get offered discounts on certain products and services (e.g., race entries, travel expenses) or get paid directly.

In general, the larger and more targeted your audience, the more room for negotiation you have.

In summary, there are no formulas that determine how much an athlete should get paid. However, you need to be a bit flexible, especially at the beginning of your career.

Following the first tip, you need to know which products and services your audience would be attracted to.

If you have a large following on social media networks, this will be much easier since these platforms provide useful statistics.

Additionally, try to include small local companies on your list of potential sponsors, as it’s more feasible to get one of these companies to sponsor you during your early career.

Once you have a list of potential sponsors, it is time to figure out who to contact.

Generally speaking, large companies have marketing departments or public relations (PR) firms that take care of sponsorships. For this reason, avoid contacting their sales page or general information.

Asking an athlete who already got sponsored by that company is by far the best way to get in touch with them.

You should be aware that most sponsored athletes will not disclose the information of their sponsors since these companies get tons of requests of this type.

With that said, doing some digging will not hurt you. On the contrary, it will help you get familiar with the process.

Completing the steps listed above means you are ready for the real thing!

You can formulate your proposal by introducing yourself, the size and demographics of your audience, what you are looking for, and any other necessary information.

Note that it is best to keep short and to the point (shoot for 100 words).

It is up to the team of marketing or PR to do the due diligence to determine whether you are a good fit for them or not. All they want to know is who are you, what you can offer, and how much money it will cost them.

Make sure to be humble in your proposal.

If you are contacting a large company, do not expect them to come back to you in a day or two. These firms receive hundreds of requests per week (if not per day). Therefore, you need to give it time.

Additionally, your chances of getting sponsored by large companies are relatively lower since you will be competing with hundreds of professional athletes.