Athlete business ownership is no longer a post-retirement hobby for retired stars with time and capital. It has become an active strategy deployed by current players to wrest control from the institutions that have historically managed their careers, images, and earning potential. The message from locker rooms to boardrooms is clear: athletes are done being represented. They want to own.
This shift did not happen overnight. But the WNBA’s 17-month collective bargaining fight has crystallized it. Alongside that labor fight, Black women agents have been building independent firms, and the infrastructure of sports representation is being rebuilt by the people it was designed to serve.
The 17-Month War for Value
On March 24, 2026, the WNBA Board of Governors ratified the terms for a new seven-year collective bargaining agreement, with the WNBA and WNBPA still needing to finalize the long-form agreement.[s] Voice in Sport reported that the deal followed 17 months of negotiations and a final eight-day, 100-plus-hour marathon bargaining session.[s] The deal included first-of-its-kind revenue sharing, giving players 20% of league and team revenue, with maximum salaries rising to $1.4 million and projected to reach $2.4 million by 2032.[s]
Kelsey Plum was a WNBPA vice president during those negotiations. In December 2025, speaking at Team USA camp while talks remained deadlocked, Plum described the process as “a little bit disheartening,” conceding that the league and union remained far apart.[s] The frustration was earned. Even with philosophical agreement on salary caps and revenue sharing structures, the details of what revenue the players would actually share in, and how much, required grinding negotiation.
The CBA outcome vindicated that grind. WNBPA executive director Terri Jackson summarized it as “player empowerment” and pointed to “players coming to the table, standing on business” and “the power that comes with that.”[s] WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike said the agreement reflected players’ “commitment to ownership” of “their value and their future.”[s]
Note the language: ownership of value. That phrase captures the athlete business ownership thesis precisely. This is not about negotiating better terms within an existing power structure. It is about rejecting the premise that athletes are inputs rather than principals.
Athlete Business Ownership Beyond the CBA
The CBA fight was collective action. But the entrepreneurial turn is happening at the individual level too. In December 2025, Fanatics and Boardroom hosted a two-day business immersion program for 11 WNBA players, including Jewell Loyd, Natasha Cloud, Lexie Hull, and Naz Hillmon.[s] The curriculum covered social media storytelling, content strategy, business breakdowns, real estate investing, and money management for athletes entering new tax brackets.
“We are a business in ourselves,” Cloud said. “I don’t think we always think about ourselves in that light.”[s] That realization, once arrived at, changes everything. Rich Kleiman, CEO of Boardroom, said the players had “an incredible understanding of how to build audience” and “a different type of hunger” for those opportunities.[s]
Loyd discussed her investments during the event, including the 160-acre farm she owns in Minnesota. This is athlete business ownership in practice: not waiting for retirement to diversify income, not relying on endorsement deals structured by someone else, but building assets under direct control.
When Gatekeepers Fail: Black Women Build Their Own Agencies
The athlete-to-owner pipeline is not limited to players. It extends to those who represent them. A parallel disruption is underway among sports agents, driven by those who found themselves locked out of mega-agencies that have long functioned as cultural gatekeepers in who gets represented and how.
At least seven of the 26 Black women agents certified by the NFL Players Association run their own agencies.[s] A 2025 study conducted by Diverse Representation and Wasserman found that more than 85% of Black women agents across all major sports run their own shop.[s]
The reasons are structural. A Diverse Representation survey asked Black women agents about the main obstacles they face. Responses ranged from a lack of pipelines to agent fees, tokenization, and fear of failure.[s] The Andscape report also described how Black women at white male-owned agencies can be used for race and gender in client pitches, treating them as objects rather than autonomous individuals with their own expertise and networks.
Rasheeda Liberty, founder of Lady Lib Sports and Entertainment, was recruited by other agencies after attending an agent bootcamp. She declined. Liberty said she did not want to be “bought and sold” or “utilized in that way”: “I wanted to build it all.”[s] That sentence could serve as the manifesto for the entire athlete business ownership movement. The choice to build rather than be used reflects a fundamental rejection of subordinate positioning.
The Academic Case for the Power Shift
This is not anecdote dressed as trend. A systematic review published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living synthesized 47 peer-reviewed studies from 2016 to 2025 on athlete self-production and platform empowerment. The findings are unambiguous: “a decisive shift in sport’s power balance, with athletes acting as media producers, cultural influencers, and entrepreneurial actors.”[s]
The review’s authors argue that “sport governance must evolve from a control-oriented model to one that positions athletes as co-creators of value and strategic partners in decision-making.”[s] Athlete business ownership, in this framing, is not a lifestyle choice. It is a governance imperative.
Stephon Marbury, the former 13-year NBA veteran behind Starbury, said athletes are “becoming owners and operators” and realizing that “their business potential goes far beyond licensing their name to a brand.”[s]
The Counterargument: New Dependencies, Old Risks
The optimistic narrative has cracks. The same systematic review that documents athlete empowerment also warns of its limits: “These developments embed new dependencies on platform algorithms and volatile digital markets. From a platform capitalism perspective, athlete autonomy is constrained by corporate-controlled infrastructures.”[s]
Athletes who disintermediate leagues and agents may simply be trading one set of gatekeepers for another: Instagram’s algorithm, TikTok’s content policies, YouTube’s monetization rules. The infrastructure remains corporate-controlled. The autonomy is conditional.
Meanwhile, private equity is accelerating consolidation across talent representation. Sportico, citing S&P Global, reported that Wasserman’s sports talent representation business ranked second behind CAA, which produced $578 million in 2024. Goldman Sachs agreed to buy Excel Sports Management, which represents Caitlin Clark and Tiger Woods, in a deal valued at around $1 billion. Wasserman, with more than $900 million in projected annual revenue, is up for sale.[s]
This consolidation creates structural conflicts. Bobby Sharma, founder of Bluestone Equity Partners and a former NBA G League general counsel, framed the concern as competitive integrity and fiduciary duty: “owners have obligations to the league and its franchises, while agents have an undivided duty to their clients,” he told Sportico. Those roles, he said, “can’t comfortably coexist without structural safeguards.”[s]
When the same private equity firms that own teams also own agencies, fiduciary-duty concerns follow. Athlete business ownership may address the athlete-side of this equation, but it does not solve the structural conflicts in representation when capital consolidates both buyer and seller.
The Due Diligence Problem
There is also a tactical risk. Matt Joyce, a 14-year MLB veteran, said leaving professional sports is “one of the toughest transitions an athlete can face” because, during a player’s career, “identity, routine, income, purpose” are centered around the game.[s]
Business networks and immersion programs can help. But they cannot replace the professional infrastructure that protects athletes from bad deals. Herrick Feinstein, a law firm specializing in sports and private equity, warns that “athletes should be wary of making decisions based solely on personal relationships, and instead rely on thorough due diligence and advice from professionals with no conflicting interests.”[s]
The informality that makes athlete networks feel empowering can also expose members to predatory pitches. Athlete business ownership requires athlete-level discipline: preparation, film study, knowing when to pass.
What Has to Change
The WNBA’s governance problem illustrates the structural ceiling on player power. A LinkedIn essay by Naeve Duarte quoted Atlanta Dream CEO Suzanne Abair to frame the constraint as NBA control over WNBA ownership decisions.[s] The same essay cited estimates that WNBA media value could be $8 billion to $10 billion and argued that roughly $500 million a year in WNBA media value may be flowing into NBA coffers.[s]
As Naeve Duarte, founder of Luminaire Sports Group, put it: “You can’t build equity on a foundation that’s inherently inequitable.”[s]
Athlete business ownership is a necessary but insufficient condition for athlete empowerment. The CBA wins matter. The entrepreneurial pivot matters. But until governance structures reflect athlete value creation rather than merely compensating for it, the architecture remains tilted. Athletes can own businesses. The question is whether they will eventually own the leagues.
