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Avery Poppinga estimates it costs her about $50,000 a year to be a professional beach volleyball player. Coaching, flights, hotels, gym memberships, gear—nearly all paid out of pocket.
USA Volleyball provides stipends to only its top four teams, and even those athletes tend to have side hustles and roommates. In 2024, Poppinga was working a remote job when her best friend, a fellow beach volleyball pro, turned her on to OnlyFans.
The subscription platform launched in 2016 and became a household name during the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly for adult content. But over the past two years, OnlyFans has quietly built one of the more unusual sponsorship portfolios in professional athletics, signing deals with speedskaters, bobsledders, cliff divers, surfers, motorcycle racers, ultrarunners, and tennis players.
About 285 professional athletes now use the platform, according to an OnlyFans spokesperson, who tells Front Office Sports the company is “especially passionate about creating opportunities for athletes in smaller or niche sports, where funding and audience-building opportunities can often be more limited.”
Poppinga, now 27, joined the platform and, in February 2025, signed an official sponsorship deal. Her former manager had connected her with the team at OFTV, the company’s safe-for-work video streaming arm, and she signed a deal to film a series of videos, wear the company’s merch while competing, and promote the platform on social media.
Now, she says she can travel to whatever events she wants, bring her coach to international competitions for the first time, and help cover the expenses of her volleyball-team partner. “It’s the most fulfilling year I’ve ever had in the sport, and it’s allowed me to be the best player that I’ve been to this point,” she tells FOS.
A range of athletes from other sports have joined OnlyFans, both as independent and sponsored creators, including Nick Kyrgios (tennis), Leticia Bufoni (skateboarding), Liz Cambage (basketball), Douglas Costa (soccer), and Sabrina Stanley (ultrarunning). Some create non-explicit lifestyle content, while others post provocative nude videos.
The pull for athletes in underfunded sports is especially strong: Real money, creative control, and a built-in audience are hard to find anywhere else.
Still, even for athletes who create safe-for-work content, the platform’s reputation for pornography follows them: Governing bodies have banned the logo from competition, and the association complicates relationships with traditional sponsors. And while Poppinga doesn’t see that as a problem, not everyone in sports agrees.
“I’m Doing Some Good”
Athletes have a couple of different ways to earn on the platform. Some athletes simply sign up and earn on their own through subscriptions, tips, paid messages, and pay-per-view content. (The platform takes a 20% cut of everything; the creator keeps the rest.) Others sign annual sponsorship contracts, structured much like any other brand partnership with social media deliverables and content requirements.
Poppinga does both. Her free page is where most of her audience lives—more than 17,000 followers—funneled there largely by OFTV or Instagram. The company recently launched a dedicated sports landing page at OnlyFans.com/sports, which aggregates athletes’ free content into a single feed, making it easier for fans to discover sports creators on the platform.
She shares swimsuit modeling shots, competition highlights, and sexy selfies captioned with invitations for fans to “connect on a deeper and more intimate level” on her VIP page. There, more than 300 subscribers pay $9.97 per month for racier bikini and lingerie content and direct messaging access—which, after the platform’s cut, works out to a little over $2,500 a month. Fans can also send tips and pay for custom content.
Beach volleyball is particularly well represented on the platform. The athletes already compete in swimsuits. Photographers shoot them at every event—”whether it’s for a magazine, for a newspaper, or the black market,” as fellow pro Falyn Fonoimoana puts it—and players have no control over where those images end up. The sport is one of the most-watched events at any Olympics, yet it is rarely nationally televised outside of the Games, limiting its audience and sponsorship revenue.
Even in her best seasons, Fonoimoana says, prize money barely hits $20,000 to $30,000—much of which goes right back into getting to the next tournament. With her Instagram audience of more than 133,000 followers—far more than most players—a one-off brand collaboration might pay $1,000 to $2,500. Many offer $500.
Fonoimoana, 34, is a single mom and has worked as many as four jobs at a time during her 14 years as a pro, including coaching 12-hour days on her feet before her own tournaments. “I should have been recovering and doing all the right things to make sure that my body was ready,” she tells FOS. “Instead, I was working to make sure that I could pay rent and pay for my kid’s food.”
She signed a sponsorship deal with OnlyFans last year. On her free page, her content leans heavily on thirst traps in workout gear and bikinis. She describes herself as an “SFW worker”—safe for work, non-nude. “We’re not wearing less than we were before,” she says. “It’s the same exact uniform.”
She also has a VIP page where fans can pay $11.11 per month to chat with her personally. Of course, she says, there are “creepers,” but they were already in her Instagram DMs; on OnlyFans, at least they’re paying for the privilege.
“Our sport needs a lot more exposure,” Poppinga says. “Whatever people think about me representing [OnlyFans], it’s drawing more attention to the sport. So I feel like I’m doing some good.”
Bart Swings, a Belgian speedskater who won gold in the mass start at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, rents an apartment in the Netherlands through the winter because Belgium doesn’t have a long-track ice rink for him to train on. His training and competitions take him to Salt Lake City, Calgary, Japan, and China.
He signed a sponsorship deal with OnlyFans ahead of the 2026 Winter Games. The deal, he tells FOS, represents “really a meaningful part” of his income.
His content is free and decidedly SFW, documenting races and his recovery from an injury that threatened his Olympic year. He doesn’t have a sexy VIP page to funnel fans toward. This limits his earnings from the platform to the flat sponsorship fee and a few bucks here and there from tips and pay-per-view videos—but also insulates him from any issues with his other brand partners.
“When I brought it up with people, sometimes they scratched their head,” Swings says. “And then I explained it, and they’re like, ‘O.K., I understand fully.’” The partnership was big news in Belgium when it was announced, and Swings says his other major sponsor, an engineering company, was happy to get some press buzz by association.
“Mind-Boggling” Consequences
There’s a reason the deals OnlyFans offers athletes are, by several accounts, generous relative to what they see from other sponsors. For athletes, posting on OnlyFans can come at a cost.
In 2023, Scottish mountain bike racer Lewis Buchanan signed an OnlyFans sponsorship deal and began posting SFW content, including bike setup tips, riding footage, and behind-the-scenes clips.
The sport’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, informed him that his association with OnlyFans violated its regulations on sponsorship from pornographic products—the same rule that governs tobacco and alcohol—and that he could be refused the right to start or fined up to 25,000 Swiss francs ($32,000) if he raced with the logo on his kit.
“It’s mind-boggling to me that they are having this issue with my sponsorship when I am not promoting any adult content,” Buchanan said in a YouTube video at the time.
The consequences have been steeper in canoe slalom. In 2024, 20-year-old Latvian British athlete Klass Francisks Rozentals joined OnlyFans to pay the six-figure cost of a four-year Olympic cycle when bartending and construction work both conflicted with his grueling training and competition schedule. His older brother, Kurts Adams Rozentals, 23, soon followed—earning £100,000 in a five-month period.
The pair aren’t shy about the kind of work they do, joking on social media about the hustle of being a “mattress actor” and the hundreds of “sugar daddies” that help them pay for training, rent, and travel.
But in April 2025, Paddle UK, the British governing body for canoe slalom, banned Kurts for two years for posting an explicit video on social media made to drive people to his OnlyFans account. It also removed him from its World Class Programme, an initiative to put athletes on course for the Olympics. In response to his brother’s sanctions, Klass left Team GB for Team Latvia. He has framed his decision as a precaution against official censure on his own accounts, but he has said he’s had to negotiate extensively with officials to protect his right to compete.
It’s unclear whether Kurts will return to international competition before his ban is up, but last month, the brothers posted behind-the-scenes clips paddling shirtless for a photo shoot with their new sponsor: OnlyFans.
“So Much Freedom”
The range of content athletes post on OnlyFans is as varied as the athletes themselves. Poppinga’s and Fonoimoana’s pages are suggestive—lingerie, bikini content shot to look like modeling rather than volleyball. Stanley, the ultrarunner, posts nude photos alongside race recaps and training logs. Other athletes, including some with official sponsorships, post explicitly pornographic content.
Whether their content is SFW, though, the brand they’re associated with is not. OnlyFans was popularized by sex workers and remains, at its core, an adult platform—its revenues are overwhelmingly driven by explicit content.
Jason Mann, CEO of the digital marketing agency Stock and chief growth officer at The Players Company, works with brands evaluating athlete partnerships. He says any connection to OnlyFans complicates the math for every other potential sponsor.
“A lot of them aren’t going to look even further past that,” he says. “And if that’s not what their brand wants to be represented by, they’re going to immediately look for someone else.”
He sees this as less of a concern for athletes in sports whose culture already runs adult—UFC, boxing, MMA—or whose sponsorship opportunities are otherwise negligible.
Athletes with credible, established brands outside of OnlyFans are also less likely to be penalized for taking advantage of the platform as a moneymaking channel, says Valerie Middleton, EVP at M+C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment. “The narrative shifts from ‘this is who you are’ to ‘this is how you monetize,’ which is a critical distinction for both fans and brand partners.”
Poppinga recently renewed her contract for a second year. She doesn’t know how long the deal will last, or how long OnlyFans will keep investing this heavily in athletes, but for now, she’s left her other remote job.
The question has taken on new urgency since majority owner Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-born pornography-site entrepreneur, died in March. He had been trying to sell his stake, and according to U.K. filings published in early May, control of OnlyFans parent company Fenix International has passed to his widow, Yekaterina Chudnovsky. The platform’s next chapter, and its appetite for athlete sponsorships, is uncertain.
For now, Poppinga’s goal is simple. “It’s just given me so much freedom to do what I want to do,” she says, “which is actually give myself a shot to compete and play at the highest level that I possibly can, for however long.”
