There is a fair chance that you had never heard of James Conrad and Paul McBeth, either.
The latter is the world number one in disc golf, an auspiciously named 30-year-old Californian who has won the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) world title five times and earned just under US$550,000 in prize money since 2005. That may or may not help you place him. Either way, in February, McBeth signed a ten-year endorsement contract worth US$10 million plus bonuses with equipment manufacturer Discraft.
The Michigan-based company has a very obvious incentive to drive awareness – that anyone reading this has probably been thinking of the brand name Frisbee for the last 80 words or so – but its partnership with McBeth is driven as well by how assiduously he has managed his digital presence.
This is as good a time as any to reintroduce James Conrad. On the final hole of the final round of the 2021 PDGA Disc Golf World Championship in Utah at the end of June, with no margin for error, he stepped up to make a 247-yard throw for a birdie that forced McBeth into a playoff. Conrad went on to take the title as clips of his impossible shot swooped and swerved around the internet, eventually landing on shows like ESPN’s SportsCenter.
These are the marketing dynamics for athletes in smaller sports like this – mostly serving a dedicated niche but occasionally breaking out to win the attention not so much of casual fans as impressed onlookers. Both Conrad and McBeth have their own lines of merchandise for disc golf enthusiasts. McBeth, in particular, has been on hand for trick shots and demonstrations of his skills in online videos, often collaborating with other content creators.
Companies within disc golf are pushing at the boundaries. The Disc Golf Pro Tour (DGPT), whose media strategy is largely based on free YouTube videos and a Disc Golf Network with around 15,000 subscribers paying US$10 a month or US$75 a year, recently agreed a broadcast deal with ESPN. A two-hour show covering the Portland Open is due for national broadcast in the US on 4th August. That coverage is being sponsored by Discraft rival Dynamic Discs, which last year paid a six-figure sum for CBS Sports Network to screen the Dynamic Discs Open.
For the most part, though, disc golfers’ best option is to cultivate their own income potential. Their prospects are not evenly distributed. But then, nor are they anywhere else. A recent profile of McBeth in the Ringer points to data from Opendorse suggesting only 70 athletes in the world made over US$1 million from endorsement deals in 2019. Even in the biggest sports, the concentration of attention delivers very different rewards. Sportico has estimated in the past few days that Roger Federer has surpassed US$1 billion in career earnings, yet there are professional tennis players not too far from the top working hard to cover expenses.
For all that, there are plenty of athletes eager to exploit the breakout possibilities of that digital creator ecosystem, not least in more esoteric sports. In that context – to complete a long flight to the central point here – the changes in regulations for US college sports are especially significant.
As of 1st July, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has issued interim rules that clear all student-athletes to earn money from their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights. The move basically suspends restrictions on payments to athletes for endorsement deals, social media activity and personal appearances, including those on paid online fan services like Cameo. It affects over 460,000 competitors and it would not be an exaggeration to say it transforms a huge part of the American sports industry at a stroke.
It was also becoming inevitable. Various state lawmakers were on the verge of issuing legislation that would effectively compel colleges to allow NIL income. In mid-June, in the case of NCAA v Alston, US Supreme Court judges ruled unanimously in favour of former student-athletes on limits to educational benefits. The accompanying opinions by Judges Gorsuch and Kavanaugh left little doubt that further challenges to the NCAA’s amateur model would be favourably received.
Distemper has lingered around that arrangement for some time, and only grown as the NCAA and individual college programmes have spent more on coaching, facilities and marketing, while making more from sponsorship, ticketing and media deals. Many student-athletes, of course, are compensated through free tuition, but the value of that is no longer seen as commensurate with the revenues coming in. Not only that, but the artificial limits on what deals student-athletes can strike with third parties have long led to all manner of compromises and inconsistent penalties. It is a recipe for dysfunction.
And while arguments have centred in recent decades on whether student-athletes receive an adequate share of NCAA licensing deals or whether they should be able to sign endorsements with sportswear companies, the current market stresses are somewhat different. Much of the popular conversation around this subject has often had in mind students on high-profile football or basketball programmes, with at least a shot at a professional career beyond. There are not 460,000 of those.
There is a bulk of athletes beyond that – many of them, to bring us back to the top, in what might be called ‘niche’ sports – who also want to capitalise on their very limited period of notoriety and exposure. The global, open-source nature of the influencer economy means that some of them, at least, would have the ability to cultivate their own specialist audiences or tap into those that already exist, taking a cadre of relevant brands with them. Their peers in other walks of life already have that option.
The forces that have eventually been brought to bear on the NCAA system are not moral or ethical, but competitive. Earlier this year, the creator-led, youth-focused sports media company Overtime announced plans for the Overtime Elite League, a basketball competition for those in their late teens offering salaries and health insurance, full commercial benefits and other training opportunities. The risk to the NCAA of other disruptive entrants is very real.
US college sport is by no means the only environment where these pressures are being felt. For several years, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has faced calls to liberalise its Rule 40 restrictions on the promotion of non-Olympic sponsors by athletes during Games-time. It has done that, in part, by passing the decision on to national Olympic committees.
Still, the entry of more lifestyle-based sports with a dedicated following and crossover potential – sport climbing, surfing, skateboarding and, in 2024, breaking – will heighten calls for greater flexibility and support. That will be coming not just from competitors but from federations, endemic brands and long-time partners eager to convert their brief, unpredictable shot at a mass global audience by any available method.
The implications here might not be straightforward but they could be far-reaching. Throughout the history of the sports business, one of the few consistent phenomena is that when talent is not earning what it could be, that is a weak point that tends to give way.
All of this has the capacity to change the game, even if it is only fleetingly sighted.