Rainbet's NIP jersey, one season in
Ninjas in Pyjamas put Rainbet's name on its Counter-Strike 2 jersey in May 2025. A year on, the deal has done what sponsorships like this are meant to do. Whether the operator underneath the logo has earned it is a separate question.
What the deal actually did
Rainbet became NIP's main jersey partner starting May 2025. First worn by the Counter-Strike 2 roster. The visibility on that shirt across a full competitive season, plus tournament appearances, plus stream overlays, is worth more in brand equity than most operators can buy in a straight ad-spend line.
The signal it sends to a young, online, esports-native audience is stability. Longevity. Money on the balance sheet. That's what jersey deals communicate. Whether the balance sheet actually looks like that is invisible from outside.
- Rainbet full review, sub-scores, esports coverage, test log
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The piece the sponsorship doesn't fix
A jersey patch signals staying power. It signals nothing about regulatory posture. Rainbet's licensing sits under Anjouan, a regulator widely characterised in independent industry coverage as unproven, and one that relaunched licence-selling operations in 2023 after a period of dormancy. That's a considerably thinner floor than Stake's post-reform Curacao position.
Independent coverage has also described a distributed influencer marketing footprint concentrated on football-adjacent X communities, which is a legal marketing tactic but one that scales attention faster than the compliance underneath it.
How we read it
Sponsorship spend is a marketing signal, not a regulatory one. It tells you an operator can pay for visibility. It tells you nothing about how they'll handle your withdrawal.
Our Rainbet review scores the product as we found it. The esports coverage is genuinely strong, and the crypto onboarding is clean. The reservations that were there a year ago are the same reservations that are there now. The sponsorship changed the visibility, not the fundamentals. See the Rainbet review for the current sub-scores.
The wider takeaway
Watch the next 12 months. If Rainbet upgrades its licensing posture, the sponsorship will look like the confidence signal it was designed to be. If it doesn't, the sponsorship will start looking like a marketing layer that outran the underlying operator, and we'll say so.