Li ning bets big on curry: Not Just Basketball, the 60 Billion Golf Market Is the Ultimate Battlefield

A decade-long contract worth over $400 million tightly binds Li Ning Company to Stephen Curry. While the outside world is still debating whether this NBA all-time three-point king can save Li Ning's declining basketball business, a more hidden and more in line with the high-end logic of sports brands has emerged — the global golf apparel market, valued at over 60 billion yuan. This may be Li Ning's boldest brand experiment to date.

Cracks in the Basketball Empire and the Super Bet

Basketball was once Li-Ning’s proudest category and its strongest moat. In 2012, Li-Ning signed a 10-year, US$100 million deal with Dwyane Wade, and later launched the “Way of Wade” line before upgrading the partnership to a lifetime contract, once serving as a benchmark for collaborations between Chinese sports brands and NBA stars. However, this dividend is fading at a visibly rapid pace. Financial reports show that Li-Ning’s basketball category retail sales fell by 21% and 19% in 2024 and 2025, respectively, making it the biggest decliner among the group’s five core categories for two consecutive years; its share of the basketball market on the three major e-commerce platforms—Tmall, JD.com, and Douyin—also shrank from 28.8% in 2022 to 21.8% in 2025.

Faced with a continuously shrinking market, Li Ning needs a symbol with greater universal appeal than Wade. Curry is undoubtedly the best candidate—four-time champion, Olympic gold medalist, with over 150 million global fans, and his jersey sales have topped the NBA for four consecutive years. The projected revenue for the 2025-26 season is $159.6 million. Even though Curry is already 38 years old, his Baidu search index consistently remains several times higher than Wade's. According to Guosen Securities' calculations, the peak revenue of the Wade series for Li Ning is about 2.5 billion yuan, while the current scale of the Curry brand is only around $100 million, indicating significant potential for commercialization growth. Li Ning's co-CEO Qian Wei has previously stated that even if the revenue from the basketball category continues to face pressure, the company will still increase its investment in sports resources and product innovation. Clearly, signing Curry is the ultimate embodiment of this intention.

From sneakers to golf clubs, a curve leading to high-net-worth individuals.

If basketball is what Li-Ning must hold steady in the present, then golf is the future it is betting on. According to reports from Lanxiong Sports, during the bidding negotiations, Curry’s team explicitly requested the creation of an exclusive golf sub-line. This was not a spur-of-the-moment idea—Curry’s obsession with golf is well known throughout the sports world. He has publicly said that he hopes to qualify for the U.S. Open as an amateur. For a superstar who is planning the narrative of his career’s final chapter, a move into golf is not only about personal interest, but also directly determines the vitality of his commercial life after retirement.

Li-Ning had already laid the groundwork for this move. Since 2023, its premium sports fashion brand LI-NING1990 has been entering the golf market, successively launching product lines such as “SWING MASTER,” collaborating with the Korean golf lifestyle brand cloveclub on a co-branded collection, and signing multiple Chinese women’s professional golfers. On the distribution side, LI-NING1990 has already entered key golf courses such as Shenzhou Peninsula in Wanning, Hainan, and Mission Hills in Dongguan, quietly completing its initial market positioning. With this Curry partnership, Li-Ning is able to integrate its scattered golf initiatives into a complete product line and, for the first time, gain global visibility.

The market logic behind this is quite clear. According to data from Huajing Industry Research Institute, the global retail market for golf products reached approximately US$20.9 billion in 2023, with apparel accounting for 44.63% of retail sales, equivalent to about US$9.343 billion (over RMB 63 billion). Although China’s golf apparel market is only around RMB 1.4 billion in size, its growth momentum is evident: in 2024, the number of golf course participants in China reached 4.06 million, while the number of registered junior players grew by 12% year on year. More importantly, the golf demographic is characterized by high average spending, strong social attributes, and a pronounced “identity symbol” function, making it a hard currency for sports brands seeking access to a premium lifestyle market.

Zhang Li, chairman of Haofu Golf Club, analyzed that golf is a “touchstone” for the premiumization of sports brands. Its requirements for fabrics, tailoring, and scenario adaptability can push brands to upgrade their R&D and supply chains. At the same time, as golf is part of mainstream business culture in Europe and the United States, Li-Ning’s entry point through Curry is essentially a preemptive move to build a penetration channel to high-net-worth users for its globalization. In other words, this is not just about selling clothes, but a deep restructuring of brand momentum and consumer demographics.

Anta has already deployed heavy forces—how can Li-Ning break the deadlock?

Before Li-Ning, the domestic sportswear brands’ battle for the golf market had already begun. In 2022, Anta’s FILA established the independent FILA GOLF business, and currently operates stores inside top golf clubs such as Mission Hills Shenzhen and Sheshan in Shanghai, building an “elite sports” brand image. Descente has opened more than 80 golf specialty stores in China, leveraging its professional skiing heritage to expand into golf-related scenarios. Skechers also introduced its golf product line to China in 2020. Compared with these early movers, the biggest variable Li-Ning has is Curry himself.

Curry’s global influence can instantly bring Li-Ning Golf products into the mainstream spotlight, delivering a level of exposure efficiency that other brands can hardly match through tournament sponsorship alone. But the risks are equally pronounced: Curry’s existing fan base is primarily made up of basketball audiences, which does not fully align with the consumer profile of golf. Converting basketball-driven traffic into actual purchasing power for the golf category will require exceptionally strong product storytelling and carefully crafted usage scenarios. In addition, Curry’s professional career is already entering its final stage, and whether his golf ability can truly sustain the narrative of “making a run at the U.S. Open” will directly affect the long-term credibility of this product line.

According to a research report by SPDB International, if Li Ning can quickly launch the Curry signature basketball shoe line, revenue from its basketball category is expected to stop declining in the second half of 2026. Meanwhile, the opening of standalone Curry brand stores in both China and the United States, including golf products, would provide a crucial foothold for Li Ning’s overseas expansion. But beyond the short-term boost to performance, the essence of this bold bet is that Li Ning is trying to use the next decade to pull the brand out of the zero-sum battle in professional basketball and push it into the much broader arena of sports lifestyle.

2.7 billion bet, Li Ning's global leap.

While the market is focused on the $400 million contract value, one detail is easily overlooked: the partnership between Li-Ning and Curry is not a simple endorsement deal, but “brand co-creation.” The two sides will jointly develop multi-category gear and open standalone stores, while Curry will also have the right to sign other athletes under his personal brand. This means Li-Ning is trying to replicate a co-branded model similar to “Li-Ning × Curry,” maintaining the professional attributes of its main brand while using the Curry brand to reach a younger, more global consumer base.

This brings to mind a remark by Li Ning Co-CEO Qian Wei: “It may affect the financial statements in the short term, but in the long run it is beneficial and empowering for the group.” From persisting with investment despite a 21% decline in basketball retail sales in 2024, to now spending heavily to sign Curry and further expanding into golf, Li Ning is demonstrating a kind of strategic patience—one that no longer simply pursues scale growth, but instead focuses on building brand value. The golf category may find it difficult to contribute significant revenue in the short term, but the high-net-worth consumers and global channels it targets are precisely the key step for Li Ning to break through the ceiling of its “China Li Ning” phase.

Of course, the books must eventually be balanced. With a total contract value of RMB 2.7 billion, plus subsequent R&D, distribution, and marketing investments, Li-Ning needs to tell a sufficiently convincing growth story in the golf market. While FILA GOLF has already secured mindshare among golf consumers and DESCENTE has built a moat through professional apparel, whether Li-Ning can leverage Curry’s cross-industry appeal to break through still depends on whether its product strength can live up to expectations. After all, there is more separating a pair of basketball shoes and a golf polo shirt than fabric technology alone; they are divided by an entirely different discourse system of lifestyle.

For Li-Ning, Curry is not just a signature sneaker waiting to be redefined, but a ticket into high-net-worth sports social circles. And the price of that ticket is a decade-long brand march with almost no way back.