On 1 July 2021 Florida’s name, image and likeness statute took effect and a college athlete in the state could sign a commercial contract in their own name. Nineteen months later, on 17 February 2023, the legislature loosened it again, striking the bar that stopped schools and their support organisations directing compensation and allowing institutions to point athletes toward opportunities and run marketplace platforms. The amended law also obliges Florida institutions to put athletes through at least two workshops covering financial literacy, life skills and entrepreneurship before graduation, each of them running a minimum of five hours.
On 6 June 2025 Judge Claudia Wilken approved the settlement in House v. NCAA. Schools that opt in have been able to pay athletes directly since 1 July 2025, under a first year cap reported at roughly $20.5 million per school, alongside back damages of about $2.58 billion payable over ten years. Third party deals worth $600 or more must be reported through a clearing platform operated with Deloitte, which tests whether the payment matches fair market value.
Eric McNeil works on the talent side of South Florida luxury development, connecting recognised athletes and entertainers with pre-construction projects along the Miami to Palm Beach corridor. What has changed in that work over five years is not appetite. It is who is sitting across the table. An athlete now arrives in a professional league having already formed an entity, filed in more than one state, watched a payment of their own tested against a fair market value standard by a third party, and sat through ten hours of instruction on how money behaves.
Why a short earning window changes the arithmetic
The growing interest in ownership alongside traditional endorsement opportunities reflects, in part, the unique financial timeline of a professional athletic career. There is research to that effect. A 2015 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Kyle Carlson, Joshua Kim, Annamaria Lusardi and Colin Camerer examined every player drafted by an NFL team between 1996 and 2003. Bankruptcy filings began soon after retirement and continued at a substantial rate through at least the first twelve years of it. The finding that mattered was the one about protection: filing rates were not affected by a player’s total career earnings or by how long the career had lasted. Earning more, and earning for longer, did not help.
The tax position sharpens the same point. Most states apportion an athlete’s salary by duty days, a measure that counts practices, meetings, travel and training camp as well as games, so a player domiciled in Florida still owes income tax in every state where they work. Residency shelters the home portion, and since Florida levies no personal income tax there is nothing to reclaim it. Residency also shelters what duty days never touch: investment income, and, under 4 U.S.C. 114, retirement income paid to a non-resident, a definition that reaches deferred compensation paid out as substantially equal periodic payments over life expectancy or across a period of at least ten years.
Those dynamics help explain why many professional athletes increasingly think about ownership, diversification and long-term capital allocation while they are still playing. For McNeil, that broader shift is part of what has changed the conversation around real estate: athletes are increasingly approaching opportunities not simply as endorsers or buyers, but as entrepreneurs evaluating where and how they want to participate. The problem is not a shortage of money. It is a mismatch between the years the money arrives and the years it is needed.
Real estate is one visible part of that shift. For athletes already spending significant time in markets like South Florida, luxury real estate can also sit at the intersection of personal use, business relationships and long-term ownership, making it a natural area of interest for athletes thinking beyond traditional endorsement opportunities.
Endorsement and ownership are different instruments
The old arrangement asked nothing beyond attendance. Someone wanted a recognisable name, the name was paid a fee, the association ran for the length of the campaign and ended when it did. Nothing was at risk and nothing accrued.
Ownership inverts every term. Capital goes in and stays in through a construction period that the owner does not control. The holder carries the downside as well as the upside. The association becomes permanent, because a purchase is a matter of record in a way a campaign never is, and that permanence is precisely why the questions have got harder. A person being paid asks about the shoot date. A person buying asks who the counterparty is and what happens to that counterparty if the project runs late.
The clearing process built into the House settlement has turned out to be useful training. A generation whose own endorsements were assessed against a fair market value standard has learned to ask what a payment is actually for, and that habit travels to any contract where a number has to be justified rather than simply quoted.
The reputational asymmetry runs the opposite way from what people assume. An endorser can walk when the term expires. An owner cannot, which makes owners more careful rather than less, and it is why a serious athlete buyer will now spend longer on the people than on the asset.
Where it goes wrong
There is a hazard in all of this that deserves naming plainly. A sponsor who wants recognisable owners has an incentive to bring them in for the association rather than for the money, and a person being courted can mistake being wanted for being well served. The two feel identical from the inside and they produce opposite outcomes.
The tells are consistent enough to list. An approach that arrives after pricing and terms are already fixed is looking for an endorsement with a purchase attached. Terms that come with a short deadline are usually terms that were not built to survive scrutiny. A counterparty who will not say who else has committed is asking one person to supply credibility for everyone. McNeil’s work on this side of the market is built around removing that dynamic rather than trading on it, which in practice means introductions made early enough for real questions to be asked and answered, and projects that would stand up with no recognisable name attached to them at all.
The direction of travel points further up the chain. Buying something finished is the entry point. Taking a position before ground is broken sits a step beyond it, and a good deal of the current activity in the corridor sits there. The constraint on that is not capital and it is not enthusiasm. It is information, because the questions that matter at that stage are difficult to answer from outside and the answers are held by people under no obligation to volunteer them. The athletes coming through now have been taught to ask anyway, which is a change that took four years and two courtrooms to produce.
This article is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and it is not investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Real estate and private market investments carry risk, including loss of principal, and nothing described here is a prediction of future results. Readers should consult their own licensed advisers before making any financial decision.
