Tennis brand sponsorships among the top 200 rankings

Thanks to fellow tennis nerd Alan, we got a list covering tennis brand sponsorships among the top 200 players.

One key factor in selling tennis apparel, shoes, and racquets is to be seen on the biggest stages in tennis. This is a costly endeavor as sponsoring the top players in the world comes at a hefty price tag. Usually reserved for the big boys on the scene and making it tougher for brands with smaller marketing budgets.

As you can see in the tables below, racquets is the toughest thing to get into. You can get a player to wear various brands, fits and outfits, but making them use a new racquet, when they are often used to one since their junior days, is very difficult.

Shoes are not that easy either, but there is a lot more competition and room to attract players in shoes and apparel than in racquets and strings.

Alan compiled this information for tennis brand sponsorships with the help from Score and Change.

Tennis Brand Sponsorships among the Top 200 WTA and ATP

Apparel

The feeling while following the tours has been that brands like Nike have stepped away a little bit from tennis and focus more on other sports, but they are still among the top apparel sponsors. But there is plenty of competition even from smaller brands like Lotto here, showing that you can do well in this space also with smaller budgets if you focus on tennis.

How Bidi-Badu got onto this list is a bit of a head-scratcher. The German brand has been focusing on making colorful clothes, which stand out, but not always in a good way.

Shoes

I am not surprised to see Asics leading this list. There are so many top players using Asics shoes and they have done a good job with their sponsorships and products in attracting tennis players. Nike and Adidas are also unsurprisingly high up in the list, but more interesting is how aggressive Lotto are also when it comes to tennis shoes. Wilson is quite a way behind here.

Racquets

I expected to see Wilson leading the amount of racquet sponsorships in the top 200, but perhaps not with this kind of margin. Dunlop is missing from the list, but from my count on the men’s side, there are a few players: Draper, Kecmanovic, Purcell and Popyrin. However, we do not see any Prince or Volkl sponsorships.

Yonex has made huge strides in recent years and is now number two on the list, surpassing HEAD. They are the strongest mover in terms of racquets.

Summary

Where you surprised by any number or position in this list of tennis brand sponsorships? Let us know in the comments.

Like we said in the beginning, racquets is by far the toughest space for an up-and-coming tennis brand to get into. Tecnifibre have made some moves recently with players like Iga Swiatek, Daniil Medvedev, Danielle Collins, Joe Salisbury and a few others, but they are still at the bottom of the main brands. However, in apparel and shoes, Lotto shows there is room to break through, even as a somewhat smaller player.