SlamBall names Pabst Blue Ribbon official beer partner for 2024, 2025 seasons

Pabst Blue Ribbon’s arrival as SlamBall’s official exclusive beer partner for the worldwide 2024 and 2025 seasons signaled something bigger than a standard sponsorship. The league was selling a lifestyle as much as a sport: fast, loud, highlight-driven, and built to travel, with PBR now attached to the SlamBall Summer Series Dunk Contest and to year-round consumer activations designed to keep the brand in front of fans between live events.

The deal, announced on February 2, 2024, fit the way SlamBall has been packaging itself since its return. League co-founder Mason Gordon said fans would see PBR across ESPN programming and in new social-media initiatives, while also pointing to the brand’s 180th year as proof that an old-line name could still live inside a modern, youth-driven property. Josh Feingold, Pabst’s senior director of marketing partnerships, matched that tone by linking the sport’s energy, excitement, disruption, attitude and independent spirit to the PBR identity. That is the real story here: SlamBall was no longer just asking brands to sponsor a stunt. It was offering a repeatable entertainment platform with inventory.

The timing mattered, too. SlamBall said dates and details for Series 7 were still being finalized, with potential domestic and international touring events planned for early and mid-2024. In other words, the PBR deal landed while the league was still building the next layer of its comeback, turning sponsorship into a bridge between the 2023 relaunch and the next wave of live events, broadcast windows and consumer touchpoints.

That comeback already had numbers behind it. SlamBall said its return produced massive social engagement, solid ESPN time-slot performance, quality attendance and global media attention, and it went further by saying no other active professional sports league came close in engagement or growth across Twitter and Instagram during the relaunch period. The league’s 2023 reboot was backed by an $11 million Series A led by IA Sports Ventures and Eberg Capital, with David Blitzer, Michael Rubin, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Adelman, Blake Griffin, Kevin Nagle, Lloyd Danzig, Brian Lovell, Jesse Sharf and Eric Manlunas also in the mix.

The on-court product gave sponsors plenty to latch onto. The 2023 relaunch featured eight teams, including the Mob, Rumble and Slashers, plus newcomers Buzzsaw, Gryphons, Lava, Ozone and Wrath. SlamBall drafted 56 players with an average age of 26.9, then expanded distribution beyond ESPN into Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and Douyin in China. With more than 200 million #BringBackSlamBall views in the bank, the league was no longer selling nostalgia. It was selling reach, repetition and a path to monetization.