Advertising has been pushing into sports more and more, with ads on jerseys and helmets a recent phenomenon that is leaving sports fans frustrated.
In the r/mlb subreddit, an annoyed fan shared a photo of a New York Mets baseball batting helmet bearing not just the team’s logo but also a large logo for the company Strauss.
Photo Credit: Reddit
“Advertising has basically just [completely] taken over sports,” the original poster lamented in their caption.
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Their sentiment isn’t far off. Major League Baseball partnered with Strauss, a German workwear company, in 2024 to put its logo on batting helmets for the next four years, the first time a brand logo has appeared on them.
Baseball isn’t the only sport pushing advertising with logos on players’ gear, either. The NBA and NHL have both been permitting ads on jerseys and helmets for the past several years, and the NCAA, the association that governs college athletics, is considering allowing ads on student athletes’ uniforms in 2026, per EMarketer.
Meanwhile, advertising during game broadcasts has dramatically increased, as one person shared on Reddit last year, showing an excessive number of ads cluttering the screen.
The oversaturation of advertising in everyday life is having detrimental effects on people’s habits and mental health. It pushes a sense of dissatisfaction with items one already has while encouraging overconsumption, which wastes consumers’ money and uses valuable resources for products that often end up in landfills.
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Sports fans in the comments agreed they were fed up with advertising taking over their favorite pastimes.
“It took over sports decades ago,” one person wrote. “It’s impossible to watch any sport without ads shown to you 24/7.”
Another said they called the Strauss company directly to complain about the ad placement, saying, “I told her the logos on the uniforms makes them look trashy. I said there were plenty of other places to advertise, that they should leave the uniforms alone.”
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