Only 71 Players
Declared For The
NBA Draft.
NIL Gave Them
A Reason To Stay.

The 2026 NBA Draft has only 71 early entrants, the lowest number since 2003. Most people are calling it a problem. Here is why it is actually the most important shift in athlete leverage in a generation.

April 2026

The 2025 high school basketball class was arguably the most talented group of prospects in over a decade. AJ Dybantsa. Darryn Peterson. Cameron Boozer. Dylan Harper. The names were generational. The anticipation was real. And yet when the early entry deadline for the 2026 NBA Draft closed on April 24, only 71 players had declared.[CBS Sports] That is the lowest number since 2003. Down from 106 last year. Down nearly 80 percent from the peak of 363 in 2021.[Yahoo Sports] Cameron Boozer, one of the most anticipated freshmen in years, is returning to Duke. Players who would have declared without hesitation five years ago are staying. And the reason is not complicated.

NIL gave them a reason to stay.

Before breaking down what this means, there is a framework worth establishing. When you look at how athletes have always built their legacies, you can trace two distinct types. The ones who walk into a situation and build the platform from the ground up. And the ones who find an existing platform and use it to become something bigger than it.

Both paths work. The common thread is intentionality. Whether you are building the platform or using one, your brand is still your responsibility. The team is the vehicle. What you put into the world as an individual athlete is what determines whether the vehicle drives you somewhere or just parks.

The reason this framework matters for the 2026 NBA Draft conversation is that NIL has introduced a third option that did not exist before. You can now stay in college, use the college platform intentionally, build your audience, build your brand, develop your game, and get paid to do it. The vehicle now runs in both directions.

Think about the athlete who was the most popular person in their high school or middle school. Everybody knew them. Everybody wanted to be around them. They had a following before following was even a formal concept. And then they went to college and you never heard from them again. The same thing plays out at the collegiate level constantly. Players who are the biggest names in their conference, who have built real audiences and real communities around their identity, go to the G League or get drafted late and simply disappear from the conversation. It is not always about talent. It is about the platform shrinking and the athlete not having built something that exists independently of the sport structure around them.

NIL changed the calculation on that completely. Because now in college, you can continue to build your fan base, build your social media presence, develop your brand partnerships, and get paid for all of it while continuing to develop the skills that will take you to the professional level. The Detroit Pistons president of basketball operations Trajan Langdon put it directly: with all the money being thrown around in NIL, you are having a lot less players put their names in, and pretty good players are pulling their names out.[Fox Sports] The incentive structure has genuinely shifted.

Those numbers matter because they reframe the entire argument about what going pro early actually means financially. A late first-round NBA rookie contract is worth approximately $2 to $3 million in year one. A college NIL deal for a top returning player can exceed that. The Duke coach Jon Scheyer said it clearly: NIL allows players to analyze whether they are actually ready, where money does not have to be the deciding factor.[Fox Sports] For the first time in the history of American basketball, the financial pressure to leave school is gone for a meaningful number of players. And the athletes who understand what that actually means are making their decisions accordingly.

In college, everyone is good. At the professional level, everyone is great. And with respect, outside of your most loyal supporters, nobody follows you closely if you are not actively competing at a high level. We have seen that reality play out at every level. The audience follows the performance, and when the performance disappears to a bench role or a G League assignment, the audience moves on. But the audience you build in college, through NIL partnerships, through consistent content, through a genuine connection to a fan base that chose you before you were drafted, that is something that travels with you regardless of where the basketball takes you.

This is why NIL is not destroying college basketball or professional sports. It is not cannibalizing the NBA. It is giving athletes the one thing they have never had before. Real leverage. The ball has always been in the athlete’s court in terms of raw talent. But now you can decide what to do with it. You can declare. You can stay. You can build. You can wait. You can negotiate from a position of financial security rather than financial desperation. NIL makes all of that possible in a way that simply did not exist before 2021.

American Express
Is The NFL’s New
Payment Partner.
Here Is Why That
Makes Perfect Sense.

Visa held the NFL’s official payment deal for nearly 30 years. American Express just replaced them in a deal worth $910 million over seven years. The story behind that switch is a masterclass in how brand value is being redefined in 2026.

April 2026

For nearly 30 years, Visa was the official payment partner of the NFL. The relationship dated back to 1995, and by all accounts it worked. Visa was everywhere. On banners, in stadiums, on broadcast graphics, woven into the fabric of the biggest sports league in the United States. Then in September 2025, Visa announced it would not be renewing when its contract expired the following March.[Ministry of Sport] American Express stepped in immediately, signing a seven-year deal worth a reported $910 million to become the league’s new official payments partner starting with the 2026 season.[Business Side of Sports]

On paper, the move looks like an upset. American Express does not have more cardholders than Visa. It is not accepted in as many places. Visa processes more transactions globally and has more cards in circulation by a significant margin. So why did the NFL move to the brand with smaller numbers? Because the NFL is not chasing numbers anymore. They are chasing spending power. And on that measure, American Express wins the comparison decisively.

Visa’s exit was not a surrender. Their chief marketing officer Frank Cooper was clear that this was a strategic pivot, not a retreat. Visa told Reuters they still love the NFL but decided there was a better way forward beyond acquiring league-wide rights.[Ministry of Sport] Instead of a single massive league deal, Visa is now investing in direct team partnerships, player deals, creator collaborations, and major global events including the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. That shift alone is a story about how sports sponsorship is evolving. But what American Express is doing with the NFL opportunity they left behind is the more interesting story.

American Express does not do logo placements. That is the simplest way to explain the difference between what Visa built with the NFL and what American Express will build. When Visa was active in the NFL, you saw the logo. On a banner, on a scoreboard, in a commercial. The brand was present. When American Express enters a sponsorship, they build a world around it. They create exclusive card member experiences, priority access, lounges, and activations that make you feel the value of carrying their card in a way that a banner never could.

The NBA All-Star Weekend is the clearest proof of what American Express does differently. Their activations at All-Star are not booths with branded merchandise. They are fully produced experiences where being an Amex card member gets you into places and moments that are genuinely exclusive. That feeling of access, of being on the inside of something curated and premium, is the product American Express is selling every time they enter a major sporting event. And now they are bringing that same architecture to the NFL.

The first move under the new deal told you exactly what direction this is heading. When American Express activated their NFL partnership for the first time, they gave card members priority presale access to tickets for the Rams versus 49ers game in Melbourne on September 10, 2026, the NFL’s opening international game of the season.[National Today] Access first. Exclusivity first. That is the Amex playbook, now applied to the biggest sports league in America.

What this portfolio reveals is a brand that has spent decades building a consistent identity across every major sport and premium live event. The US Open Tennis partnership dates back to 1994. The US Open Golf relationship has been active for years, and American Express now titles their own PGA Tour event in Palm Springs annually. The Formula One presence, the NBA All-Star activations, and now the NFL all tell the same story. American Express is not buying visibility inside sporting events. They are building the premium layer of the fan experience across all of them simultaneously.

Visa’s model was different and legitimate on its own terms. Being accepted everywhere, with every consumer, at every price point, made Visa the right fit for the NFL in 1995 when the league’s priority was mass reach and contactless payment adoption. In 2026, the NFL’s priorities have shifted. They are chasing a higher-spending, more engaged fan base. They are expanding internationally. They want their sponsorship partners to build experiences, not just provide payment rails. American Express is built for exactly that moment.

Athletic
Performance
Is The Price
Of Entry.
Lifestyle Is
The Ceiling.

Nearly half of all athlete brand deals today have nothing to do with the sport being played. This shift happened in three waves over three decades. The WTA and Mercedes-Benz just proved where it lands.

April 2026

Before anything else, this needs to be said clearly. Athletic performance matters. It always has and it always will. Nobody is putting a Mercedes in your driveway because you have a good Instagram page. Performance is still the foundation. But in 2026, performance alone is no longer enough to maximize what you are worth to a brand. The athletes who understand that their identity, their audience, and their lifestyle are assets on top of their athletic ability are the ones building something that outlasts a career. The ones who do not are leaving money on the table.

The data tells the story plainly. Nearly 44 percent of global athlete endorsement market revenue in 2025 came from non-sports brands, meaning consumer goods, financial services, technology, luxury, and entertainment companies combined.[DataIntelo] That is almost half of all brand deal money flowing to athletes from brands that have nothing to do with what those athletes do on the field or court. Two decades ago that number was a fraction of what it is today. The question worth asking is how we got here, and what it tells us about where the money is going next.

Twitter gave athletes a public voice when it launched in 2006 with a followers model that let anyone tune in without permission. But Instagram, launching in October 2010, added something Twitter could not: a purely visual, mobile-first identity.[Britannica] Its popularity helped launch the era of the influencer, individuals who built considerable social media followings and used that influence to connect brands with audiences in a way that felt personal rather than advertised. What brands discovered through Instagram is that a tweet tells you what someone thinks. An Instagram page tells you who someone is. What they wear, where they eat, how they live, and who they are when the game is not being played. That visual window is what opened the door to lifestyle brands at scale.

When athletes got on Instagram and started showing their lives, their style, their personality, and their values to audiences that followed them purely out of genuine interest, brands started paying attention in a different way. They were not just seeing jersey numbers and stat lines anymore. They were seeing who these athletes actually were. And what they saw was that the athletes with the most engaged audiences were not always the ones with the biggest contracts. They were the ones whose lifestyle, identity, and story resonated with people who wanted to be connected to them as human beings, not just fans.

The women’s sports numbers deserve their own conversation because they are the most important piece of this argument. Research from RBC and Wasserman found that women athletes are proving to be two times more valuable to brands than male athletes because of the depth of their relationships with their fan communities.[RBC Wealth Management] The reason behind that is both straightforward and important. Women athletes have historically earned a fraction of what male athletes earn in salary. On average, 82 percent of a professional woman athlete’s annual income comes from commercial partnerships and endorsements, not playing contracts.[Sportico] Out of necessity, they had to build authentic audiences. They had to connect with fans on a deeper level. They had to cultivate communities rather than just accumulate followers. And the result is that when brands come in, those communities show up for them in a way that translates directly to ROI.

Eighty-six percent of brands report that their women’s sports sponsorships have met or exceeded their ROI expectations.[Athelo Group] Fans of women’s sports are 2.8 times more likely to purchase products endorsed by female athletes compared to fans of men’s sports. These are not small margins. These are the kinds of numbers that shift where investment dollars flow. And they explain exactly why Mercedes-Benz did not go to the ATP. They went to the WTA.

The WTA and Mercedes-Benz deal was announced on December 10, 2025, at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. From January 1, 2026, the tour became officially known as the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, with the German automaker serving as Premier Partner and Exclusive Automobile Partner across WTA 1000, 500, and 250 tournaments worldwide.[WTA] At every tournament, Mercedes-Benz provides an exclusive fleet of vehicles for players, officials, and guests, and delivers what the brand calls a unique driving experience at each stop.[Mercedes-Benz] The deal is reportedly worth approximately $50 million per year for up to 10 years, a potential $500 million total commitment that positions it as the largest single brand sponsorship in the history of women’s sports.[Sportcal]

This is not a logo on a jersey. This is not a banner behind a baseline. Mercedes-Benz is embedding itself into the physical experience of attending a WTA tournament, putting players in their cars, putting their star on the net at approximately 30 tournaments in 2026, and doing all of it from a stage they specifically chose for its cultural alignment. WTA founder Billie Jean King said the deal sends a message that echoes far beyond tennis, that women’s sport matters and their athletes deserve to be seen, heard, and given a global platform.[Tennis.com]

Think about what tennis actually is as a sport and a culture. The country club setting. The white clothing. The grass courts and strawberries at Wimbledon. The US Open feeling more like a food and wine festival than a pure sporting event according to American Express’s own brand team. Tennis has always carried a high-end, lifestyle-driven identity. You did not just watch tennis. You attended tennis. The image of who was in those stands, what they were wearing, what they were driving, has always been part of the sport’s brand.

Mercedes-Benz understood that alignment before the deal was ever signed. This is not a brand that needed tennis to become premium. They brought their premium identity to a sport that was already living in that space. And by doing it through the WTA specifically, by choosing the women’s tour over the men’s, they made a statement about where they see the sport’s cultural moment going. The Challengers film with Zendaya introduced tenniscore to an entirely new generation.[Hypebae] Emily in Paris went to Roland Garros. The WTA launched a fashion capsule collection with London lifestyle brand Duke and Dexter, sold at Selfridges in June 2025, their first fashion collaboration after their rebrand.[WTA] Tennis is showing up in places that have nothing to do with the sport itself. And the brands paying attention to that are moving accordingly.

Coco Gauff was also signed as a global Mercedes-Benz brand ambassador as part of the announcement, another deliberate choice. Gauff is the No. 1 ranked women’s player in the world by prize money in 2025, earning approximately $30 million that year.[Sportico] She is also 21 years old, built entirely in the social media era, with a following and identity that resonates well beyond the tennis world. She is not just the best player Mercedes-Benz could sign. She is the exact kind of athlete that the post-Instagram era produces, someone whose performance earns her the platform and whose identity sustains the brand relationship.

The Pro Deal
Is Dead.

Adidas, Nike, and Jordan Brand are not waiting for draft night anymore. The shoe deal has moved to the hallways of high school gyms, and the athletes who understand that first will win.

GEMLAB Readings   |   April 2026

For decades, the blueprint was simple. Work your way to the league, prove yourself on the biggest stage, and if you were lucky, a brand would come knocking. The shoe deal was the reward at the end of the road. A finish line. A confirmation that you made it.

That model is gone.

What is replacing it does not wait for the NBA Draft. It does not wait for a college commitment. It does not wait for a player to set foot on any court at any level. The new model is watching right now, scrolling your feed, tracking your following, and deciding whether your story is worth investing in before a single professional game is ever played.

The evidence is stacking up fast. Adidas signed Caleb Holt and Bruce Branch III to NIL deals while they were still in high school. Nike moved to lock in AJ Dybantsa with a deal reportedly worth over four million dollars before he ever played a college game. And then there is Jordan Brand, which has been building something in this space quietly and deliberately for the last three years.

What Jordan did strategically in its early phase deserves real attention. The brand’s first high school athletes were all women. That was intentional. Female high school athletes consistently build larger audiences around lifestyle-driven content than their male counterparts, and Jordan read that before anyone else was paying close enough attention. They were not just signing athletes. They were signing reach, personality, and cultural connection.

By the time Cameron and Cayden Boozer became the brand’s first male signings in November 2025, Jordan had already built infrastructure and credibility in the NIL space. Neither twin had played a single college game when their deal was announced. That is the point. The brand did not need to see them perform at Duke first. The story, the legacy, the following, and the potential were enough.

Kiyan Anthony was announced the same day. His father Carmelo spent years as one of Jordan Brand’s signature athletes. The brand was not just signing a player. They were signing a continuation of a legacy that already lived inside their house.

And then came Jason Crowe Jr.

This is what athletes and families need to understand right now. The conversation about brand alignment is not a post-career conversation anymore. It is a right-now conversation. The brands doing the work are looking at follower counts, yes, but they are also looking deeper. What does an athlete represent? How do they carry themselves publicly? What does their platform say about what they value on and off the court?

Adidas, Nike, and Jordan Brand are not waiting for combine numbers. They are reading social followings, family legacy, cultural presence, and personal narrative. The athletes who are building those things right now, in high school, are not ahead of the curve. They are simply on the right timeline.

Your Brand Is
Your Responsibility.
The Team Is
Just The Vehicle.

WTA Chief Brand Officer Sarah Swanson laid out one of the clearest frameworks for understanding athlete branding across team and individual sports. The argument she made applies at every level, from a guard choosing between prep programs to a professional deciding how to build their off-court presence.

April 2026

Sarah Swanson spent years running the commercial business of surfing before she ever touched tennis. As Chief Marketing Officer of the World Surf League and now Chief Brand Officer of WTA Ventures, she has operated inside two very different individual sport ecosystems and watched closely how athletes in those spaces build, or fail to build, personal brands.[WTA] When she sat down with Front Office Sports in April 2026, she made a comparison that cuts straight to the heart of why some athletes build massive commercial platforms and others with equal talent never do.[Front Office Sports]

The comparison is not about which sport is more popular or which athletes are more talented. It is about structure. The structure of your sport determines how much of your brand building you have to do yourself, how intentional you have to be about it, and ultimately how much of your commercial ceiling you actually control. That distinction is worth understanding at every level of athletic competition, not just professionally.

The personal presentation point is where the framework becomes most useful for athletes at every level. Swanson is describing something that applies whether you are a tennis player on the WTA Tour, a basketball player choosing between prep programs, or a football player deciding how to build your presence inside a team structure. At every level, the affiliations you choose are vehicles. They are not your brand. They carry your brand to a wider audience. But the brand itself, the identity, the story, the values you put into the world, that has to come from you.

Think about the decision a talented high school basketball player makes when choosing between a nationally prominent prep program and a lower-profile one. The platform that comes with a nationally known program, the national exposure, the caliber of competition, the eyes on every game, all of that is a vehicle. It puts your talent in front of more people. But two players can go through the same program and come out with completely different commercial profiles depending on how intentionally they built their identity alongside the athletic development. The program is the stage. The performance and the brand are still yours.

Photo: Front Office Sports  /  Sarah Swanson, WTA Ventures  /  April 2026

The on-court layer, broadcasts, highlights, match results, that is largely controlled through media partnerships and the tour structure itself. The WTA owns that layer and amplifies it. But the off-court layer is where the individual athlete either builds something meaningful or leaves commercial value on the table. The WTA supports players with content, behind-the-scenes social, TikToks, and anything that brings personality to life away from the match. But the vision still has to come from the athlete.

That quote matters because it directly challenges the idea that there is one formula for building an athlete brand. There is not. Every athlete’s identity is different, and the most successful brand builds are the ones that are authentic to who that athlete actually is rather than a template someone handed them. What works for Sabalenka, whose personality is outsized and unapologetic and perfectly matched to her aggressive playing style, is not the same strategy that works for a quieter, more reserved athlete. The common thread is not the style. It is the intentionality.

Swanson also talked about a dynamic that gets overlooked in the individual sport world, the value of athletes building community with each other on tour.

The Players Box podcast that a couple of WTA athletes launched is her example of that dynamic working well in practice. They took the natural friend groups that form on tour and built a platform around the conversations those groups were already having. That is exactly the kind of content that individual sport athletes have to create intentionally because the sport structure does not produce it automatically. The team sport version of that is the locker room. In individual sports, you have to build the room yourself.

She also made a specific observation about Frances Tiafoe’s longtime partner, Ayan Broomfield, a former professional tennis player and NCAA doubles champion who built a significant fashion and lifestyle influencer career alongside her relationship with Tiafoe on the ATP Tour.

The point is not about romantic relationships. It is about proximity to a world and using it intelligently. Broomfield was already inside the tennis ecosystem as a former player. She understood the audience, the lifestyle, the culture, and she built a brand identity around fashion and content that stands independently of Tiafoe’s career. That is the same logic that applies to any athlete in any sport. The people you are around, the ecosystems you move through, the worlds you have access to are all raw material for building something of your own. The question is whether you are paying attention.

She Built a
$4.5M Empire
Before Going Pro.

Flau’jae Johnson’s personal brand earns roughly 14 times her WNBA rookie salary. She is proof that the most powerful move in women’s sports is building before you ever step on a professional court.

GEMLAB Readings   |   April 2026

On April 14, 2026, Flau’jae Johnson heard her name called at the WNBA Draft in New York City. The Golden State Valkyries selected her eighth overall.[ESPN] Less than an hour later, she was traded to the Seattle Storm. Two franchises wanted her that badly, on the same night.

And yet the most important financial moves of her career had already been made. Long before she walked across that stage. Long before a WNBA jersey had her name on it. The draft was not the moment Flau’jae Johnson arrived. It was just the moment the rest of the world caught up.

As the No. 8 pick, Johnson will earn $309,622 in her first WNBA season under the league’s new collective bargaining agreement, part of a four-year rookie deal worth just under $1.4 million total.[On3] That is genuinely historic money for a WNBA rookie. The No. 1 pick in 2025, Paige Bueckers, earned $78,831 in her first year. The new CBA changed everything for incoming players.

But compare that $309K to what Johnson disclosed in her own words: her combined NIL deals and music career bring in approximately $4.5 million annually.[EssentiallySports] Forbes estimated her net worth at $7 million and named her to the 30 Under 30 list.[Tuko] She built all of that in college, before playing a single professional minute.

What makes the Flau’jae Johnson story different is not just the money. It is the architecture of how she built it. She did not wait for a professional contract to become marketable. She treated herself as a brand from day one at LSU and went to work building every pillar simultaneously.

She signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation as a recording artist in 2021, before most people outside of basketball knew her name.[Wikipedia] From there she built a NIL portfolio that reads like a Fortune 500 sponsor list. Puma, Amazon, JBL, Meta, Powerade, Taco Bell, TurboTax, Experian, MassMutual, Mercedes-Benz, Doritos, Raising Cane’s and more.[EssentiallySports] These are not local sponsorships. These are national brands investing in her because of what she represents, not just what she averages.

Then in December 2024, she became only the second college athlete ever to receive an equity stake in Unrivaled, the women’s 3-on-3 professional basketball league.[Wikipedia] Ownership. In a professional league. While still in college. That is a different level of thinking entirely.

The critical detail in all of this is stability. Every deal she built, every partnership she secured, every equity stake she earned, none of it depended on whether she stayed healthy. None of it disappeared if she transferred, got injured, or had a bad season. It existed independent of the basketball outcome. That is the model that the old system never made available to women athletes. NIL changed that, and Flau’jae Johnson understood it faster than almost anyone.

What Flau’jae Johnson represents is a shift in how athletes, especially women athletes, need to think about their careers. The WNBA has never been a path to generational wealth on salary alone. Even with the new CBA dramatically raising rookie pay, the gap between men’s and women’s professional salaries remains enormous. The athletes who will build real financial independence in women’s sports are the ones who treat the game as a platform, not a paycheck.

Johnson understood that her audience was not just basketball fans. Roc Nation gave her access to music culture. Her NIL portfolio gave her access to lifestyle and consumer brands. Her equity in Unrivaled gave her a stake in the growth of the sport itself. She built in multiple directions at once, and by the time she walked across that WNBA Draft stage, the professional contract was the smallest number on her balance sheet.

AI Is Running
The 2026 FIFA
World Cup.

Lenovo and Verizon are deploying AI at a scale the sports world has never seen before. Referee cams. 3D player avatars. Equal analytics for all 48 teams. This is not the future. It is happening this summer.

GEMLAB Readings   |   April 2026

The FIFA World Cup is returning to the United States for the first time since 1994. Thirty-two years later, the tournament looks completely different. Not just on paper. Not just in roster size. The entire infrastructure of how the game gets played, officiated, analyzed, and experienced has been rebuilt around artificial intelligence.

This is not a feature upgrade. This is a ground-up reimagining of what a global sporting event can be, and the 2026 World Cup, hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, is where that vision goes live in front of an expected global audience of over six billion people.[Lenovo]

Two companies are at the center of it all. Lenovo, named FIFA’s Official Technology Partner for World Cup 2026,[Lenovo] is delivering the AI tools that will change how fans watch, how officials make calls, and how teams prepare. And Verizon, the Official Telecommunication Services Sponsor,[Verizon] is providing the 5G network backbone that makes all of it possible. Without the network, none of the innovation works. That part matters more than most people realize.

Let us break each of these down because the details matter.

The AR experience in stadium is not new to the World Cup. FIFA first tested it at the 2022 tournament in Qatar, where fans inside the venue could open the FIFA app, point their phone at the pitch, and tap on any player to see their live speed and movement heatmap.[Engadget] What is new in 2026 is the scale and the network infrastructure behind it. Verizon has boosted 5G capacity by three to five times across all host stadiums and expects fans to consume over 50 terabytes of data per match inside each venue.[Telecom Review] That is the equivalent of streaming HD video for more than three years, compressed into a single match.

The Referee View is genuinely new at this scale. Body cameras on match officials were first trialed at the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025. The footage was promising but had a real problem: referees move fast, and the raw footage was shaky and hard to follow. Lenovo solved that with AI-powered stabilization software that smooths the footage in real time, reducing motion blur so the picture is clean regardless of how fast the referee is moving.[TechInformed] The stabilized stream will be made available to broadcasters worldwide, meaning fans watching at home will see exactly what the referee sees, live, during the match.

The 3D player avatars are the most visually striking innovation. FIFA and Lenovo are scanning all 1,248 players from the 48 participating nations before the tournament begins. The scanning process takes approximately one second per player and captures specific body dimensions rather than using a generic digital model.[The Sports Playmaker] When a tough call happens, the offside line or a contested touch, the broadcast can render a 3D visualization using the actual dimensions of the players involved. The play essentially rehappens in front of you in real time, in three dimensions, with the correct body shapes of the actual players.

And then there is Football AI Pro, which may be the most significant innovation of all, even if it is the least visible to fans.

For decades, access to elite sports analytics has been a function of budget. Your Brazils, your Germanys, your traditional powerhouses arrive at every major tournament with full data science departments, proprietary analytics platforms, and years of accumulated player data. Smaller national programs do not have that. They never have.

Football AI Pro changes that directly. Built on FIFA’s Football Language model and powered by Lenovo’s full-stack AI capabilities, the system analyzes hundreds of millions of FIFA-owned football data points and delivers pre-match and post-match insights in text, video, graphics, and 3D visualizations.[FIFA] And every single one of the 48 competing teams gets access to the same tool, with the same capabilities, at no competitive disadvantage.

This is the first time in World Cup history that analytical parity has been built into the tournament infrastructure itself. Not as a nice idea. As a required feature.[Sports Video Group]

None of this works without the network. That is the part that rarely gets the headline but deserves more attention. Verizon has deployed private 5G networks inside host stadiums specifically to support critical applications including the Lenovo Referee View body cameras.[Data Center Dynamics] They have installed thousands of antennas, deployed nearly 140 small cells and temporary sites, and boosted 5G spectrum capacity across every host venue. The Broadcast Contribution Network, the system FIFA uses to centrally collect ball and player data and deliver high-quality footage to broadcasters worldwide, runs on Verizon’s fiber infrastructure.[Light Reading]

The AI innovations are the story. The network is the foundation. You cannot have one without the other.

Athletes Are
Building Media
Companies.
This Is Now
A Real Industry.

33 athlete-owned production companies. 370-plus media properties. A USC Annenberg study confirmed what the numbers already showed. Athletes who own their media own their narrative, their income, and their future well beyond the playing career.

GEMLAB Readings   |   April 2026

A 2025 USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center study titled “Owning the Narrative” mapped the athlete-owned media landscape for the first time and found 33 athlete-owned production companies producing more than 370 media properties worldwide.[Phys.org] Athlete-owned podcasts alone have generated more than 7 billion YouTube views, 725 million TikTok likes, and 37 million Instagram followers combined. What the study confirmed is something that has been building quietly for over a decade: athletes are not just building social media followings anymore. They are building media companies.

The valuations reflect that reality. LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill Company is valued at $725 million. Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions is valued at $400 million. The Kelce brothers secured a three-year, $100 million deal with Amazon’s Wondery for their New Heights podcast.[CNN] Pat McAfee licensed The Pat McAfee Show to ESPN for a reported $85 million.[Culture of Sport] And Shannon Sharpe, who built Club Shay Shay into a media network that includes five shows and an interview with Katt Williams that has surpassed 89 million views on YouTube, is expected to sign a new deal worth over $100 million.[Front Office Sports]

What makes these numbers meaningful is not just their size. It is what they represent structurally. When Shannon Sharpe built Club Shay Shay, he was not creating a show. He was building a network with owned IP, a growing roster of talent across multiple shows, and an audience relationship that no single broadcaster could replicate. When his deal with The Volume expired, he walked into negotiations with over four million YouTube subscribers, a viral catalog, and leverage that his NFL career alone never would have produced. His next deal is expected to pay him roughly four times his entire NFL career earnings.[Sports Illustrated]

Brandon Marshall is worth discussing specifically because his story is different from the others on that list. Most athlete media companies were built after the playing career ended. Marshall started making moves while he was still in the league. He was a co-host on Inside the NFL beginning in 2014 while still an active NFL wide receiver.[Wikipedia] He was building media relationships, developing a broadcast presence, and laying the groundwork for what would become I Am Athlete before he retired. When he eventually left Fox Sports in 2021 to build his own platform, the foundation was already there.

I Am Athlete, the media company Marshall founded, is focused on the intersection of business, entertainment, music, and sports. It was built around long-form athlete-driven conversation in an unscripted, unfiltered format, creating what the platform describes as a locker room environment where athletes can tell their stories outside of traditional media structures.[Front Office Sports] He also went further by investing $10 million of his own money into House of Athlete, a lifestyle wellness brand, making him one of the rare examples of an athlete who used media ownership as a springboard into broader entrepreneurship.[Sportico]

The reason Marshall’s approach matters is the IP angle. When athletes build their own media platforms rather than lending their name to someone else’s show, they own the content, the audience relationship, and the commercial rights. That means the value compounds over time. Every interview, every episode, every piece of content sits on a foundation they control. That protection extends well beyond social media reach and into something that can be licensed, sold, or scaled independently of whether they are still playing.