Noble Savage wrote: ↑Wed Oct 18, 2023 2:24 pm
So I learned today that ENDEAVOR who owns WWE & UFC sold IMG ACADEMY for 1.25 Billion this past June.
It's not relative to the post just did not know It was worth 1.25 billion dollars.
Suppose you had $1-billion. You could spend $5,000 a day for more than 500 years before you would run out of money. Breaking it down even farther, it means you would have to spend over $100,000 every day for the next 25 years in order to spend $1-billion.
1 billion dollars in 100 dollar bills is 10 million individual bills.
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Man, There's definitely Money in Sports Education.
The original IMG was an endorsement/player agency that focused on individual sports like golf - Palmer, Nicholas, etc.. and then branched into tennis.... and later team sports.
If you're thinking the institutions/school/campus that is now down in FLA that came along later IMG Academy that was about 1980's, but again it was down in FLA and a primarily a gold/tennis campus.
About the early 2000's, they decided to add other team sports...... most notable football.
It has been sold a couple of times over, but yes it was a business model based off of developing golf/tennis players and then once that player was producing bank on the professional level, IMG would promote and gain revenue for representing that athlete.
Basically, IMG rolled the dice on a handful of kids.... as with say tennis with Andre Augasee (sp?) and Serena Williams to cash in on the back end when they made beaucoup dollars.
The football stuff/sports teams stuff is obviously different since production is based on not 1 single player but a group of players; IMG models themselves as the 'top prep' school nation wide.
I don't know now how much the representation side of IMG is still in effect, but the football prep side was highly based on the ESPN/College Gurus/fan sites high school player recruiting pages --- IMG wanted to have a roster full of 4-5 stars that the big UniSchools wanted. The rest of the team was comprised of recruit-want-a-bes that paid beaucoup tuition..... all as a financed/agency representation rate.
Before everyone goes "the 'IMG was stealing money" from the future Allstars/want-a-bes/never-to-bes..... it no different than the model in MLB that signs minor league guys to deals and banks on them becoming stars and then being under team control ($$$ control) for a set number of years; or those who sign MiLB for nothing and then gamble future gains vs money now by several different agencies that prorate those to future MLB contracts.
In other words, yeah there's money.... but for the most part those kids are gaining something that HS cannot offer financially.
It is model that has been around for a long time, but not with "home town sport". There have been academies for painting, music, singing, academics, etc..... for centuries......
We 'home town' guys are simply still operating off the 19th century mill town model of everyone is born here and will die here, so here is the place to be.
times have changed.
