Ramis Monthly Sports Digest Edition 7

Rami's Monthly Sports Digest Edition 7

WHATTTTT is up everybody! My name is Rami and this is the 7th edition of Rami’s Monthly Sports Digest! I cannot believe it is now 7 blogs already. I just know you were all waiting for this to drop, so my Christmas gift to you whether you celebrate or not is this edition!

I hope you all had an amazing Thanksgiving with the people you love and care about, and going into the holidays and New Year I wish you nothing but blessings from me and Rami’s Sports Corner.

Personal Update

This month was a lot to say the least. I just finished up finals, which were brutal. But you've got to take the punches and keep going. You can’t win 'em all. That’s the beautiful thing about the journey, and also the beautiful thing about sports: embracing the hard.

After the interview and application process with Wasserman, I got a spring internship on the Brands and Properties team, so I’m super excited to see the agency side of sports and really dive into it.

Personally, I’ve been going 200 MPH lately and I know I need to slow down a bit but hopefully this winter break will allow me to do that.

Last edition, it was “5 Things I’ve Learned in 5 Minutes,” and I got personal, which is hard for me. I know I didn’t get crazy deep or tell you everything that’s happening in my life that’s affecting me and whatnot, but I did get personal, and I tried to give you opportunities to reflect and take something away from a 19-year-old kid who’s just trying to figure it out himself.

Before we hop into the sports this week, I just want to say: I got so many great reviews and feedback. People were texting me about how much they loved the read, and that genuinely meant a lot.

Rami’s Corner Reflection

Now, if you’re still reading and didn’t click off yet here’s your reflection for the month:

As someone who really values relationships, people, and connections. I love building relationships, keeping them, and more in specific being intentional about the people in my life and my relationships. So here’s your little assignment:

After you finish reading this blog (and I said early don't click off), reach out to someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Text them, call them, hell even email them if that’s all you’ve got. Ask how they’re doing. Ask what’s new. Check in on them in a real, genuine, and intentional way.

It could be a friend you haven’t talked to in ages, a teammate you played with years ago, a family member you rarely see, a girlfriend you miss, or even me. I’m serious—you can text, call, or, if you don’t have those, email me. I would love that and would love to talk.

The whole point is to remember that life moves so fast but even when life moves fast, it never moves too fast that your relationships should fall victim to the pace of life.

“Treat people nicely on the way up the ladder; you might need them on the way down.”

Now, with that being said, let’s get into the 7th edition of Rami’s Monthly Sports Digest. Thank you so much for being here, reading, and being a part of this journey and PLEASE subscribe! Scroll to the bottom and drop that email in. Let’s do it.

In today’s edition we are going to be talking about -

How over the last few years, I’ve noticed something that I can’t unsee anymore: sports isn’t just “sports” now. It’s a full-money machine. Private equity funds are buying pieces of teams. College football rosters are basically built through donor-backed NIL collectives. Ten-year-olds are playing on $5,000 travel teams like they’re mini-pros. It’s all connected by one thing: money.

I love the business side of sports. I’m literally majoring in this stuff, and I geek out over ownership structures, media rights, and sponsorship deals. But the deeper I go, the more I keep bumping into the same question: at what point does the pursuit of revenue and money start changing sports itself?

Today I want to walk through three layers of that money stack:

1. Private equity moving into team and agency ownership.
   
   

2. NIL in college football, and how it’s crazy it is.
   
   

3. The youth sports industry, and how “pay to play” is shaping the future.
   

1. Private Equity: When Teams Become Investments

Private equity has officially entered the sports conversation. In just the past few years, PE firms have bought minority stakes across all four major U.S. leagues and a lot of teams now have some sort of private equity involvement. Leagues that used to not allow institutional money have officially opened the door and in last year NFL owners even voted to allow approved private equity funds to own up to 10% stakes in teams. From a league that used to swear against it to allow that now is huge.

Why do these funds love sports and why now? From a financial standpoint, it makes perfect sense. There aren’t too many NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, or Premier League clubs in the world, and live sports is still one of the last things people consistently watch in real time. Add in growing valuations year over year, monster media-rights deals, and the upside around the team with real estate, events, betting partnerships, and more you can start to see why investors treat a franchise like they are now.

Private equity is buying into European soccer clubs now, investing in stadium redevelopments, and building ownership models that treat teams like properties in a global network. In the U.S., you’re seeing more investment around venues to turn stadiums and ballparks into year-round entertainment hubs with concerts, festivals, events, and experiences. This is because the real value isn’t just the games. It’s the venue, the land, and everything you can monetize around it. Look at Arrow Head stadium, moving indoors leaving behind their historic landmark outside. Why? It's a smart business but it also changes the mindset. A stadium starts to feel less like a field where people play and more like a mixed-use asset where shows, concerts, and people can meet.

There are real upsides. Private equity can bring professionalized management, better analytics, and capital to upgrade facilities, fan experience and overall budget for the team. Fans get better operations, improved concessions, and modernized arenas. Players might benefit too with more money and backing they get better staff, better medical resources, and infrastructure that actually helps careers last longer.

But in Rami’s Sports Fashion the business side. Private equity usually operates on a 5–10 year gap and is measured by ROI, not championships. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about winning because winning drives revenue but it does mean the scoreboard they ultimately answer to is financial and that ROI. So decisions around ticket pricing, local outreach, staffing, and even relocation can start to look different when everything runs through a spreadsheet instead of an owner of a team who's owned it for 50 years.

Private equity can change the vibe of a team. A team can start to feel less like “our city’s team” and more like an investment. That can mean more money and better business decisions, but it also raises a real concern: will choices be made for fans and the community or for that ROI?

2. NIL in College Football $$

If private equity is changing the top of the pyramid, NIL is blowing up the middle: college football.

Now I don't really know where to start with this, because it isn't just private equity, its very rich donors, pouring millions and millions to see their team win. And now college football is turning into that aspect of more money, more players, more wins, more championships.

When NIL rules changed, the idea was simple on paper: let athletes finally earn money from their name, image, and likeness. I was a big fan of this, my favorite team's former coach Jim Harbaugh advocated for it for so long. But now in practice, it’s turned into something way bigger: donor-funded collectives, wide-open transfer portals, and “deals” that look very different from the original idea of signing a few autographs.

Take Utah as an example of how far this has gone. Not a huge college football blue blood right? Not a program you think is the top dog, or has the most money. Their Crimson Collective arranged a deal giving every scholarship football player a Dodge Ram 1500 truck lease 85 players rolling out in matching pickups. Then the same collective expanded vehicle leases to other teams too, even covering insurance in some cases. This isn’t a “star quarterback gets paid” story. It’s a full roster perks package backed by an NIL fund. Twenty years ago, that would’ve sounded like a fake under the table recruiting pitch, now it is real.

Now zoom out to the donor side. At Michigan State, a donor, one man, owner of Acrisure pledged $401 million gift to Michigan State, with major support aimed at athletics and football-related initiatives. That is actually absurd. Even when donations aren’t technically NIL money, the point is obvious: the arms race is real. Facilities, staff, resources, recruiting support are indirect advantages that impact everything. Meanwhile, collectives across the country are directly coordinating with donors and brands to fund deals that keep star players from transferring or lure them out of the portal. Kenny Dillingham, coach of Arizona State in a press conference last week said “ “We need to find one of these really rich people in this city to step up and stroke a check, and I'll do everything I can to make (them) the most famous person in the city.” Money now talks in CFB in public. It's always been about resources. Now it’s just happening out in the open.

On one hand, this is overdue justice. I said earlier I was a huge supporter of these players getting paid what they deserve. Players generate billions. They fill stadiums of 100s of thousands of people, drive TV deals, sell merchandise, and create the product. For decades, coaches and administrators got rich while players were told just to play. NIL finally lets athletes participate in the value they create, and I don’t think anyone can honestly argue they don’t deserve a piece of that pie.

On the other hand, it’s kind of chaos. Some collectives have real money and structure, others are thrown together, and that gap is only getting bigger. Some programs have standardized salaries where almost every scholarship player gets a baseline amount. Others throw most of their chips into a few players paying them over 5 million dollars a year. Combine NIL with the transfer portal, and it starts to feel like a yearly free agency window roster continuity is harder than ever. Teams are now “re-signing players” which feels like the NFL. If a guy pops off at a smaller program, it’s not crazy to think a bigger brand with a better-funded collective is going to come calling with tampering but there's no way to monitor all of this.

It is really funny because we solved one problem (players not getting paid) and created another (there aren’t consistent guardrails in place). NIL isn’t going away and it shouldn’t but right now the overall system of donors acting like unofficial owners, deciding who’s “worth” paying for and more that I talked about is insane. It's actually comical.

At some point, college sports has to face the real question: is this still a university with an athletic department or building franchises inside universities?

3. Youth Sports: Pay to Play

Now shoutout to my mother who wanted me to talk about youth sports to some capacity in one of these blogs.

Before an athlete gets recruited or signed to a pro team, there’s a good chance their family has already spent thousands just to keep them competitively there in the game. Estimates put youth sports in the U.S. around a $39–40 billion industry. That is big business.

Parents feel it. Surveys suggest the average family now spends around $1,000 per year on their child’s primary sport up significantly since 2019. And that’s just the average. Other data says a huge portion of families spend between $1,200 and $6,000 annually, and a noticeable number go way beyond that. Club fees, travel tournaments, uniforms, private training, showcases, equipment add up fast, especially when a kid plays multiple sports or joins an elite travel team. As a former athlete who played soccer growing up I have seen this first hand and been a part of it.

The result is a system where money quietly becomes the main thing. Travel ball, AAU, and club teams used to be about finding and concentrating talent. Now, in a lot of cases, if you can pay, you can play whether you’re elite or not. Meanwhile, there are kids with real talent who never even step into that pipeline because the price of admission is too high. This is mostly a U.S thing too, and is a reason we are falling behind now in some sports.

What’s wild is how normalized it’s become. Families plan weekends around tournaments, book hotels, drive hours for games, and pay trainers in the offseason like their kid is already in a professional development system. And with how competitive recruiting has become, it’s hard to blame them. The message is clear if you don’t do all this, you might be falling behind. Youth sports start to feel less like childhood and more like an investment to get their kids possible free education or a pro contract.

Here’s the thing: spending more doesn’t automatically mean better results. For every kid who earns a scholarship, there are way more families who pour thousands into travel teams, trainers, and camps and never see a return, just memories, and sometimes burnout or injuries. The fun of playing with your friends turns into pressure to “make it worth it.” Sports becomes a bill you have to justify, not something you love.

And we can’t really talk about NIL and big money at the top without the pipeline of pay-to-play at the bottom. By the time athletes reach college, the gap between kids who had year-round coaching and exposure and kids who didn’t is massive. That’s not just talent winning out. That’s access.

Conclusion

From private equity buying stakes in teams, to donors fueling nine-figure athletic investments, to NIL collectives handing millions, to families spending thousands on youth travel teams. Money is touching every layer of sports right now.

None of it is purely good or purely bad. There are real opportunities with better resources for athletes, more platforms for women’s sports, improved fan experiences, and life changing financial upside for players who used to get nothing. I am a fan of this.

But there are also real tradeoffs. Real fans can get priced out. Smaller programs and lower-income families can get left behind. Decisions change from “what’s best for the player or community?” toward “what’s best for the business?”

I’m not anti-business, I am majoring in economics. I’m studying this because I want to be part of the industry and hopefully help build the future of it. But I also grew up seeing what sports can do at their best and it is also why I'm majoring in sports administration. Spots give kids a safe place, teach discipline, create community, and make people feel part of something bigger than themselves. That is what it gave me.

The more sports becomes an investment product, the more we have to ask: who are we building this system for? Investors, donors, or the actual players and fans?

Over the next decade, the defining challenge in sports won’t be “how do we make more money?” That part is already happening. We talked about it today. The real question is:
Can we keep growing the business of sports without losing the soul of sports?

That’s the question I’ll keep coming back to here at Rami’s Sports Corner.

Thank you so much for joining me in this edition. With the holidays here, there’s a lot to celebrate so enjoy the time with your family, stay safe, and have an amazing New Year.

I’ll catch you in 2026!

-Rami