NIL market reached $917 million in first year

Yahoo Finance Video
1

Yahoo Finance sports reporter Josh Schafer details how NCAA athletes have earned nearly $1 billion in the first year of the NIL landscape.

Video Transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: I do want to turn the conversation towards another billion dollar question, which is the future of NIL. Name, Image, and Likeness, Josh, turns one-year-old today. And it's like a one-year-old. It's got a lot of growing up to do. What are your biggest takeaways from year one?

JOSH SCHAFER: Well, year one, it's estimated that they made $917 million. That's sort of extrapolating what some athletes made and taking that to be a little bit bigger. And they're looking at market in year two to reach over a billion dollars, Dave. So pretty big market when we talk about it overall. But where is the money going, where is it coming from, I think, is where it gets interesting.

Right now, 35% of it's coming from donors. It's coming from these collectives we've talked about here on the show before. Donors can sort of just put money together and pool it. And it's all going to football and basketball. So, really, I think we're just seeing the NCAA becoming the business it's always been. And now it's more in our faces. And we're going to see that grow over the next year as well.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, the donors primarily are giving to football, then basketball, too. But some women have made out pretty well in this process. Not from the donors, but through their own actual name, image, and likeness.

JOSH SCHAFER: Right, so if you take out football from the activities, so if you look at the most popular NIL activities, and you were to remove football, women actually have more NIL activity than men. Slight-- it's like 52%. But they're leading the category when you take out football. And football, really, when we talk about the NCAA, is kind of its own animal, right? So they're actually doing pretty well. And they're getting engaged by real brands. We know Gatorade, Nike, those kinds of big sponsors, are coming into women's sports, particularly women's basketball.

DAVE BRIGGS: I would say that women are the ones that are actually using the policy the way it was intended. The men's football and basketball players, it's a lot of pay for play. And I know deals that are strictly buying a player to come to your school, they need some guardrails, but maybe year number two.