💰The Players Fund: The £40m Venture Fund created by Athletes

Welcome and Happy Monday to all the new subscribers to this community.

As many of you may know I love watching the business moves made by those at the top of the sport. It’s like a sport in itself watching all the chess pieces be moved by those who play the game at the very very top.

Alongside the very elite I am also intrigued by those who are in the rung below. So much so that I recently uploaded a video entitled:

What the 100th Best Athlete in Each Sport Makes. Watch that HERE if you haven’t already.

When you aren’t making $30m-$40m per year in salary what type of things can you do then? Well today’s newsletter explores just that as we dive into the business moves being made by the C and D tier of athletes! You’ll soon realise that it can be just as fruitful!

One of my favourite things about sport at the elite level today is seeing elite athletes create their own venture capital business outside of their sport. This is a surefire path to create extreme levels of wealth later in life.

A selection of athletes who have done this include:

• Serena Williams (Serena Ventures)

• Aaron Rodgers (Rx3 Ventures)

• Rory McIlroy (Symphony Ventures)

As you can see from the names above this type of play is usually reserved for today’s elite as they make so much money, they can do this themselves without needing to raise outside capital.

Kevin Durant is perhaps the best example of this. His company 35 Ventures ran with his business partner and right-hand man Rich Kleiman have invested in over SIXTY tech companies already including companies such as Acorns, Coinbase, Zenreach, Lime, Therabody, Underdog Fantasy and many more.

He has already seen exits too. Kevin famously invested $1m in Postmates in 2016 which resulted in a $15m exit when they IPO’d just four years later.

Their investment is usually seen as strategic. Companies leave a peace of the funding round open to wealthy athletes as their audience provides a massive marketing channel for the business helping accelerate the companies growth much faster than before. This in turn creates a lot of tailwinds for the athlete too.

There is one problem though. Not everyone can make $48.5m/year in salary like Kevin Durant can from the Phoenix Suns!

So what happens when you’re an athlete making say, $4m/year instead? Well, the answer is you team up and join forces with others around you, which is exactly what has happened with The Players Fund.

The Players Fund is exactly that, a fund created by athletes investing in early stage businesses. The athletes involved include Ben Stokes, KL Rahul, Stuart Broad, Jos Buttler, Chris Smalling, Serge Gnabry and Héctor Bellerín.

Those guys have come together with a group of investment executives and pooled £40m between them - an impressive sum. The best part is that they have begun to deploy that capital already with two investments so far:

1. Hana Kuma

2. Seat Unique

Hana Kuma is the media company created by Naomi Osaka. It was initially a company under SpringHill (LeBron James’ media company) until it struck out on its own accord. Investors now include FSG, Epic Games, Disruptive and the Players Fund!

Alongside HK is Seat Unique. On the surface it looks like a standard marketplace for tickets but it's more than that. It's the best place to buy and sell hospitality and VIP seats specifically allowing clubs to maximise the revenue they get from these usually high ticket offerings.

They've raised 12 million pounds over two funding rounds so far with the latest seeing investment from The Players Fund.

This is an excellent idea and a venture I am going to follow very closely. Both of those investments happened some months ago so I am intrigued to see the pace in which they choose to invest in other companies too.

There are still a few questions in my mind also:

1. Is the fund closed? Are they accepting any more capital?

2. Is there a criteria about WHO they can take capital from?

3. Will they ever expand to the US were growth has shown to be faster?

Either way, the fund is created and money is already being distributed.

Not much better than group economics being exercised in front of our very eyes!

Check out the website here.

I leave you today with an excellent interview that Eddie Hearn did recently with Hall of Fame boxer Andre Ward.

The whole interview is fantastic but there are two things Eddie speaks on in here that I would like to draw your attention to.

At 13:39, he speaks about the current state of global boxing and the ways alot of promoters lose money on shows they put on. A fascinating insight from a man who has put on some of the best boxing events in recent memory.

The second is a fascinating story from 2017 telling the story of how Andre Ward returned $125k to Paul Smith despite Paul coming in overweight to fight him.

I watch alot of Eddie content but this one was a cut above the rest.

See you next week.