Player programs are still teaching to the old model

On 8 October, Loop Capital closed an agreement taking on specified assets from Life Line Holdings' wealth management and family office businesses. Life Line's clients include NFL and NBA athletes. The release didn't disclose a price, fees, a client count or how much in assets moved.

As I read it, this is two firms with complementary assets: one with access to more than brokerage-level investment products, the other with really strong relationships across sports and entertainment. But I think it's part of something bigger than one transaction.

Two days earlier, Wealthspire, which is owned by the private equity firm Madison Dearborn, launched a sports and entertainment practice with about $2.9 billion under management. In November 2025, Goldman Sachs Alternatives took a majority stake in Excel Sports Management, an agency with roughly 750 clients, at a valuation reported near $1 billion. The firms that manage athletes' money and the firms that negotiate their contracts are being consolidated at the same time, and increasingly by the same type of owner.

My personal opinion is that part of it is fees. Advisory firms look at the 1% they earn on assets under management and see fees being generated everywhere else, through outside investments, SPVs, GP stakes and funds, walking away from them. Bringing more of that action in-house creates more touch points for the athlete, and more fees for the firm. The law firm Loeb & Loeb, writing about the Goldman and Excel deal, put it in the buyer's terms: owning the agency "embeds Goldman at the earliest and most critical moment: contract signing," and "athlete representation becomes a strategic point of entry into wealth management."

Players associations already certify the agents who are in the room at that moment. But most of what follows the signing doesn't land directly on the desk of a players association or a team's player development staff. It lands on the athletes they represent.

Where it lands

As the financial services world evolves around athletes, it impacts the players associations and the player development staff indirectly, because they have to track how players are moving through the ecosystem. This consolidation toward multi-family office solutions and more private investment opportunities leads to a much different financial situation, and a much different risk profile, than the traditional stocks-and-bonds portfolio management and budgeting that most of the education has been providing for the last decade plus.

The traditional financial advisor isn't the only outfit out there anymore. There are a lot of players managing their own public portfolios through apps like Robinhood. Some are moving closer to the family office model. Others have crypto holdings, real estate portfolios, and other private alternative investments coming through SPVs and funds. Each comes with its own fees and its own risks.

What the old model teaches

Many of the financial education programs teach budgeting and lifestyle management, which is foundational. Some external advisory firms and brokerage firms come in through sponsorship and, in essence, talk their book of business. Other times, investment firms and funds are presented as subject-matter experts and enter the room excited at the prospect of having a pool of high-profile investors.

Each of these solutions only speaks to a fraction of an athlete's business life.

I know that fraction from the advisor's chair. I had a client who was doing everything right. He was on a league-minimum contract, living well within his means, keeping a solid portfolio of public equities. He was building a small pool of capital to invest into cash-flowing businesses to supplement and potentially replace his income.

At a brokerage firm, an advisor's job is to manage a public equities portfolio and provide day-to-day cash management and reporting. Any investments held somewhere else sit outside the advisor's purview, even though they ultimately affect the client's whole financial life.

My firm's compliance policies treated those investments as held-away assets, and I was restricted from giving any guidance on them. I advised him only up to the point where I risked regulatory trouble, and then I stopped, even though I was fully capable of the thought partnership that would have made him more confident in his plan. I never truly crossed the regulatory line, and it remains one of my deepest professional regrets.

He was looking to do the right thing, and I let the constraints of the job stop me from helping him do it fully. That blind spot is ultimately what led me to leave the industry.

What it leaves out

What an athlete has to deal with now has a lot of moving parts, and most of the education doesn't reach three of them: the fees, the risk, and what's being done with the athlete's name.

The fees. There are fees associated with every single one of these opportunities: an AUM fee to the advisor managing the public portfolio, two and twenty (a 2% management fee plus 20% of the profits) to a fund manager once you get into funds or SPVs. That second structure raises a simple question: how much is your GP commitment in this deal? A lot of fund managers will source a deal, then leverage an athlete, or their relationships with athletes, to get access to a deal they typically couldn't fill themselves. When that happens, you're not equally yoked with that manager. If they don't have their own capital in the game, it's a much different financial calculation for them, because everything is upside.

The risk. Most of the conversation tends to hover around the risk of the investment going to zero. With private investments specifically, you've got duration risk, concentration risk and liquidity risk. That's concentration risk: you can't have too much in any one deal. Most private investments have some kind of lockup, a period where the money is illiquid and you can't access it. All of these deal shapes have to be accounted for and adjusted for within a portfolio.

The name. In this name, image and likeness world, there has to be more conversation around brand and equity partnerships. In early stage companies especially, many advisor roles and brand ambassadorships promise equity. The athlete makes a real commitment: the brand association can preclude other opportunities. What comes back is a stake that gets diluted every time the company raises capital, in a company the odds say won't make it. That matters more as agencies take on a bigger role in these deals: Loeb & Loeb describes agencies that "increasingly act as IP managers, not just contract negotiators."

All of this becomes part of the athlete's new business reality. Going beyond the surface-level "have a no guy" advice is paramount.

What the athletes who make it work do differently

The athletes who make it work truly use their advisors as advisors, not as vendors they can set and forget. They learn to ask questions of everyone in their ecosystem: what is it that you do, and how do you get paid for it?

That's how an athlete starts to see how the fees stack on top of one another. Keeping a record of what each role was supposed to do and what it cost also makes it far easier if the day comes to replace someone.

Where it goes

Three to five years out, I think the programs and departments that serve athletes well are the ones that skate to where the puck is going. More and more, the business of athletes is consolidating. Financial advisory firms are trying to function more like multi-family offices, to capture more of the athlete flywheel. I think you're seeing the same thing in the agency business. Contract representation as a standalone business has been really challenging, and the bigger agencies are taking in the more contract-focused groups and building ancillary services around them.

Excel bought REP 1 Football in 2023, in a deal its lawyers said created "one of the largest full-service football agencies in the industry." In 2024, Bruin Capital combined four soccer representation agencies into a single platform representing more than 300 players.

The groups that see where the puck is going will make sure the education they provide reflects what this new iteration of the athlete business, the athlete enterprise, is going to look like.

The question I'd leave on the table

Player development and the players associations have to keep evolving with the times. So the question I'd leave with a program director, or the head of a players association, is whether the education they're providing and the service providers they bring in actually match the real life and the realities their players are dealing with.

Put another way: when a player in the program is offered a piece of an SPV, or equity in exchange for an ambassadorship, would anything that player has been taught lead them to ask about the lockup, the fees, or how much of the GP's own capital is in the deal?

—MC

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Sources: Loop Capital and Life Line Holdings release, PR Newswire (8 Oct 2026) · Wealthspire, "Wealthspire Launches Dedicated Sports & Entertainment Practice" (6 Oct 2026); WealthManagement.com (Oct 2026) · Front Office Sports, Excel valued at nearly $1B in sale to Goldman Sachs (11 Nov 2025) · Loeb & Loeb, "The New Playbook for Sports Agencies: Consolidation, Integration and Institutional Capital" (19 Feb 2026) · Katten, Excel Sports Management acquisition of REP 1 Football (Nov 2023) · Simpson Thacher, Bruin Capital acquisitions forming AS1 (4 Dec 2024).