Sharapova fronts Polymarket’s push into ATP tennis markets

Maria Sharapova posted the ad herself on September 3, straight to her own account on X rather than through a separate campaign rollout. In it, the five-time Grand Slam champion talks about following tennis matches on Polymarket and trading contracts tied to how those matches turn out — an athlete’s own voice doing the pitch instead of a generic sponsorship spot with her face pasted on top. Sportico’s Kurt Badenhausen picked up on the campaign and connected the dots publicly: Polymarket brought Sharapova on specifically to push its tennis vertical, and the timing lines up with the platform’s new status as an official prediction-market provider for the ATP Tour.

That ATP deal is what makes Sharapova’s involvement make sense rather than looking like a random celebrity booking. Polymarket signed with the ATP Tour, the organization running men’s professional tennis worldwide, in early August, and the agreement made the platform the tour’s official prediction-market partner. Buried in that same deal is something with more actual utility than a marketing title: exclusive rights to broadcast ATP matches through Sportradar, the same data and streaming provider Polymarket already leaned on for other sports.

Live match footage sitting on the same platform where someone can place a trade on that match closes a gap that used to send users elsewhere. A viewer no longer needs a separate stream open in another tab while trading blind on a delayed scoreboard; the match and the market sit in the same place, updating together. Sharapova puts a recognizable face on a partnership that’s really about distribution and access rights, and having a name that carries actual authority inside tennis makes the tennis vertical land as more than the fourth or fifth sport a betting-adjacent platform bothered to add.

Genius Sports gave Polymarket a similar live-streaming and integrity-monitoring arrangement for other sports not long before this ATP deal, so tennis fits an established pattern rather than starting something new. Lock down the rights, sign someone the audience already trusts, and let both push the vertical at once — that’s the playbook, running for a second sport in fairly short order.