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    Rich Paul, N.B.A. Power Broker, Growing Up and Finding Peace

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    When Rich Paul considers his life now, he sometimes thinks how far it seems from his childhood, growing up Black in a particularly dangerous part of Cleveland.For the past two decades, Mr. Paul, 42, has been a polarizing force in basketball. A power broker in a specialized world, he is slim, 5-foot-8 and sharply dressed, often appearing on the margins of photos snapped at marquee events.Many saw him as LeBron James’s confidant, and later as his agent. But as he built a sports agency, Klutch Sports Group, that rivaled and irritated more established companies, he has worked to separate his identity from that of Mr. James’s.Mr. Paul is now a courtside fixture at N.B.A. games. He collects art. He lives in Beverly Hills. And he is in a yearslong relationship with the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Adele. Mr. Paul has helped N.B.A. players shift power away from teams and to themselves, like when he maneuvered a 2019 trade that sent Anthony Davis to the Los Angeles Lakers to join Mr. James.On Tuesday, Roc Lit 101, an imprint of Random House, will publish his memoir, “Lucky Me.” It is a bid by Mr. Paul to both own his past — growing up with a mother who battled addiction and acknowledging his own drug dealing — and celebrate the way his difficult upbringing, and in particular his father, prepared him for his future.Recently, at a restaurant in a five-star hotel in Midtown Manhattan, with sculptures of tropical birds in the light fixtures, Mr. Paul mused about his hope that athletes would focus on the peace of mind that can come with real financial security, not the fleeting pleasure of social media attention and the temporary financial windfalls that come with it. The idea of finding peace set off another thought.“I come from a place where every day is chaotic. Every. Day,” Mr. Paul said, his voice rising as he began tapping hard on the table to emphasize his words. “Sirens, all day long. You have to wear headphones. I should have been the inventor of Beats, as many sirens as I had to listen to, and yells and cussing outs and everything.”After a moment, he returned to his original point.“These kids, they just want clout,” Mr. Paul said. “I don’t understand it.”One of the main themes of the memoir is the influence Mr. Paul’s father had on him.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIt’s why, he said, he was so passionate about becoming an agent. He had heard so much about players being broke despite initially getting lucrative contracts.“There’s no line down the street to get to knowledge,” Mr. Paul said. “It tells you a lot.”In thinking about Mr. Paul’s memoir, Chris Jackson, the publisher and editor in chief of Roc Lit 101, said he was interested in Mr. Paul as part of a generation of Black men “whose formative experiences were during that period that was defined by crack cocaine and the post-civil rights cocktail of white flight, urban abandonment and families that really struggled to stay together.“And how out of that kind of experience of survival, so much was created, and how the entire country was shifted by people who were kind of forged in that.”The broad strokes of Mr. Paul’s back story have been recounted before, the way his mother had struggled with drug addiction and his father, who had another family, raised him in the family’s corner store. How a chance meeting with Mr. James at an airport in Akron, Ohio, turned into a partnership that changed the course of his life.In the memoir, which was written with the journalist Jesse Washington and features a foreword by Mr. James, Mr. Paul goes further than ever before. He depicts in heartbreaking detail the ways his mother’s absences forced her children to act older than their ages, contrasting those stories with her energy and charisma when she was clean.“It was therapeutic for me, but at the same time I wanted to make sure that people understood it wasn’t all bad,” Mr. Paul said.He writes that his father taught him discipline and how to run a business. Not all of his father’s business dealings were strictly legal, but Mr. Paul said he always ran them with honor. His father’s advice is sprinkled throughout the memoir, as are the ways Mr. Paul learned to make money and earn respect. Dressing well was always a big part of that.He writes of the devastation he felt at losing his father, whom he calls his “moral compass,” in 2000, which led to him selling cocaine for the first time. He shares his unease at selling hard drugs, which had shattered his mother, but said that he was swept up by a desire to compete and win.During lunch in Manhattan, Mr. Paul said he hadn’t felt comfortable publicly sharing stories about selling drugs before, though he knew drugs weren’t exclusive to his community.“I’ve talked about it with clients, just in conversation, and they resonate with it because when you grew up how we grew up it’s in your family,” he said. Two days later, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn, a car picked Mr. Paul up outside a townhouse to take him from one podcast taping to another. (Near the end of the first show, Mr. Paul had been asked to name his favorite Adele song, but, having some editorial control, he requested a different question.)“I try to keep it as private as I possibly can,” Mr. Paul said of his relationship with Adele.Lauren Bacho/NBAE, via Getty ImagesDuring the drive, Mr. Paul made phone calls. He pitched a client to a shoe company, and then called a friend to plan where they would watch the Cleveland Browns game later that day.Suddenly his eyes widened in happiness as he looked at his phone.“A couple got married in my shoes!” he said. Mr. Paul, who has a shoe collaboration with New Balance, showed a photo to a Klutch employee acting as his chief of staff.He FaceTimed with Adele to see how her morning had gone. Then he chose a different watch and different Klutch Athletics sweatshirt, the clothing brand he has created with New Balance, for the next taping.Asked if he has a stylist, Mr. Paul proudly said no.“I used to style LeBron his rookie year,” he said, adding: “I could be anything. I could be a stylist, music executive, coach.”Mr. James was a teenager when he met Mr. Paul, who had a jersey resale business sometimes run out of the trunk of his car. Soon, Mr. James was paying him $48,000 a year, confident Mr. Paul was worth the investment. Mr. Paul watched Mr. James’s career unfold. Then, when Mr. James hired Creative Artists Agency, one of the most powerful agencies in sports and entertainment, Mr. Paul began working for the agency. He helped recruit clients, saying he knew most agents “couldn’t do it.” Mr. Paul was dismissed by some who believed his success came solely because of his friendship with LeBron James.Jim Poorten/NBAE, via Getty ImagesHe met business moguls, from Warren Buffett to Jay-Z, and asked plenty of questions. His friendly boldness attracted people.“Flawlessly confident,” said Rich Kleiman, the longtime manager for the N.B.A. star Kevin Durant, and a founder of Mr. Durant’s media company, Boardroom. Mr. Kleiman was working with Jay-Z when he met Mr. Paul, and saw in him hints of Jay-Z’s self assurance. “There’s a way to be confident where you can make anyone believe you.”When Mr. Paul started Klutch Sports in 2012, nine years after Mr. James’s N.B.A. career began, Mr. James and three other players immediately became clients.Chatter quickly followed — in the news media, primarily anonymous — from other agents questioning Mr. Paul’s qualifications. He had never received a college degree and they viewed him as a lucky member of a star athlete’s entourage.Maverick Carter understands. He grew up in Akron with Mr. James, has handled his business affairs for years and is the chief executive of The SpringHill Company, an entertainment and production company he founded with Mr. James. For a while, he said, it could seem like his “first name was ‘LeBron’s’ and my last name was ‘friend.’” “It’s straight-up disrespectful when they say, ‘Rich Paul is only successful because he’s doing this with LeBron,’” Mr. James wrote in the foreword to Mr. Paul’s memoir. “That’s like saying I don’t demand the same excellence from my partners that I demand of myself, or that Rich’s other clients don’t think for themselves.”Mr. Paul doesn’t argue that he didn’t benefit from his friendship with Mr. James. He just thinks that if he hadn’t been a young Black man getting career help from a powerful friend, and an athlete at that, his story would have been framed differently.Still, Mr. James is entering his 21st N.B.A. season, which means life after LeBron James is in the not-too-distant future for Klutch Sports Group.The agency now has 198 clients between the N.B.A., W.N.B.A., N.F.L. and athletes looking for deals related to their name, image and likeness. Klutch has partnered with United Talent Agency, and Mr. Paul is the co-head of UTA’s sports division.The agency still attracts defectors from other agencies, but it experiences ebbs and flows. Three prominent players’ relationships with Klutch ended this year — Ben Simmons of the Brooklyn Nets, Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves and OG Anunoby of the Toronto Raptors.Some N.B.A. agents have quietly admired what Mr. Paul has accomplished, while others find him too aggressive in pursuing clients from other agencies.Mr. Paul said he was proud that many of his clients began their careers with other agents. He sees it as a sign of his superior ability to connect with players.“This is one thing my dad always taught us: No matter what somebody else is doing to you or done to you, that don’t mean you follow suit,” Mr. Paul said. “You stay the course. You do what you know is right.”There are those who don’t like the credit he gets for fostering an era of player empowerment in the N.B.A. Mr. Paul is known for aggressively advocating for his clients’ interests, even if that means demanding a trade while they are under contract, but he doesn’t shy away from telling them to pull back when he finds their wishes unrealistic.Mr. Paul’s Klutch Sports Group has nearly 200 clients.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAs he navigates the current landscape of athlete management, he worries about the way players and their parents think about branding.“There’s nothing wrong with being a great basketball player and make all the money you can being a great basketball player,” Mr. Paul said. “Because I look at it this way: Being a great basketball player, being able to make four or five, $600 million playing a game of basketball is no different than building a business and selling it.”Mr. Paul’s career has kept him close to superstardom. But recently, his relationship with Adele has thrust him into a spotlight that isn’t always comfortable.“I try to keep it as private as I possibly can,” he said. When he and Adele began attending N.B.A. games together, dozens of search engine optimized headlines followed, asking: “Who is Adele’s boyfriend, Rich Paul?” Last month she even referred to Mr. Paul as her husband while speaking to a fan.“I’m in a place now where I’d rather she be happy than me,” Mr. Paul said. “Not that I don’t want to be happy, I want it to sound the right way. Just understanding the importance of someone that you are involved with, that you’re dating and that you’re spending your time with, that you may love. You understand the importance of them and their happiness.”Love has never been an easy subject for him. His parents never told him they loved him, though he says he has no doubt they did.Now, he said, he makes a point to tell his three children he loves them. It is one lesson he didn’t learn from his father because vulnerability was dangerous when he was growing up.It is one illustration of how different his life is from the one he lived growing up. But he doesn’t want anyone to forget how it started. More

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      in Basket

      4 People Accused of $13 Million in Pro Athlete Fraud Schemes

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      Prosecutors said the people, including a former N.B.A. agent, took money from professional basketball players and spent it on luxury goods and home renovations.Four people were arrested Thursday and charged with collectively defrauding four professional men’s basketball players out of more than $13 million, according to Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.In one scheme, three players were allegedly persuaded to purchase more than $5 million worth of life insurance policies at an enormous markup. In another, a fourth player spent $7 million to buy a women’s professional basketball team, but prosecutors said the money never went toward a purchase. In the third scheme, a player spent $1 million to fund a player representation agency that never existed, according to the indictment.“These defendants believed that defrauding their professional athlete clients of millions of dollars would be a layup,” Williams said in a statement. “That was a huge mistake, and they now face serious criminal charges for their alleged crimes.”Darryl Cohen, Brian Gilder, Charles Briscoe and Calvin Darden Jr. were each charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.Cohen, who was formerly a broker at Morgan Stanley, was also charged with one count of investment adviser fraud. Briscoe, who was formerly a certified N.B.A. agent, was also charged with one count of aggravated identify theft.Cohen, Gilder, Briscoe and Darden could not be reached for comment, and court filings did not list lawyers for any of them. Brandon Reif, a lawyer who previously represented Cohen, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.In a statement, Morgan Stanley, where Cohen worked from 2015 to 2021, said he had been “terminated” in March 2021 and had since been barred from the securities industry. “We fully cooperated with the investigation and have resolved clients’ claims related to Mr. Cohen,” a spokeswoman for the firm said.The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also filed a civil complaint against Cohen.The identities of the professional athletes that prosecutors say were defrauded were not released. But many of the details of the life insurance scheme appear to match claims made by Jrue and Lauren Holiday, Chandler Parsons and Courtney Lee, who previously described allegations of being defrauded by Cohen to The New York Times.Jrue Holiday plays for the N.B.A.’s Milwaukee Bucks, and Lauren Holiday, his wife, is a former professional soccer player. Parsons and Lee are former N.B.A. players. They all said they had filed claims against Cohen with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees brokerage firms.According to the indictment, between about 2017 and 2020, Cohen and Gilder induced three N.B.A. players to purchase about $6.2 million in life insurance policies, from which Cohen and Gilder “secretly profited” about $4.5 million. Cohen allegedly gave about $200,000 of the money to a person with whom he was in a romantic relationship and used the other funds to pay off a former professional baseball player who was threatening to sue him, to pay his credit card bill, and to renovate his home, according to prosecutors.Another plan involved purchasing a women’s professional basketball team, according to the indictment. An N.B.A. player had wanted to purchase the team, but was forbidden from doing so by the N.B.A.’s collective bargaining agreement.The player discussed an “arrangement” with Briscoe, Darden and others, in which the player would indirectly buy the team through a company controlled by one of Darden’s relatives, prosecutors said. The player transferred $7 million to a bank account, which was controlled by Darden, to purchase the team. But instead, prosecutors said, Darden transferred more than $1 million to Briscoe and more than $500,000 to a relative, then spent the rest on cryptocurrencies, a house, luxury cars, art and a piano.Cohen, Briscoe and Darden are also accused of defrauding an N.B.A. player who wanted to start a player representation agency that he would run after he retired, according to court filings. The player gave Briscoe $1 million so the agency could pay expenses involved with signing a highly touted prospect. But prosecutors said the prospect never signed with the agency, and that the purported contract he signed was forged. The money allegedly was transferred to Briscoe, who paid off a debt and gave some of it to Darden, according to the indictment. More

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      in Soccer

      The Hollywood Merger That Could Reshape Soccer’s Transfer Market

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      As two behemoths join forces against boutique agencies in the fight for control and commissions, some fear profits could come before players.LONDON — Everything about the deal seemed to connote vastness. Most obviously, there were the figures: The merger created a company with a combined value of an estimated $5 billion. There was the language, too. A “landmark,” according to Variety. “Seismic,” The Los Angeles Business Journal said.In this case, though, time is the best way to gauge scale. It was in September last year when word filtered out of Los Angeles that two of the world’s biggest talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency and ICM Partners, had decided to join forces, but it was not until June that the union was given the green light.The nine-month delay could be attributed to antitrust investigators combing through the deal, trying to establish whether the unified agency would wield too much power. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly cast an eye over the prospective merger.The central concern was the potential impact on Hollywood from having two of its most influential agencies become one market-dominating behemoth, and what that might mean for the industry. The Screen Actors Guild, for one, expressed concerns that its members might be “disadvantaged” by the deal.At no point did anyone feel the need to mention soccer. It is there, though, where the deal’s impact might be felt most keenly.Both CAA and ICM have, in the last three years, expanded into soccer. In 2019, CAA acquired Base Soccer, one of Britain’s biggest sports agencies, with more than 300 professional clients. A year later, ICM completed a deal to buy the even-bigger Stellar Group, in what was thought to be the most expensive acquisition in the company’s history.For years, Base and Stellar have been powerhouses — Stellar, the largest agency in the sport, represents more than 800 clients — but they have also been rivals, and not always cordial ones. But as soon as the Justice Department signed off on CAA’s acquisition of ICM, they became teammates.That has ramifications, of course, for the firms, the agents who staff them and the players whom they call clients — including stars like Gareth Bale, Jack Grealish and Eduardo Camavinga. But the scale of the combined venture may also have a profound effect on the delicate power balance in the fraught, lucrative player trading business which acts as the financial engine for the most popular sport in the world.Poetic LicenseErkut Sogut, an experienced agent, has written a novel about the sometimes sordid industry in which he works.Gualter Fatia/Getty ImagesThere is one element of Erkut Sogut’s debut novel that, he admits, belongs squarely in the realm of fantasy. Soccer is not, he wants to emphasize, actually controlled by a cabal of superagents who will resort to anything — sabotage, match-fixing, kidnapping, murder — to keep the game and its riches in their vise.Everything else, he maintains, is real. More than that, in fact: The plot of his book, “Deadline,” a thriller set against the backdrop of soccer’s transfer market, is drawn from firsthand experience. Sogut has spent 15 years as an agent, and he is best known for his longstanding association with Mesut Özil, the onetime Arsenal, Real Madrid and Germany playmaker. It is a world, he said, that does not demand a great deal of poetic license.The portrait of the industry he paints is not a flattering one. His characters are, by and large, hucksters and vultures, charlatans and sharks, operating in a sport rife with corruption and addled with cronyism. It is, though, intrinsically familiar: Soccer has grown accustomed to the depiction of agents as puppet masters in sharp suits and designer sunglasses, wielding ultimate influence over the fates of players and teams.That image, though, the one that suffuses Sogut’s novel, does not quite capture the reality of the industry as it stands now. The likes of Jorge Mendes — consigliere to Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho — may be cast as rainmakers possessed of sufficient clout to bend the whole market to their will, but they increasingly seem like the exception, rather than the rule. The world of agents is in convulsion, soccer’s latest battleground between new money and old hands.Though FIFA’s controversial decision, in 2015, to deregulate the industry opened the doors to any family member or friend who wanted to sign up to represent a player — a move that turned a chaotic and irrevocably murky world into a “complete free-for-all,” as one agent put it — the most significant new entrants in recent years have not been cowboy operators hoping to make a quick buck but established corporations panning for new fortunes.That market now includes not only CAA — which first entered soccer by handling the commercial deals of Mendes’s stable of stars — and ICM, but also the California-based sports agency Wasserman. The latter established a beachhead in English soccer in 2006, but has expanded rapidly in the last two years, acquiring another British agency, Key Sports, and the Spanish firm Top Value, as well as opening a German office.The appeal is no mystery. According to FIFA, agents and intermediaries made more than $500 million in commissions last year alone. In 117 deals, those paydays ran to more than $1 million. Even that seems like small change in comparison to, say, the deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City this summer: His representatives are reported to have earned somewhere in the region of $40 million simply for delivering his signature.Those sorts of figures are difficult to resist. “Football is the No. 1 sport in the world,” said Jonathan Barnett, a co-founder of Stellar. “If you want to be a major sports agency, you have to be involved.”The deal that sent Erling Haaland to Manchester City paid off handsomely for him and his representatives.Craig Brough/ReutersThe Benefits of ScalePlenty of people have offered to buy Andy Evans’s business in the last few years. There have been inquiries from other soccer agencies and from firms that have never worked in soccer. There have been talks with several companies in Britain and at least one from the United States. None of the approaches, in Evans’s view, have felt quite right.Sometimes the finances have not added up. Sometimes Evans has not been sold on exactly what a new owner had planned for World in Motion, the agency he founded a quarter century ago. Mostly, though, he has not been inclined to sell at all. “I’ve been running it for a long time,” Evans said. “I’m not especially inclined to not run it.”The client list he has established is an impressive one — it includes Aaron Ramsdale, the Arsenal goalkeeper, and the England defender Conor Coady — but Evans has never had any desire to operate at the sort of scale of Base and Stellar. That was a conscious choice: He has long believed there was an advantage in being a David.He is conscious, though, that the arrival of the corporations, and in particular the merger between CAA and ICM, could start to alter that equation.Whenever he pitches a prospective client, Evans finds that the first question is always the same. “It is always, ‘Who else do you represent?’” he said. “Players want to know that more than anything else. They know that if you don’t know anyone, you can’t get anything done. People just wouldn’t pick up the phone.”That gives the monolith that has emerged from the union of CAA and ICM — and, as a result, between Base and Stellar — an almost unassailable advantage. Neither firm expects to lose any soccer agents as a result of the merger; the intention is to grow the client list rather than shrink it. The answer to the question “Who else do you represent?” might as well be “everyone.”“It has been a huge advantage in terms of commercial, marketing, organization,” Barnett said earlier this year, before the merger had been approved by the Justice Department, but he was adamant that even becoming part of ICM had been “fantastic” for both his staff and his clients. The impact of joining forces with CAA could be only greater still.Heavy LiftingMichael Yormark in 2013. He joined Roc Nation a year later.Omar Vega/Invision/APMichael Yormark, with his cut-glass jaw and his close-cropped hair, does not seem the sort to be easily intimidated. A veteran agent, he has spent the last six years steering the expansion of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label into international sports, painstakingly building out a roster of clients that started, by accident, with Jérôme Boateng and has since grown to include the Belgian star Romelu Lukaku and the Chelsea defender Reece James.Yormark might then have been expected to greet the prospect of a colossal new rival on his turf with something sandwiched between reluctance and dread. Instead, in an interview at Roc’s London headquarters, he seemed genuinely enthusiastic. “That deal is great for us,” he said.His logic is straightforward. Roc Nation’s pitch to prospective clients is based on what Yormark described as a “360-degree service,” one that focuses as much, or more, on meeting their aspirations away from the field than on negotiating new contracts or arranging money-spinning transfers. The label keeps its client list small by design.“The heavy lifting is in helping build a brand, a platform, whatever they want to do,” Yormark said. That is not possible, his company contends, with a client list numbering in the hundreds. “It would be hard to do what we do with 150 clients,” said Alan Redmond, Roc Nation’s head of football. “It would be impossible if we had 400.”Inside CAA, those concerns are airily dismissed. Executives believe that the company’s scale belies its flexibility. The example often cited is the N.B.A. player Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans.Williamson, when selecting his representation, made clear that he wanted a “boutique” feel, precisely the kind of treatment that Roc Nation has made its hallmark. To win his signature, CAA pivoted. Williamson and his family, one CAA executive said, have two points of contact at the agency, no more. The fact that those representatives are merely a tiny part of a giant company is hidden from view.There are others, though, who worry that the type of representation players might receive is far from the most significant consequence of the merger.While the arrival of corporations — with shareholders and workplace cultures and public images to worry about — may hint at an encroaching professionalization in what has traditionally been the kind of lawless industry Sogut’s novel depicts, it also exposes players to the possibility that their futures will be determined by a greater need to bolster a parent company’s bottom line.“If you have an agent who is under pressure to move you early because it is the best thing for the agency, it can compromise a career,” as one veteran agent put it.That has always been a risk for players, of course. They have always been vulnerable to their careers being shaped by their agents’ interests outweighing their own. It is that tension that makes the world of agency such a rich, compelling setting for a thriller, for example. There have always been sharks in the water. The only thing that has changed is the size of the fish. More

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      in Tennis

      Naomi Osaka Leaves IMG to Start Her Own Agency, Evolve

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      Already the world’s top-earning female athlete, Osaka is leaving IMG to start a sports representation company with her longtime agent, Stuart Duguid.The tennis career of Naomi Osaka, one of the biggest sports celebrities in the world, has taken on certain familiar characteristics during the past 16 months.Her achievements have been limited on the court because of a series of self-imposed layoffs to manage her struggles with mental health, motivation challenges and the occasional physical ailment, but she has enjoyed wild success off the court, solidifying her status as one of the world’s highest-paid athletes and by far the highest-paid female athlete.As she sits out the Italian Open to nurse an Achilles’ injury and prepare for the year’s second Grand Slam event, the French Open, set for later this month, Osaka announced that she would be starting a representation agency to take further control of her mounting business portfolio. Osaka and her longtime agent, Stuart Duguid, have left IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, to begin Evolve, which will manage Osaka’s business interests and potentially those of other clients the agency may sign.News of Osaka’s decision to start Evolve was first reported by Sportico.A four-time Grand Slam singles champion, Osaka, 24, earned roughly $60 million last year, according to Forbes, with an estimated $55 million coming from more than a dozen corporate sponsors. She was tied for 12th on the Forbes list of top-earning athletes with Tiger Woods. Conor McGregor, the mixed martial artist, held the top spot on the list, earning $180 million.In an interview Wednesday, Duguid said Osaka’s main priority remained winning tennis matches and tournaments. He said her typical day involves training and treatments with her physiotherapist in the morning followed by lunch, but once that is over, she almost always wants to engage in her cultural or business interests.“She’s not someone who likes to play video games and binge Netflix all day,” said Duguid, who has worked closely with Osaka since she was a teenager.Osaka’s ranking has tumbled in the past year and a half, largely because she has played so little. She was ranked second in the world at the beginning of 2021, but dropped to 85th this year. She made the finals of the Miami Open in April, and is up to 38th, and she hopes to climb back into the top 10 by the end of the year.“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be No. 1 again,” she said at the tournament in Miami.A spokesman for IMG declined to comment.Osaka during the women’s singles final at the Miami Open in April.Wilfredo Lee/Associated PressLosing a star of Osaka’s magnitude is a significant loss for the company, though it will most likely continue to earn money on existing endorsement deals that it negotiated on her behalf. She is one of a handful of transcendent tennis stars IMG has represented in the past two decades. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal left the IMG fold in recent years to start businesses with their agents, Tony Godsick and Carlos Costa.For Osaka, the goal of Evolve is not simply to save money on paying commissions to a third party, but also to grow her business portfolio to $150 million annually in the coming years, from roughly $50 million today, but not by signing deals that put more company logos on her tennis outfits.Duguid said Osaka might actually pare down her endorsement portfolio. The model for Evolve is similar to businesses set up by several of Osaka’s role models in the sports industry, many of whom have become close friends, including LeBron James and Stephen Curry. Osaka was also close with Kobe Bryant, who died in 2020 in a helicopter crash and who was an early mentor to her.She has been weighing a venture like Evolve since the Tokyo Olympics, where she lit the Olympic cauldron and was the face of the Games in Japan, her home country. Osaka has wanted more leeway to invest in businesses, have an ownership stake in them and grow her own. She started Kinlò, a skin care products company focused on people with melanated, or darker, skin tones, last year.That announcement came days after Osaka exited the U.S. Open after being upset by Leylah Fernandez, an unseeded Canadian, in the third round. She announced in a teary news conference after the match that she planned to take an indefinite break from tennis. She had previously taken seven weeks off after she dropped out of the French Open last spring following a conflict with tournament organizers. Osaka had stated that she would not participate in mandatory news conferences after matches. Organizers had threatened to throw her out of the tournament if she did not fulfill her news media obligations, so Osaka withdrew.Neither the breaks nor her drop in the rankings appears to have affected her ability to grow her business off the court. Now, Duguid said, she will try to retain her leading position off the court as she tries to regain the one she once had on it.“This is something that scratches an itch on the side for her,” he said. More

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      in Football

      Lamar Jackson’s Bold Play: A Contract Without an Agent

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      Jackson is leading his own negotiation for a contract extension with the Ravens, challenging the norms of executives’ relationships to N.F.L. players and raising questions about the efficacy of agents.By any argument, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson has had an exceptional career through his first three N.F.L. seasons.Drafted at the end of the first round in 2018, he quickly emerged as one of the league’s most dynamic players, winning six of his first seven regular season starts in his first year and the Most Valuable Player Award in his second. At 24, he is a face of the league and the undisputed centerpiece of the Ravens’ future.Those are among the facts that undoubtedly will be brought up as Jackson and Baltimore executives negotiate an extension of his rookie contract, the massive payday that is usually the largest salary bump in an N.F.L. player’s career and that will determine the market for other franchise quarterbacks nearing the end of their entry-level deals.His peers have already set the table. Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott in March signed a four-year, $160 million contract extension (with $126 million in total guaranteed money). In August, Bills quarterback Josh Allen received a six-year, $258 million deal (with $150 million in total guaranteed money).But as Jackson haggles with his team over the size and conditions of a new deal, he stands out for handling the matter on his own, one of 17 N.F.L. players not represented by a traditional sports agent. Instead, Jackson has enlisted advisers, including his mother, Felicia Jones, to work out the clauses, exceptions and trade-offs.They have offered little insight into the process. He could follow the trend and ask for a four-year deal to increase his flexibility, or he could try to secure a longer and larger contract as Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Allen did. Jones did not respond to a request for comment.By proceeding without traditional representation, Jackson is challenging football orthodoxy, partly promoted by agents, that players can’t possibly understand complex contracts or negotiate one successfully. At the same time, Ravens team executives — who declined to speak for this story — can’t limit their relationship to only talking to Jackson about his labor. They also must tell him what they think his labor is worth.“The agents have told the whole world that the players can’t do anything without them,” said Russell Okung, who began representing himself halfway through his 12-year N.F.L. career as an offensive lineman. “By Lamar going out on his own, it’s scary to the agent world. If he figures it out, others will too.”The challenges stretch beyond dollar signs. “He’s also a Black quarterback and people are used to labor looking a certain way,” Okung added. “He’s pushing up against a myriad of narratives all at once.”Lamar Jackson posed with his mother, Felicia Jones, after winning the Heisman Trophy in 2016 while at the University of Louisville.Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire via AP ImagesFor years, players have complained that agents don’t do enough to earn their fees, which can run as high as 3 percent of a contract’s value. Saving hundreds of thousands of dollars is largely what motivated Richard Sherman, Okung, DeAndre Hopkins and others in recent years to negotiate their own deals, some of which were panned in the media.While those players ditched their agents midcareer, Jackson has gone without an agent from the outset.Under the league’s peculiar economics, that’s understandable because rookie pay scales are tightly prescribed, leaving little room for negotiation. Teams operate under rigid salary caps, and often pick up the fifth-year option in star players’ contracts to keep them at a cheaper figure for an additional year before they become free agents, or in the Ravens’ case with Jackson, to allow for more time to negotiate an extension.Teams can also slap a “franchise tag” on players — a one-year designation of either the average salary of the top five players at the same position (over the past five seasons) or 120 percent of the player’s previous salary — to refrain from paying what the market will bear. To hang on to their star quarterbacks, whose salaries are growing far faster than those of players at other positions, teams can also fill the rest of their rosters with rookies and free agents willing to play for minimum salaries.Jackson’s decision to forgo traditional representation is inviting more scrutiny than other stars’ negotiations because he is in line for a mammoth contract extension that will help set the future market for franchise quarterbacks. Deciphering N.F.L. contracts is complicated because teams can include a host of clauses that when triggered can cost the player dearly. Getting injured away from the field might allow a team to withhold payment. So might an arrest, suspension or an unexcused absence from the club.A player’s yearly salary can be relatively small compared to signing bonuses, payments for making a team’s roster, payments for appearing at voluntary training camps and hitting performance targets like leading a statistical category.Top-tier quarterbacks like Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers have in recent negotiations prevented their teams from assigning them franchise tags. The tag would have kept Brady from hitting the open market after the 2019 season, his last with the Patriots. The reworked contract Rodgers signed in July prevents the Packers from assigning him the franchise tag after the 2022 season, when he is eligible to become a free agent.In 2018, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins negotiated through an agent to reach a rare contract that was 100 percent guaranteed, like those in Major League Baseball and the N.B.A. The percentage of guaranteed money in N.F.L. contracts is increasing, but for most players it is below 70 percent, which makes it easier for teams to justify cutting players.Agents argue that part of their role is to steer players away from deals that give teams too much leverage.“There are so many different ways to not get your money in the N.F.L.,” said Joby Branion, who runs Vanguard Sports Group, an agency that represents 36 N.F.L. players, including Von Miller of the Denver Broncos and Keenan Allen of the Los Angeles Chargers. “The best agents are going to understand that the most important part of any negotiation is leverage. Guarantees in the N.F.L. are not guarantees like in other sports.”Agents also pay for top prospects to train for the combine and talk up their draft value with general managers. Once they join a team, agents help players find marketing opportunities and keep track of their needs during the season.“It’s not just doing negotiating the contract and washing your hands of the player,” said Kim Miale, an N.F.L. agent who leads the football division at Roc Nation Sports, which represents Giants running back Saquon Barkley, Buccaneers running back Leonard Fournette and others. Still, some players do many of these things themselves. Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner said he negotiated a three-year, $54 million extension in 2019 not just to avoid paying his agent, but to become a smarter businessman. He read the league’s collective bargaining agreement, studied other player contracts and sought advice from corporate executives, team owners and even Michael Jordan.During the process, he was aware of how unusual a path he was taking. “There were a lot of people that felt players were not able to negotiate their contracts successfully, so I knew once I committed to doing it, I had to do it right because I knew there was a lot of eyeballs that wanted me not to succeed,” Wagner said.Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner told reporters that reading the book ”Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?” by Reginald Lewis helped him negotiate a three-year, $54 million contract with the team.Ted S. Warren/Associated PressThe union does not push players either way on hiring agents. But it provides players who represent themselves access to its database of contracts and reviews any proposed contract language, just as it does for agents. Since 2016, the union has required agents to send all contracts that average $2 million or more a year to the union’s lawyers for review to ensure that agents are sufficiently protecting their clients.“The union-agent relationship is complicated and sometimes adversarial,” said George Atallah, the spokesman for the N.F.L. Players Association. “But when it comes to representing players, we haven’t changed our model of providing services to the agents.”For now, just 17 players represent themselves according the N.F.L.P.A., but that may change in the coming years as college athletes, now allowed to earn money off their names, images and likenesses before turning pro, become better educated about their value and how others profit from it.“With name, image and likeness rules, you’re going to have more young people recognizing their worth,” said Charles Grantham, the director of the Center for Sport Management at Seton Hall and a former N.B.A. agent and union executive. Agents may be forced to cut their fees to secure players, he added. “It’s definitely going to change the economics of the business.”Over time, Grantham and others said, the younger generation’s awareness could lead them to take the same leap as Jackson.“A lot of it is players waking up to realizing the power that they have and how they can execute if they educate themselves the way that they should,” Wagner said. It’s all part of a bigger picture of players becoming more aware of their potential outside of the sport that they play.” More

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      Endeavor Expands N.B.A. Talent Reach With Stake in BDA Sports

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEndeavor Expands N.B.A. Talent Reach With Stake in BDA SportsBill Duffy, who founded BDA Sports Management more than two decades ago, represents rising basketball stars like the N.B.A.’s Luka Doncic and the W.N.B.A.’s Sabrina Ionescu.Bill Duffy, who represents stars like the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, center, is selling a stake in his agency, BDA Sports, to Endeavor.Credit…Ashley Landis-Pool/Getty ImagesDec. 15, 2020, 9:01 a.m. ETEndeavor, the entertainment and sports conglomerate, expanded its sports representation business Tuesday by purchasing a stake in BDA Sports Management, the firm led by the influential N.B.A. agent Bill Duffy.The partnership calls for Duffy, who represents the rising basketball stars Luka Doncic and Sabrina Ionescu, to become an adviser in the sports division of William Morris Endeavor, one of Hollywood’s major talent agencies. Duffy will continue to serve as chairman and chief executive of BDA Sports, which will retain its own branding and represents an estimated 130 players in the N.B.A., W.N.B.A. and professional leagues internationally.“We don’t really have an uber-N.B.A.-agent in our company,” Mark Shapiro, Endeavor’s president, said in an interview. “I’m certain this will accelerate our growth plan as it relates to representing more N.B.A. players both on and off the court.”Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but Shapiro described Endeavor’s stake as a “meaningful, strategic investment.” WME Sports has provided full-service representation for several tennis and golf clients, including the tennis stars Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, but the sports division’s co-head, Karen Brodkin, said the alliance with Duffy was part of a broader strategy to work with “more clients earlier in their career trajectory” in sports where they haven’t historically. Duffy said the union with WME would position BDA Sports “to build something even bigger and better than what we’ve been able to do.”“The modern athlete has a high expectation for off-the-court opportunities,” Duffy said. “They want to get into gaming, into fashion, into entrepreneurial endeavors. WME has a history of doing that at the highest level, so with this partnership, it’s like we’re expanding our menu from one page to four.”Duffy, who turns 61 in January, oversees a team of six agents domestically and seven internationally. He has represented Hall of Fame N.B.A. players like Yao Ming and Steve Nash, now the head coach of the Nets. Duffy’s current clients include Ionescu of the W.N.B.A.’s Liberty and the N.B.A. players Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks, Phoenix’s Deandre Ayton, Chicago’s Zach LaVine, Miami’s Goran Dragic and the Knicks’ RJ Barrett.A fifth-round draft pick by the Denver Nuggets in 1982 after playing in college at Minnesota and Santa Clara, Duffy began his agent career by representing the former Cleveland Browns wide receiver Webster Slaughter in 1985. Duffy was connected to Slaughter by his boyhood friend Ronnie Lott, the former San Francisco 49ers star and Hall of Famer, and soon moved into basketball representation. He founded BDA Sports in 1996.Endeavor, which is led by Ari Emanuel and represents entertainers like Denzel Washington and Selena Gomez, has been making other sports moves. The agency’s recent hires include Bret Just, who represents pro and college basketball coaches and N.B.A. front-office executives, and the N.F.L. player agents Brian Ayrault and Ben Renzin, who were lured away from the rival Creative Artists Agency to launch a football group for WME Sports.The arrangement between WME and BDA Sports is the latest in a string of partnerships between top Hollywood agencies and player-representation companies in both basketball and soccer — the team sports with the most global reach. In July 2019, the prominent N.B.A. agent Rich Paul sold what the buyer United Talent Agency called a “significant stake” in Paul’s Klutch Sports Group to establish Klutch as UTA’s sports division.Even before their partnership was formalized Tuesday, Duffy’s BDA Sports had enlisted WME Sports’ help with off-the-court pursuits for various clients. Nash’s forays into soccer and basketball broadcasting after he retired as player in 2015 were largely arranged by WME. BDA and WME also each signed Ionescu as a client in the spring, for on- and off-court representation, after the Liberty selected the former Oregon star with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 W.N.B.A. draft.“I’m an ex-athlete and I understand the importance of stability and support during that transition in life when the ball stops bouncing,” Duffy said. “I have to be thinking about longevity for them and their careers always.”Shapiro said the deal with Duffy’s BDA “would have been done a lot sooner” if not for the coronavirus pandemic. Like other agencies in Hollywood, Endeavor instituted a round of layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts earlier this year. Public events in many of its specialty areas — like Broadway, stand-up comedy, music and fashion — remain “primarily closed,” Shapiro said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More