Avery Poppinga estimates it costs about $50,000 a year to be a professional beach volleyball player. Coaching, flights, hotels, gym memberships, and gear are nearly all paid out of pocket, as USA Volleyball only provides stipends to its top four teams…and even those athletes tend to work side hustles just to get by. In 2024, Poppinga was balancing a remote job with her athletic career when a friend pointed her toward OnlyFans.
She signed a sponsorship deal in February 2025, and now she can travel to any event she wants, bring her coach to international competitions, and help cover the expenses of her team partner. “It’s the most fulfilling year I’ve ever had in the sport,” she explained in a recent interview, “and it’s allowed me to be the best player that I’ve been to this point.”
Poppinga is one of approximately 285 professional athletes now on OnlyFans. The roster includes speed skating, bobsled, cliff diving, surfing, motorcycle racing, ultrarunning, tennis, combat sports, and more every month. OnlyFans has said 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.” The platform has even built a dedicated sports landing page and a free-to-watch docuseries on its SFW streaming arm, OFTV.
The economics of why so many athletes are joining isn’t complicated. Falyn Fonoimoana has been a professional beach volleyball player for more than 14 years, and in her best seasons the prize money barely reaches $20,000 to $30,000. Definitely not enough to live on, especially when most of that money simply goes back into getting to the next tournament. At one point, she was working as many as four jobs simultaneously, including 12-hour coaching days right before her own tournaments. “I should have been recovering and doing all the right things to make sure that my body was ready,” she said. “Instead, I was working to make sure that I could pay rent and pay for my kid’s food.”
As her Instagram following grew, she began supplementing her income with brand collaborations, which pay anywhere from $500 to $2,500 each. But it wasn’t until she signed her OnlyFans sponsorship last year that things began to feel stable. And her content is totally safe-for-work, featuring workout gear, bikinis, and the same uniform she competes in. She also has a VIP page where fans pay to chat with her directly. Are some creepy? Yes, but as she explained, she was already getting those on Instagram. At least on OnlyFans, she is getting paid to deal with them.
But it’s not just female athletes. Bart Swings won gold in the mass start speed skating event at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. He rents an apartment in the Netherlands each winter because Belgium, where he lives, doesn’t have a long-track ice rink. And with a training and competition schedule that takes him to Salt Lake City, Calgary, Japan, and China, he can’t exactly work a regular 9-5 job. That’s why he signed an OnlyFans sponsorship deal ahead of the 2026 Winter Games. The deal makes up a “really meaningful part” of his income, and is also entirely safe-for-work. The new sponsorship also didn’t phase his other major sponsor, an engineering company, which was reportedly pleased with all the press attention the OnlyFans sponsorship generated.
Not all athletes on the platform have an official sponsorship deal. Many joined independently after realizing that they can monetize their athletic careers just like creators have been doing for years: through a subscription model. Not only does OnlyFans allow them to connect with their fans more intimately, but it can also pay for them to focus on training and the sport they love. Some post training footage and travel content, while some post NSFW content. The platform accommodates both, which is why so many different athletes across different sports have joined.
But the OnlyFans association can create complications for some athletes. Governing bodies in cycling and canoe slalom have penalized athletes for OnlyFans partnerships, treating the logo the same way they treat tobacco or alcohol sponsors. Two Latvian-British canoe slalom brothers who signed with the platform faced bans from their governing bodies, with one brother leaving Team Great Britain for Team Latvia over it. The platform’s reputation precedes it in every boardroom conversation these athletes have with traditional sponsors. But the truth is that most traditional sponsors never give most of these athletes real consideration, so why should these athletes worry about them?
Instead, OnlyFans offers the kind of freedom athletes want. Poppinga renewed her contract with the platform for a second year and left her remote job. “It’s just given me so much freedom to do what I want to do,” she said, “which is actually give myself a shot to compete and play at the highest level that I possibly can, for however long.” Isn’t that what most athletes want at the end of the day?