Cannabis Sponsorships Arrive in US Sports

Stock car racing got there first, and it did not stop at CBD. In December 2021 NASCAR approved a deal between Richard Childress Racing and 3Chi, a company whose business is delta-8 gummies. The sport's own website later called it the first hemp-based consumer brand sponsorship across all major professional sports. That was ten months before Major League Baseball approved its first partner, and baseball's was a CBD company certified to contain no psychoactive THC.

Most people assume the four biggest leagues led this. The NFL, the NBA, the NHL and baseball itself were among the last to move.

Who went first

The order matters because it shows where the resistance really sits.

• April 2018: Las Vegas Lights FC, a second-division soccer club, partnered with a Nevada dispensary. The first cannabis sports sponsorship in America was not a CBD deal at all. It was a shop that sold weed.
• March 2021: UFC named a CBD company its official global partner, on a five-year deal.
• December 2021: NASCAR approves 3Chi and Richard Childress Racing.
• October 2022: MLB becomes the first of the four major leagues to sign a CBD company.

Below the top tier, this had been happening for four years before baseball moved.

College sport has moved, too, and further than three of the four major leagues. In August 2025 a hemp company signed what was described as the first THC beverage sponsorship in Division I athletics, at a public university, structured as advertising only because state law did not permit sales at the venue. A collegiate summer league baseball team in Portland has been selling hemp-derived THC drinks at home games since 2024, and that arrangement is still running.

The MLB deal, and the part nobody expected

Baseball opened the category in June 2022, restricted to CBD companies certified by the National Sanitation Foundation as free of psychoactive THC levels. In October it named Charlotte's Web as the first official CBD of the league. CNBC described the deal as the first time one of the four major US professional sports leagues had formed a sponsorship agreement with a CBD company, which is how the league itself framed it, too.

The terms were the interesting part. Reporting at the time put the rights fee at $30.5 million across three years, plus more than six million shares of company stock and a royalty on co-branded sales above a threshold. A league that had prohibited players from taking cannabis endorsement money two years earlier became a shareholder in a cannabinoid company. That agreement ran to the end of 2025.

Club deals followed. The Cubs took a CBD partner in April 2023 with signage inside Wrigley Field, and the Braves signed a six-season deal that September covering Truist Park and the team's radio network.

Why the NBA is a special case

The league removed cannabis from its prohibited substances list in the 2023 collective bargaining agreement and stopped testing for it. It also opened the CBD category to teams that off-season, which produced the first NBA and WNBA team deal in February 2024.

Then it drew a line that sounds contradictory and is not. Players may use cannabis. Players may hold a passive, non-controlling stake in a cannabis company. Players may not promote one. They may endorse CBD products only, provided the company behind them is not a marijuana company.

Use it, own a piece of it, do not advertise it. That is a sponsorship rule written by lawyers who expect the federal position to change and do not want to be first.

Cannabis sponsorship rules are written by states, not leagues

Here is the part that gets missed whenever a CBD sponsor and an NBA team make the news, or a new arena partnership is announced. The binding constraints are frequently not league policy at all.

Washington bans the signage outright. Its statute prohibits outdoor advertising on signs and placards in arenas, stadiums, shopping malls, whether open air or enclosed, with an exception only for areas classified as off limits to anyone under 21. New York's regulations do the same, naming arenas, stadiums and sporting venues, with the same age-gated carve-out.

California takes a different route to the same place, permitting advertising only where at least 71.6 percent of the audience is reasonably expected to be 21 or older, measured against real audience data. Ohio simply bans cannabis advertising on radio and similar broadcast media.

And behind all of it sits the party nobody negotiates with. Every broadcast partner holds a federal license it has to renew, which is the reason NASCAR gave when it refused the category in 2019 before reversing two years later.

The unexamined day is a wasted opportunity. Reflect on what you did, what you learned, and how you can improve.

John Dewey

The cannabis brand stadium deal that shows the whole problem

In January 2026 the United Center in Chicago began selling hemp-derived THC beverages, the first venue of its size in the country to do so at concerts and live events. But not at Bulls or Blackhawks games. Same building, same taps, and the product comes off the shelf depending on which tenant is playing that night. That single arrangement contains the entire state of play. Venues are ready. Some leagues are not. The building solves it by having two rulebooks and checking the calendar.

Not every attempt gets that far. A vape company bid for the Denver Broncos' stadium naming rights after the previous sponsor's bankruptcy and was quietly passed over without explanation. CBS refused a medical cannabis advertisement for the Super Bowl in 2019 and never said why. And the UFC's first CBD partner went into administration in early 2023, less than two years into a five-year agreement, which is its own kind of warning about the category's stability.

What a seed company notices about all this

Four decades in this business gives you a specific reaction to a sports league cannabis partnership: notice which cannabinoid is doing the talking.

Almost every deal above involves CBD or hemp-derived products, which is to say, things that are federally legal on a technicality and sold on a wellness argument. The plant itself has not been sponsored by anybody at that level. What has been sponsored is the version of it that can pass a certification test.

There is a reason that matters to growers. The hemp definition changes in November 2026, and the rewritten statute is aimed directly at the intoxicating hemp products behind much of this wave. A category built on a legal gap gets rebuilt when the gap closes. That is also why the daytime, functional end of the catalog keeps its value regardless of what any league decides:

• Amnesia Lemon crosses Amnesia Haze with Lemon Skunk for a bright citrus profile and a clear, forward effect that does not flatten an afternoon.
• Strawberry Lemonade is the sweeter counterpart, a citrus-forward hybrid bred for flavor and not for a certification.

None of that is a substitute for a certified product a league will put its name on. It is the honest alternative to it: a plant with documented parents and a stated cannabinoid range, grown by the person using it, with nobody's compliance department involved.

Where this actually stands

The pattern across eight years is consistent. Smaller properties move first because they have less to lose, the major leagues follow once a certification standard exists that lets them say the product is not psychoactive, and state advertising law decides what any of it can look like inside a building.

The next real test is not a league. It is November 2026, when the hemp definition tightens and a large share of the brands currently sponsoring American sport find out whether their products still exist. A plant with documented parents and a stated cannabinoid range will be exactly what it is now on the other side of that date. Not everything on a stadium concourse will be able to say the same.

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