Weekly Roundup: Business of Athletes, Sports, & NIL (August 21-27)

Audio Timeline:1:30 - Feel good stories* An update on John Daly’s heartwarming donation and Kobe Bryant’s wife3:15 - Business of Athletes* Enhanced water company, Lemon Perfect, has brought on tennis star Sloane Stephens as an investor and ambassador. * Former NFL quarterback Michael Vick is launching his co-founded NFT platform FanField this fall.* The Player’s Impact, a venture capital firm for athletes, has launched its own internal communication system for the 190 members.* Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy teamed up to create TMRW Sports, which is in partnership with the PGA tour for their new league, The TGL. * Bill Ackman’s Prysym Capital invested $26M in Winners Alliance, a for-profit affiliate of the Professional Tennis Players Association designed to help professional tennis players pursue business opportunities10:00 - Name, Image, and Likeness* The first team-wide high school NIL deal* Hooters makes a unique move in football* A look at some interesting deals from this past week15:05 - Future of Sports* Smart training application, Perform, has raised $1.2M for its application which marries human coaching elements with intelligent features.* The Dallas Cowboys are the first NFL team to generate over $1B in annual revenue and the first team to be assessed at an $8 billion valuation. * Sport Buff, a live-streaming tool designed to create social games around video content, has raised $2.5M in seed funding.* EA Sports and Learfield are teaming up for the LevelNext collegiate esports league, that holds a $150,000 cash prize for the Madden champion.* Esports franchise Valhallan, announced its acquisition of the United Federation of Esports Athletes (UFEA) leagueInteresting StatThe mean number of injuries suffered per game in the NFL is approximately 4.9 times higher than the sum of other professional leagues. Teams don't want to pay for that kind of risk any more than they have to.Higher risk = lower guaranteed contracts. Short Passage of The Week* We can't change our past, but we can change our perspective.* We can't change our past, but we can choose to learn from it.* We can't change our past, but we can change our future."When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us." Passage by Clint HurdleTweetInteresting thread right here:It still blows my mind that Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for only $50M and turned it down. Recommended ReadI talked about the rise of esports in the podcast — here is a supplemental read that I found pretty interesting:What makes an esports athlete an athlete? We asked the proshttps://www.thestar.com/sports/2022/08/25/this-is-a-sport-what-makes-an-esports-athlete-an-athlete-we-asked-the-pros.htmlFinancial JargonEast Asia is a breeding ground for innovation right now.A Harvard study has concluded that China, Vietnam, Uganda, Indonesia, and India are projected to be among the fastest-growing economies from now