How do athletes get paid for their name: fee, royalty or equity?

An athlete's name gets paid in three main ways: a fee, a royalty or stock in the buyer's company. All three are ways of renting the name to someone else's business. They differ in how the athlete shares that business's risk: a fee is fixed, a royalty moves with sales, and stock moves with the company's value. None of them turns the name itself into an asset. The name earns the way it always has: it gets rented out, and it is never owned as an asset. It produces income and has no value of its own that anyone could buy, sell or invest in. Owning that asset is a different thing from being paid in equity, and almost nobody has built it.

The clearest example is the biggest one. Michael Jordan's name has earned him billions from Nike, and Nike owns the brand. The one athlete in this piece who actually sold part of his name, rather than renting it, raises a question nobody has settled: was it a good deal?

What are the ways an athlete's name gets paid?

A fee is a fixed payment for a defined use of an athlete's name, such as a sponsorship paid per month, per year or per event. The buyer carries the commercial risk and keeps whatever the name earns beyond the fee.

A royalty is a percentage of the revenue or profit a product generates. The athlete earns more when the product sells more, so buyer and athlete share the upside of that product.

An equity endorsement (sometimes called athlete equity) is a deal in which an athlete is paid in stock in the sponsor's company instead of, or alongside, cash. The athlete is paid and also takes a bet on the sponsor's success, with incentives aligned.

All three are leases. The buyer rents the name for a use, a period and a price, paid in cash, in a share of sales or in shares of its own company. When the deal ends, the name goes back to the athlete. Its value was never counted anywhere.

Name Equity is the asset class created when the commercial value of an athlete goes beyond the sport, and their name and likeness are held in a company that owns them, so that value can be invested in and grown, rather than rented out to buyers one deal at a time.

The difference is simple. An equity endorsement pays the athlete with a piece of the buyer's business. Name Equity is ownership of the thing the buyer is renting.

Most of the market runs on the first structure. A fee is easy to price, easy to sign and easy to compare. Its limit is that it's set before anyone knows what the name will be worth. No public data shows how athlete deals split between fees, royalties and stock across sports. Everyone in the industry would say "mostly fees," and nobody has measured it.

How much can a royalty pay?

More than the sport itself. Michael Jordan earned $93.8 million in NBA salary over his career, according to Forbes. Nike signed him in 1984 to a five-year deal worth $2.5 million plus royalties. That royalty now sits on top of Jordan Brand, a Nike division with more than $5 billion in annual revenue. Nike has never disclosed the rate. At the roughly 5% most reports assume, his royalty comes to an estimated $300 million a year, more than two decades after his last NBA game. On that estimate, one year of the royalty pays him about three times his whole playing career.

A royalty is the best rent a name can earn, and it shows what renting leaves out. Jordan earns from every shoe. The Jumpman logo, the Jordan Brand business and the enterprise value built on his name sit on Nike's balance sheet. He is paid by the brand. Nike owns it.

Why are athletes asking to be paid in stock?

Because the athletes with the most leverage want a share of the upside they help create, not only a fixed price. Three deals show it in public:

• Stephen Curry and Under Armour. In April 2023, Under Armour granted Curry restricted stock valued at $75 million on the grant date, vesting in halves in 2029 and 2034.
• Giannis Antetokounmpo and Prenetics. In April 2026, Prenetics announced Giannis as a global partner and shareholder of its IM8 brand. The company said he "chose 100% equity over any cash compensation".
• Kylian Mbappé and On. In September 2026, On confirmed a multi-year deal with Mbappé as his Nike contract ended. The deal reportedly includes equity; terms are undisclosed.

A September report from Business of Athletes still called equity a "bespoke" form of athlete compensation, not a standard one. Institutional capital is now trying to make it one, through two models launched in the same month.

The first is CHAMP, launched in April 2026 by L Catterton, a consumer-focused investment firm managing about $40 billion, and Patricof Co, an investment and advisory firm that works with professional athletes. More than 250 athletes, including Kevin Durant and Joe Burrow, invest alongside the two firms as co-owners of consumer brands in their portfolio. The athletes are then put to work on those brands through what the firms call an "Athlete Activation framework," aimed at brands with strong affinity but little visibility. The athlete's fame is the growth lever, and the athlete's payoff is a share of the brand.

The second is EnOne Ventures, launched the same month by EnTrust Global, an investment firm with about $17 billion in assets, and OneTeam Partners, a group-licensing company set up by several US players' associations that represents more than 35,000 athletes. EnOne invests in companies where "athletes and their IP serve as primary drivers of product, brand, and commercial value," starting with a live-sports experiences company and an authenticated-memorabilia company, and gives them access to OneTeam's licensing, marketing and sponsorship operation. Here the athlete's name is an input the portfolio companies build on.

Both models put serious money behind athlete names. In both, the stock is in the brand, not the name.

Being paid in stock is a real improvement for an athlete who believes in the sponsor. It doesn't change what was sold. Curry's stock is a share of Under Armour, worth what Under Armour is worth. The name is still on lease.

Conor McGregor, the former two-division UFC champion, went a step further. He launched Proper No. Twelve Irish whiskey in 2018 as its majority owner, with his persona at the center of the marketing, and in April 2021 he and his partners sold the brand to Proximo Spirits, which already owned 49% of it, in a deal reported as worth up to $600 million. That's ownership of a company built on a persona, which is more than any equity endorsement. But the company was the whiskey brand, not the name. When the whiskey sold, the name stayed with McGregor.

That cuts the other way too. Because a buyer gets the brand and not the name, a brand built on a persona is worth more the less it depends on that person. Part of making it sellable, and part of raising its value, is reducing key-person risk, which means reducing its reliance on the name. For a persona brand, the persona is the launching pad, not the long-term business model. The better the brand does as a business, the less it needs the person it was built on. A name is the opposite: it can never be separated from the person. The only way for an athlete to capture the value of the name itself is to own the name, not a brand built on it.

What does it mean to own an athlete's name as an asset?

Legally, the athlete already owns their name: in the US, the right to control the commercial use of your name and likeness is a property right. But it's almost never held like one. It sits in no company, carries no valuation and can't take investment. It earns through a series of separate leases, each sold off one category at a time.

So there are only two categories: renting the name out, or owning it.

Renting is getting paid for what the name does. A fee, a royalty and an equity endorsement all belong here. Each one pays for a service: the value the name delivers to someone else's business. Stock in a sponsor looks like ownership, but it's the same payment made in shares instead of cash. None of the three gives the athlete a share of what the name itself is worth. Moving up from fee to royalty to stock aligns the athlete's incentives more and more closely with the brand's. But the athlete still owns only the slice of the brand's enterprise value they were paid with.

Owning is holding what the name is worth. The name sits in its own company. Every deal and venture built on the name is signed by that company and paid into it, and the company has an enterprise value that investors can own part of and fund. It's the difference between collecting rent on a building and owning the building.

Owning the asset doesn't replace fees, royalties or stock. It decides who receives them.

Today, ownership of a name trades at one moment only: the end. Authentic Brands Group took over the management of Shaquille O'Neal's name in 2015, four years after he retired, and was reported in 2022 to have paid about $269 million for 55% of David Beckham's brand company. No institutional investor is publicly known to take equity in an athlete's name company during the career at any scale. That's when the name grows fastest and needs capital most.

Holding the name in a company isn't enough on its own, and Foreman proved it. In 2005, he assigned the rights to his name and likeness to a subsidiary of a small public company, renamed George Foreman Enterprises, for about 35% of it. It never found a business. By 2007 it had about $200,000 in sales and $3 million in losses, and the SEC suspended trading in its shares in 2014. Fortune's verdict: it "had no actual business, just a personality".

A name in a company is legally an asset, and structurally investable. That doesn't make it worth anything. Signing sponsorships without holding the name in a company is one extreme: revenue without an asset. George Foreman Enterprises was the opposite extreme: an asset without revenue, and therefore worth almost nothing. Once the name is in a company, it gets judged like any company, on what it earns. Value needs both: the name held as an asset, and run as a business that makes money. And like any business, it needs an operator. First Light, an operator-investor in athlete IP, is built on that model: it takes equity in the company that owns an athlete's name and likeness, then operates it to increase its value.

Is being paid in stock better than cash?

Not automatically. Stock is usually illiquid, and stock in a sponsor carries two risks cash doesn't.

The first is relationship risk. Curry's $75 million grant doesn't vest until 2029 and 2034, with proration if the partnership ends early. In November 2025, Curry and Under Armour announced they were parting ways. What that stock ends up being worth is not public, and it won't be the number in the headline.

The second is key-person risk, which cuts both ways. In November 2024, after a civil court ruling against McGregor in Ireland, Proper No. Twelve said it would stop using his name and likeness in its marketing; Proximo noted it had owned 100% of the brand since 2021. The brand lost its face. McGregor had already sold. Whoever holds the equity when a name's value drops carries the loss, and here that was the buyer.

Stock is worth what the company is worth, and someone else runs the company.

Was the Foreman buyout a good deal?

Every other deal in this piece rents the name or sells a company built near it. Foreman's 1999 buyout did something different: it sold part of the name itself.

From 1994, Foreman was paid a share of the grill's profits, reported by BusinessWeek at about 40 percent per grill and up to $4.5 million a month at the peak. In 1999, Salton, the grill's maker, agreed to pay $137.5 million for the right to use his name and likeness on food-preparation products in perpetuity. That's not a lease. It's a sale of one slice of the asset, forever. A large part was deferred into four annual installments of $20 million, and in 2000 one of them was paid in Salton stock. More than 100 million grills have been sold, and Foreman said in 2014 that he had made well over $200 million from the grill.

If he was selling a grill royalty, the buyout looks like a mistake: he gave up the upside of a product that kept selling for years. If he was selling risk, it looks smart: a royalty depends on a kitchen appliance staying in fashion, and $137.5 million in 1999 removed that dependence.

It was a tremendous deal for him. The grill succeeded so completely that a whole generation now knows George Foreman as a grill brand, not a boxer. And he sold his name for that one category only, at a price no boxing purse came close to. His biggest, for fighting Evander Holyfield in 1991, was a guaranteed $12.5 million. The Salton deal was eleven times that, and everything outside home appliances stayed his to pursue. Selling a single category of his name, for that much, was the best deal his name ever made. Jordan never sold a slice of his name, and he never owned the brand built on it either.

Who should own an athlete's name?

The useful question isn't fee, royalty or stock. It's who owns the asset being rented, and who funds its growth.

An athlete with few options may sensibly take the fee. A sponsor the athlete believes in may be worth taking stock in. A company with distribution may be the right buyer for one category, as Salton was. But an athlete whose profile is rising, with someone funding and operating the name alongside them, has every reason to hold the name as an asset first and rent it out from there.

A question for brand managers

When you sign an athlete, how much risk are you willing to hand them in exchange for sharing the upside?