Athletic Brewing, the largest dedicated non-alcoholic brewer in the United States, has signed Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye as athlete-owners. The multi-year deals give each player an equity stake in the company rather than a straightforward endorsement fee, and both will front a new marketing campaign called Athletic Fits launching this month. Athletic carried an estimated valuation of around 800 million dollars in 2024, so these are not token arrangements.
The move fits a company that has spent years pulling non-alcoholic beer into the cultural mainstream through sports and sponsorship. What is new is the structure. An endorsement rents an athlete's credibility for a season. An ownership stake ties it to the company's long-term success, which is a very different signal about how the people involved see the future of the business.
The Cr(af)ted Take
The interesting word here is owner, not spokesman. Athletes lend their names to all sorts of things they would never touch, and everyone knows it. Equity is different. When two of the most visible quarterbacks in the league take a stake in a non-alcoholic brewery, they are betting their own upside on the category continuing to grow, and doing it in the most public arena in American sports, where the beer sponsorship has been sacred for a century.
It also lands on a specific cultural nerve. Professional sports and alcohol have been fused in the popular imagination forever, from the locker-room champagne to the stadium beer vendor. Having the sport's marquee players publicly back the alcohol-free version does more to normalize it among ordinary drinkers than any amount of paid media. This is the same thread we keep pulling on: the category stops being a niche the moment the people at the center of mainstream culture treat choosing it as completely normal. A quarterback with equity in a non-alcoholic brewery is about as mainstream as it gets.
Original reporting: BevNET →