A new deal for Curry
After 13 years as a key figure for Under Armour’s footwear category, Stephen Curry has chosen to develop his career in the shoe business with a surprising new partner.
Basketball star Stephen Curry has announced a new ten-year deal for his own-name athletic footwear brand. The Curry brand will now become part of Li-Ning. The deal is reported to be worth $400 million.
Stephen Curry plays for San Francisco-based Golden State Warriors in the NBA. He launched the Curry brand with Under Armour in 2020 after a longtime partnership between the athlete and the Baltimore-based brand. In November 2025, Mr Curry announced that he was separating the brand from Under Armour, with a final release, the Curry 13 shoe, coming to market in February 2026.
At the start of June, the athlete announced that the future of the Curry brand lay with Li-Ning. Plans include opening Curry brand stores, in the US and overseas, and moves into other sports, including golf. “This is bigger than a shoe deal,” Stephen Curry says. “This is the partnership of a lifetime.” He says he admires Li-Ning as “a company truly rooted in sports innovation” and dedicated to creating quality products.
He also likes that the Chinese brand has a high-profile athlete, former gymnast Li Ning, a winner of five Olympic gold medals (four more than Stephen Curry), as its founder. “He is an athlete who has built one of the world’s most premium sportswear brands over the last 35 years,” the basketball star says.
These comments are meaningful. Stephen Curry is under contract for the forthcoming NBA season. When the season ends, in June 2027, he will be 39 years old and, surely, close to retirement. His career has a long list of highlights. In addition to his Olympic gold with the US in Paris in 2024, he helped his national team win the basketball World Cup in 2010 and 2014. He has contributed to four championship wins for the Golden State Warriors and has twice won the NBA’s most valuable player award. In 2016 and 2021, he had the highest points-per-game average in the league. But he seems also to have had an eye on his post-basketball future for many years.
Beyond playing
He also seems to regard his relationships with major sports footwear companies as much more than just a series of athlete-endorsement deals. He is on the record, as having said, to Sports Illustrated nearly a decade ago, that he viewed his entry into the footwear business as a chance to build something that will last “long beyond my playing career”.
Mr Curry says he has long admired the way Michael Jordan has moved from basketball star to highly successful footwear entrepreneur. But he also insists that he wants to shape his business career in a way that is “authentic to me”.
He signed his first agreement with Under Armour in 2013, having previously been on Nike’s athlete roster. The new partners worked together over the following 12 months on the development of the first shoe that bore his name, the Curry 1, which made its debut at the start of 2015.
Under Armour’s founder and chief executive, Kevin Plank, was delighted. A former American football athlete, Mr Plank launched Under Armour in 1996 as a supplier of technical apparel for his favourite sport. It took a further decade for Under Armour to enter the footwear business and, when it did, football was once again its target market. The footwear cleats it launched that year soon captured more than 20% of the market. In that first year, the brand’s footwear category contributed revenues of just over $25 million.
Own brand
Another decade on, Under Armour’s footwear business was worth more than $1 billion per year. Stephen Curry was a key part of that success. After the launch of the Curry 1, Kevin Plank described him as “one of the most dynamic and popular young stars in the NBA”.
By 2020, Stephen Curry was ready to take his career as an entrepreneur to the next stage. In agreement and still in partnership with Under Armour, he launched Curry as a brand in its own right, with the promise of ploughing a percentage of revenues into grass-roots sports opportunities for people in low-income communities.
Part of the family
In 2023, Under Armour and Stephen Curry marked a decade of working together. Building upon “the success and accomplishments” of that first decade, they set out to “continue driving product solutions and innovation, impacting communities across the globe and growing Under Armour and Curry together”.
Kevin Plank remained effusive in his appreciation for his star signing. He said: “Stephen is one of the greatest talents of our generation. He embodies what it means to be an Under Armour athlete and is an integral part of the Under Armour family. We are excited to keep building together.”
For his part, Stephen Curry said ten years of working with the Baltimore-based company had shown him they were able to “build great things together”. He added: “It is all about impacting athletes and creating products that perform and resonate with them.” The tenth shoe in the series cemented this tenth-anniversary celebration and Under Armour made the athlete the president of the brand that bore his name.
When growth stops
But that year, 2023, was the last in a while in which revenues grew for Under Armour. It posted a full-year figure of $5.9 billion, up by 3% year on year, with footwear sales contributing $1.5 billion. Its financial year ends on March 31 each calendar year. The company’s revenues slipped to $5.7 billion in 2024, with footwear falling to $1.4 billion. In 2025, the numbers were down again, with total revenues falling to $5.2 billion and footwear sales bringing in $1.2 billion. For the 12 months ending March 31, 2026, revenues went down again, reaching $5 billion in total, with the footwear category contributing $1.1 billion.
By the time the 2026 results came out, confirming three straight years of falling revenues, what everyone knew already to be the last of the Under Armour releases of Curry shoes, the Curry 13, had come to market. Lightweight and with high levels of stability, grip technology, and what Under Armour insisted was its best cushioning to date, it presented the Curry 13 as a shoe that brought together years of insight and on-court feedback in “one final expression of performance and style”.
Within three months, the news of the switch to Li-Ning had become public.
Stephen Curry helped Under Armour build its footwear category into a $1.5 billion business. Credit: Under Armour
