Who Actually Sponsors Chess? Spoiler: Not Rolex.

This is a story about the ideal sponsor for chess — or, more precisely, why the “ideal” hasn’t shown up yet. We (World Chess, and me personally) have spent years pitching the sport to brands. 

At first, we went for the obvious prospects: the luxury watchmakers, the banks, the heritage giants who already live in the land of prestige. Chess seemed like their natural habitat — centuries of tradition, an aura of genius, and the kind of gravitas that usually costs millions to replicate.

For years, the pitch was simple: chess is the perfect stage for elite brands. Timeless, intellectual, a little intimidating — everything a heritage house dreams of seeing in the mirror. But nothing came out of it.

Because prestige doesn’t need a plus-one. If your whole business runs on heritage and status, adding chess doesn’t change the equation. It looks elegant, sure, but to turn that elegance into something real — an activated campaign, a product, an experience — the brand had to do the heavy lifting themselves. 

The problem, we realized, wasn’t chess. The problem was assuming the right sponsor is the one that already looks good standing next to it.

And that’s the real shift: the future isn’t in selling the aura of chess — or at least the sponsors might not need us for it. Chess is free. But it isn’t just reputation; it’s a global community that plays, spends, and obsesses — and is shockingly underserved. Hundreds of millions of people, and almost no products made specifically for them. That’s the opening.

From Check-In to Checkmate

The first real sponsors of chess weren’t brands at all — they were hotels. In the late 19th century, tournaments were scheduled like off-season sales: designed to fill rooms, dining halls, and ballrooms when tourist traffic dried up. That’s why the chess map still sounds like a travel itinerary. Openings weren’t just strategies; they were postcards from the sponsors. Berlin, Vienna, Sicilian — every move carried the return address of the hotel or café that underwrote the tournament.

Fast forward to today, and the logic has gotten muddled. Inside chess, professionals often assume that a “famous” brand is a good fit — the luxury watch, the heritage fashion house, the big bank. It looks right on the press wall, it feels glamorous, it flatters the players. But glamour isn’t a business model. Chess might be good for the brands (think LVMH Ronaldo — Messy photo with a chess set on a Louis Vuitton trunk), but chess events rarely are good.

That’s the real mismatch. Not that chess can’t attract big names, but that big names don’t actually need chess events — and chess doesn’t really need them. The only sponsors that make sense are the ones with products that fit the community itself. And those are still rare.

The Sport With No Merch Table

Chess is everywhere and nowhere. Hundreds of millions play worldwide, but if you walk into a store, you’ll find almost nothing made specifically for them. A few sets, some books. Compare that to running, yoga, or esports — whole industries of shoes, drinks, gadgets, and apparel. Chess has none of that.

This is the gap: the community exists, it spends money, it shows up daily online, but no one has built a consumer product ecosystem around it. The most universal game in the world still doesn’t have its own sneaker drop, its own energy drink, or its own mainstream product line. For sponsors, this isn’t a prestige play — it’s white space.

Fallon Numbers, Fischer Audience

Here’s the thing most brands still miss: chess isn’t just symbolism, it’s distribution. A live chess broadcast pulls numbers that rival late-night television. Jimmy Fallon averages about 1.5 million viewers; a major chess stream can do the same. But unlike a TV audience that flips channels during ads, chess audiences are communities. They analyze, they argue, they probably buy the merch, they come back tomorrow.

Which means chess isn’t an ornament — it’s a market. A global one, with loyalty baked in. The right sponsor isn’t the one that wants to look clever by association; it’s the one ready to treat chess like the next big consumer platform.

The Brand We’re Still Waiting For

So who’s the right match? Not the brand that wants its logo on the board. Not the one hoping for a fleeting aura of genius by sitting next to grandmasters. The ideal sponsor is the one willing to build with chess, not just lean on it.

That means creating products that make sense inside the culture. A drink that becomes the default at blitz tournaments. A shoe that references pawn structure the way Air Jordans reference flight. 

The chess audience is out there, big enough to rival prime-time TV, loyal enough to outlast a campaign cycle, and hungry for things that actually belong to them. The first brand that stops treating chess as a halo and starts treating it as a market will own an entire cultural space nobody else has claimed.

We’ve tried the old playbook. Now we’re waiting for the first sponsor bold enough to write a new one.