In June 2018, when the Golden State Warriors were on the verge of winning back-to-back championships, one of their sponsors, the champagne brand Moët & Chandon, had a request.
Could it put a gold bathtub filled with champagne bottles in the locker room for the celebration?
The Warriors were playing the Cleveland Cavaliers that year, and the first opportunity to clinch the series came in Cleveland. The management for the Cavaliers’ arena said no to the bathtub. So Eric Housen, the Warriors’ vice president of team operations, decided to employ some subterfuge.
He and his team put the bathtub on a dolly, covered it with a tarp, put cases of celebration-ready beer on top and wheeled it into the visitors’ locker room undetected.
The Warriors won that day. When the players and coaches returned to the locker room after their trophy presentation, a bathtub filled with three dozen magnum bottles of special-edition Moët & Chandon champagne (ranging from $1,250 to $1,500 each) greeted them so they could shake, pop and spray it all over one another in front of television cameras and media hordes.
This week, the National Basketball Association will crown a new champion, and regardless of whether the Oklahoma City Thunder or the Indiana Pacers win, the players, coaches, team staff and even some family members will be doused in bubbly alcohol. Mostly champagne, but some beer, too. It’s a tradition that goes back decades, fueled by the overwhelming emotion associated with winning a championship.
But what began as a spontaneous celebration has now been codified. For some brands, that means an opportunity for visibility that is hard to replicate.
“This is an emotional time when the team wins,” said Lisa Delpy Neirotti, an associate professor of sport management at the George Washington University School of Business. “The fans feel part of it. It brings a sense of community and camaraderie with everyone involved. When they go to celebrate something, the goal is that they will pick out Moët versus some other brand.”
Sponsorships are the second-biggest source of revenue for the N.B.A. and its teams after media rights deals. Money from team sponsors helps those organizations afford the state-of-the-art facilities and high-priced rosters that it often takes to win championships. Companies pay to have their names on stadiums, arenas, practice facilities and team jersey patches. Events like the N.B.A. finals and the league’s in-season tournament, the N.B.A. Cup, have presenting sponsors.
Champagne sponsorships in sports have grown 37 percent in the past three years, but they still make up less than 1 percent of sponsorship spending from the alcoholic beverage industry, said Bob Lynch, the founder of SponsorUnited, which tracks and analyzes sponsorships across sports.
Some venues have lounges, signs or V.I.P. experiences sponsored by a champagne company. Its products sometimes become part of the concession offerings around arenas and stadiums.
“It’s putting their brand in front of, in many cases, completely new consumer segments,” said Liz Thach, the president of the Wine Market Council.
She added that champagne or other wine brands often sold smaller bottles, which feel more accessible to consumers, in sports venues. “If their team is winning, and they see players being sprayed with this, it’s something people want to participate in,” Ms. Thach said.
Major League Baseball and Formula 1 are also known for their history of champagne celebrations. The National Football League didn’t have champagne celebrations until three years ago because it bans alcohol in locker rooms; the league has now lifted that ban for the Super Bowl. This year, the Philadelphia Eagles celebrated with Armand de Brignac, a champagne brand commonly called “Ace of Spaces” and owned by Shawn Carter, the rapper known as Jay-Z. The brand sent special bottles to some Eagles executives.
Moët & Chandon is a sponsor of the U.S. Open tennis tournament. In 2024, the brand placed bottles of its champagne where the winner, Aryna Sabalenka, would see it after her victory. Ms. Sabalenka picked up a magnum bottle and sprayed her team with it.
“We want rawness, we want real,” said Scott Bowie, the senior vice president of champagne and sparkling for Moët. Mr. Bowie is keenly aware of the danger that the celebrations become overcommercialized and people recoil. “It’s a very delicate balance,” he added. “For us, it’s not about overshadowing the moment or being the moment — it’s about supporting the moment.”
Data from SponsorUnited shows that Moët & Chandon is the biggest champagne spender in sports, about $64 million each year, counting broader brand deals with its French parent company, LVMH. Next are Veuve Clicquot and Dom Pérignon. Le Chemin du Roi, launched by the rapper 50 Cent in 2018, is the champagne brand with the largest number of U.S. sports deals.
Moët & Chandon is an official N.B.A. sponsor. The brand and the league declined to share financial terms of their arrangement. Having a league deal means the company can use images from N.B.A. celebrations in marketing campaigns nationwide. Without the league deal, it would be limited to using them in the local market of the team with which it has a deal.
But Moët’s league partnership does not require teams to use its champagne. The Pacers have a deal with Le Chemin du Roi, making it likely to be their champagne of choice if they win the championship. The Thunder do not have a champagne sponsorship.
Still, many teams use Moët, which often makes special bottles for their celebrations. The Warriors teamed up with Moët for all four of their recent championships, with Moët investing more than $100,000 for each one. In 2016, when they lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers despite taking a 3-1 series lead, Mr. Housen, the Warriors’ vice president of team operations, flew 250 bottles of Moët from Oakland, Calif., to Cleveland and back to Oakland for a celebration that never happened. That year, Cleveland celebrated with custom bottles of rose champagne from Moët.
And sometimes a team doesn’t need a formal deal. When the Milwaukee Bucks won the title in 2021, they celebrated with Armand de Brignac thanks to P.J. Tucker, who played on that team.
“Jay-Z sent me I don’t know how many bottles of Ace of Spades,” Mr. Tucker said.
Armand de Brignac has no official sports sponsorships, said Monika Kaufman, a sommelier and the president of commercial operations in North America for the company.
“Mr. Carter, of course, has a lot of relationships, as you would imagine, with celebrities, and not just sports but film, music and fashion,” Ms. Kaufman said. “So obviously he chooses to give to whoever he likes to give.”
The Lakers celebrated their Covid-era 2020 championship inside the league’s secluded campus at Walt Disney World, the N.B.A. Bubble, where teams and league personnel lived for months after a strict quarantine period. Sourcing champagne wasn’t easy, given the league’s restrictions on things could go in and out of the bubble. They used G.H. Mumm champagne, the same brand the Chicago Bulls used for Michael Jordan’s final championship in 1998.
The champagne itself isn’t the only opportunity for marketing at a locker room championship celebration. Branding also appears on the oversize eyewear, which resembles ski goggles, that players wear to protect their eyes from champagne sprays. (They became commonplace about 10 years ago.)
Moët has made a version in the past, but apparel brands like to get in on the action, too. When the Boston Celtics won in 2024, their star player Jayson Tatum wore goggles with “CHAMP” written across the lens and a large Jordan Brand logo right between his eyes. (Mr. Tatum has a larger sponsorship deal with the Jordan Brand.) When the New York Liberty won the Women’s National Basketball Association championship a few months later, Breanna Stewart’s goggles had Puma written across the front.
The only beverage brand that pays to have its products and signage inside the championship locker room no matter who wins is Michelob Ultra. Neither the league nor Michelob Ultra would share financial details, but that deal began with the 2020 celebration inside the N.B.A. Bubble. There and in every finals since, when a team wins a clinching game, league personnel rush into the locker room to dress it with Michelob Ultra beer banners.
But in keeping with the celebration tradition, Michelob Ultra will provide its beer in bottles shaped and sized like champagne bottles.
And some players prefer beer. When the Denver Nuggets won the championship in 2023, Nathaniel Butler, a longtime N.B.A. photographer who now works for the league, found the Nuggets star Nikola Jokic standing in a corner with a beer after spraying his teammates with champagne.
“I just like beer better,” Mr. Butler recalls Mr. Jokic telling him.
Mr. Butler has photographed 39 championship celebrations, starting with Boston’s win in 1986.
Back then, the locker rooms were often just cubbies for changing with folding chairs in front of them, and the celebrations were less organized. Today, players enter championship locker rooms with not only tarps covering their lockers but the N.B.A. finals logo displayed across those tarps. And, of course, a table arranged with buckets of the carefully chosen brands of champagne and beer.
“Over the years, there’s been different brands and things involved, but it’s still all about just the pure joy of winning the championship,” Mr. Butler said.
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture.
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