5 Game-Changing 2025 Sports & Social Impact Partnerships You Should Know About

When people think about sports sponsorships, they often picture stadium or arena billboards. Logos on jerseys. Naming rights. Athletes in commercials holding products. And there’s a reason for this. Historically, most brand and sports partnerships have been pure marketing plays — designed to sell, not to serve.

But buried beneath the noise, we’re seeing a slow, quiet shift start to happen. One that’s giving us a much-needed dose of optimism heading into 2026. Brands, teams, athletes, nonprofits, and foundations are beginning to build partnerships that actually move the needle on real social issues, like debt relief, community rebuilding, youth access to sports, economic empowerment.

These new models of sports partnerships — which combine marketing dollars with CSR goals to amplify both — are successful because they're structured differently from day one. They integrate brand visibility with measurable community impact. They turn athletes and teams into vehicles for change, not just content. And they’re each unique because they’re designed specifically for the needs of the brands, athletes, teams, and nonprofits involved.

In 2025, the WIN | WIN team followed and analyzed nearly 150 of these kinds of activations, learning something new from just about every one. Some of the campaigns or collabs made national headlines, even if only for a few days. Others got zero media coverage, yet created more of a human impact than any signage deal ever could. And while a majority of the initiatives were in pro-sports rather than at the collegiate level, they're all valuable inspiration and validation for what we’re building with NILi: NIL for Impact — our flagship program that gives college athletes a platform for social good through mission-aligned brand and nonprofit partnerships. 

--

If you’re ready to build the next era of sports and social impact with us, check out five of the game-changing partnerships that sparked our imaginations in 2025:

Up first: 

• Cash App, The Atlanta Dream, and nonprofit ForgiveCo partner to provide $10M in debt relief to local ATL families 

Coming soon:

• LA Dodgers Foundation, Up2Us Sports, and Americorps collab to train and hire thousands of trauma-informed youth baseball coaches 
• Indeed, The LeBron James Family Foundation, and UNINTERRUPTED champion skills-first hiring and equitable career opportunities for non-traditional talent 
• Comcast and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Foundation empower Ezra Frech’s nonprofit, Angel City Sports, to expand adaptive sports access in Southern California
• Dexcom builds an NIL network and mentorship platform for young athletes with Type 1 Diabetes

What do these 5 initiatives have in common?

While their structures, issue areas, and sports connections are all different, each of these five case studies is a shining example of the practices that are fueling a new era for sports and social impact. And (to no one’s surprise, of course), they’re the same basic principles we’ve built into the foundation of NILi:

• Combining marketing and CSR budgets for more amplification and alignment
• Creating multi-year commitments to build sustained momentum and connection, not one-off campaigns for a quick, transactional spike
• Driving measurable human outcomes vs. marketing metrics: debt forgiven, coaches trained, hiring practices changed, communities supported, student athletes re-engaged 
• Giving athletes/teams real agency in shaping the work to align with their values, and merging their personal experiences with the brand’s narrative
• Leveraging existing nonprofit expertise, programming, and infrastructure to scale impact instead of reinventing the wheel

What this means for 2026

If you're a brand considering a sports marketing play in 2026, asking "how do we get more visibility for our products?" or “what’s the easiest partnership we can afford?” isn’t enough. 

The real thought-provoking and impact-creating prompt is this:

 "How do we build a collaboration that aligns with our values, supports our community, and actually matters?"

The most successful partnerships won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most famous athletes — especially when every media outlet in the world will be flooded by high-volume transactional campaigns for the FIFA World Cup and 2026 Winter Olympics.

Instead, the initiatives that will have the most immediate influence, and the longest staying power, will be the ones that combine brand goals, authentic athlete platforms, and mission-driven nonprofit infrastructure to create outcomes that people genuinely care about.

That's the kind of movement we're building here at WIN | WIN. Let’s kick it into high gear together.