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Friday, March 29, 2024

Another Big Year For Sports Agencies, Ranked By Forbes

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As sports continue growing to previously unimaginable heights of popularity, aided by the spread of television and internet coverage and high-quality production value and picture and sound quality, anyone involved in the business is making big bucks. Each time a team signs a star to a big contract, there’s an agent and agency to thank, and they get thanked handsomely by taking a nice cut out of paychecks that are far, far larger than anything the vast majority of people would come even close to seeing in an entire lifetime.

Forbes features the best sports agencies each year, and the rankings are in for the 2018 World’s Most Valuable Sports Agencies. All of the firms that Forbes puts in the rankings are responsible for getting their clients $45.7 billion, which has earned them a nice $2.35 billion from commissions. The big number is almost a 10 percent increase from the prior year.

Los Angeles based Creative Artists Agency leads the way by sitting atop the list thanks to $9.3 billion in contracts under management, leaving the other sports agencies in the dust. Forbes reports that “with a $900 million uptick in deals over the last year, the agency now stands to earn $348 million in commissions from its clients- a $30 million increase from 2017.”

CAA has 16 clients, with three in the top 11. All of those contracts amount to over $100 million.

Wasserman comes in at second behind CAA thanks to the $3.7 billion in contracts Wasserman has negotiated, earning the agency $175 million in commissions, both of which are nice increases from the year before. Founded in 2002 by Casey Wasserman founded the agency back in 2002, which doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows his lineage. His grandfather is Lew Wasserman, who is very well known around the talent agency world. Since its creation in 2002, Wasserman has chugged along and now represents over 750 athletes that span a handful of sports.

Forbes goes on to talk about how “Wasserman lands five agents on this year’s World’s Most Powerful Sports Agents list, including No. 12 Joel Wolfe and No. 18 Adam Katz (baseball), No. 29 Thad Foucher and #46 Darren Matsubara (basketball), and #42 Doug Hendrickson (football). Wasserman also expanded its soccer division with the purchase of European agency Mondial Promotion, giving it the strongest soccer division of any multi-sport agency in the world.” Wasserman’s acquisition of equity in No. 31 Orr Hockey Group shows that it wants to penetrate the hockey market further.

The list has a good mix of big agencies that cover multiple sports and agencies specializing in just one. There were also three new agencies that made it into the rankings this year.

By: Gabriel Eaton

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