Wednesday Special Feature | The Future of Professional Sports in NIL
A new segment by Optimum Sports Consulting- the Wednesday Special Feature. OSC provides valuable, actionable NIL resources for athletes, administrators, agencies and sport professionals.
Wednesday Special Feature | The Future of Professional Sports in NIL
By: Alexander Kaczynski
It took only a little over one month after the start of the NIL era for professional sports teams to offer NIL deals to student-athletes when the Florida Panthers signed a deal with University of Miami (FL) quarterback D’Eriq King. The Atlanta Braves followed suit a few weeks later, announcing partnerships with University of Georgia gymnast Rachel Baumann and Georgia Tech quarterback Jordan Yates. Since then, the Florida Panthers and newly established Charlotte FC (MLS) have created NIL programs looking for student-athlete ambassadors.
While these deals have been beneficial to the individual professional teams, gaining publicity and general good will from fans who might not otherwise have been interested in that team/sport, it is only the tip of the iceberg for the potential for professional sports in the NIL realm. Coordinated league-sponsored NIL programs, with strategic partnerships with certain conferences, can help student-athletes, professional sports leagues, and schools/conferences prosper.
Professional Sports Leagues
It is often said how leagues wish that they could build their perfect superstars, or how a specific player has the potential to be a marketing star the second they walk into an organization. Yes, a lot of it has to do with their talent and ability, but the player’s brand plays a huge role too.
Zion Williamson was a household name for basketball fans while he was still in high school, making hoop mixtapes that were getting millions of views. Zion, like most of the NBA’s superstars, became famous through YouTube and highlight reels, in an era with no NIL rights for student-athletes. Imagine how many superstar brands the NBA could build now if these players were not only marketing their brand with mixtapes, but also were a part of coordinated NBA NIL marketing schemes. The potential growth of their brand, and the fans that would be added along the way, could pay for the deals numerous times over.
By having the leagues as a whole serve as the sponsoring partner and not the individual teams, any potential issues surrounding conflict of interest can be mitigated. Currently, the professional teams that have been launching NIL programs, such as the Atlanta Braves, Florida Panthers, and Charlotte FC, have not been able to sign players from their respective sports. If a league comes in and offers these sponsorship deals, this will allow the league to be able to sign collegiate athletes from their own sport and thereby grow the athlete’s brand in ways that an individual team cannot do at this moment. This will create a structured system where the individual teams sign student-athletes from other sports, and the leagues sign players from their own.
Additionally, leagues that have trouble marketing their best players, such as the MLB [1], can use NIL deals to help build the brands of potential players while they are still in college, so that by the time they reach the league they will be well known. By tapping into the size of college sports, as well as fans of the different schools (not particularly the sport), professional leagues can broaden the exposure of future athletes exponentially. This helps both the teams and the athletes with future marketing.
By establishing NIL deals with college football players, both the Florida Panthers and the Atlanta Braves have increased their exposure to fans that otherwise might not have been interested in hockey or baseball. If leagues do this as a whole, such as the MLS signing NIL deals with college basketball or football players, it can open a whole new segment of sports fans leading to growth and expansion of their sport.
Schools/Conferences
In addition to NIL deals with student-athletes individually, professional sports leagues could sign strategic sponsorship deals with schools or conferences to offer NIL deals. A possible example of such a deal would be the NFL signing an NIL deal with the SEC to have their players be given specific NIL opportunities. In doing these deals the conferences/schools benefit both directly (in getting their brand out to professional sports fans) and indirectly (high school players might be more interested in going to schools/conferences that have partnership agreements with professional leagues), while the professional sports leagues benefit by strengthening their brand representation across specific geographic locations in America.
Such deals could also be extremely beneficial for professional sports leagues that do not have teams located in a state/city within the geographic location of schools that have large fanbases, such as the University of Alabama (across all major leagues there is not a professional team in the state of Alabama). This same principle applies for colleges/conferences where there are professional sports teams in a city/geographic area where there are no major collegiate programs.
In creating these strategic partnerships, both the schools/conferences and the professional sports leagues can help gain marketing exposure, all while continuing to gain the good will of the public via paying/promoting the NIL opportunity for student-athletes.
[1] Three-time AL MVP and nine-time All-star Mike Trout, widely said to be the best player in baseball, had lower name recognition than NBA player Kenneth Faried (who did not have an all-star appearance) according to Q Scores in 2018.
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