During the 2023 NBA playoffs, D’Angelo Russell kept setting a bottle of Coco5 on the table at Lakers postgame press conferences. Team staff kept taking it away. The drink wasn’t an official NBA partner, so it wasn’t supposed to be on camera.
What made the moment odd is that nobody was paying Russell to hold it. He owned part of the company, through one of the first athlete investing collectives to work at any real scale.
Russell had come into a 2021 financing round assembled by Jim Reynolds, founder of Chicago-based Loop Capital, for a coconut-water brand that started inside the Chicago Blackhawks’ training room. Devin Booker, Derrick Rose, Charles Barkley and twins Marcus and Markieff Morris came in with him. Reynolds set one condition, as he told Forbes: “everybody had to put their own money up,” and they had to actually drink the product.
An athlete investing collective is a pooled investment vehicle that lets professional athletes buy direct equity in private companies as co-owners, instead of negotiating one-off endorsement contracts or writing small individual angel checks. What Reynolds improvised in 2021 became an institutional product in 2026. In April, private equity firm L Catterton and athlete advisory firm Patricof Co announced CHAMP. By July, an automotive M&A bank had opened a dedicated athlete practice and a Frisco family office had run its ninth symposium on the subject.
For founders, this changes what athlete money is. It used to be a marketing line item. It’s becoming a term sheet.
Last updated: August 2026
Quick answers
What is an athlete investing collective?
An athlete investing collective is a pooled investment vehicle that gives professional athletes direct equity ownership in private companies as co-investors alongside an institutional manager. CHAMP, launched by L Catterton and Patricof Co in April 2026, is the largest example. Athletes commit their own capital and take ownership positions rather than accepting a fee for promotional work.
How much capital does CHAMP have?
The official April 23, 2026 announcement from L Catterton and Patricof Co discloses no fund size. Press reporting, including Forbes and Sportico, puts the target raise at $500 million with athletes having committed more than 10% of it. Treat the $500 million as reported rather than confirmed.
Can a startup pitch an athlete investing collective directly?
Rarely. CHAMP sources deals through L Catterton’s existing consumer investing pipeline, and check sizes at that firm run from $5 million to $5 billion. Most founders will reach athlete capital through a lead investor, an agent, or a family office such as Rise Family Office rather than through a cold approach.
What is an athlete investing collective?
An athlete investing collective pools athlete capital into a managed vehicle that buys ownership stakes in operating companies. The manager handles sourcing and diligence. The athletes supply capital and, afterward, attention.
The structure exists because the best private deals are hard for a single athlete to reach. Winning an allocation in a competitive consumer round generally requires an institutional relationship, a diligence team, and a check large enough to matter to the company. A shortstop with $4 million to deploy has none of those things on his own. Two hundred of them, sitting behind a private equity firm, have all three.
L Catterton’s announcement describes CHAMP’s core feature plainly: “Athletes participate directly alongside L Catterton and Patricof Co as co-owners of portfolio companies to create powerful and authentic alignment of interests that differs meaningfully from traditional athlete-brand relationships.”
Mark Patricof, who founded Patricof Co in 2018 and is the son of venture capitalist Alan Patricof, put the thesis more bluntly in the same release: athletes “can drive better outcomes when they have skin in the game.”
How is this different from an endorsement deal?
In an endorsement deal the athlete is paid a fee and carries no exposure to whether the company succeeds. In a collective the athlete buys equity, and the promotional work follows the investment instead of substituting for it.
The practical difference shows up in behavior. Charles Barkley used a nationally televised postgame interview to tell Devin Booker to hydrate with Coco5. No contract required that. Barkley owned a piece of it, and so did Booker. When Russell’s bottle got confiscated at that Lakers press conference, the brand got more coverage from the removal than a paid placement would have bought.
The financial asymmetry matters more. An endorsement pays once. Equity compounds. Coco5 grew from roughly 100 retail locations in 2021 to thousands of stores across Sprouts, Whole Foods, Walmart, Stop & Shop and Costco. CEO Marc Doggett, who joined in early 2026 after nearly two decades in sports nutrition including a stint at Liquid I.V., told Forbes the company expects to move from about $10 million in revenue to a $30 million run rate by the end of 2026. The athletes who wrote checks in 2021 own that growth. An endorser would have cashed a check and moved on.
This is the same logic behind Cole Palmer launching his own ice brand rather than fronting somebody else’s, and it’s why the equity-over-fee shift keeps showing up across the athletes who’ve built real businesses.
Which vehicles are active in 2026
Five distinct structures are operating right now, and they want different things. Lumping them together as “athlete money” is how founders waste six weeks pitching the wrong one.
| Vehicle | Behind it | Structure | Launched | Relevant if you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CHAMP | L Catterton, Patricof Co | Athletes co-invest alongside the sponsors as portfolio co-owners | April 2026 | Run a scaled consumer brand with untapped visibility |
| Loop Capital athlete syndicate | Jim Reynolds | Deal-by-deal syndicate, each athlete writes their own check | 2021 | Have a product athletes personally use |
| ATHLOS | Alexis Ohanian, Seven Seven Six | Athletes hold equity in the league they compete in | 2024 | Build sports media or live events |
| DCG Athlete Investment Services | Dave Cantin Group | Advisory practice matching athletes to dealership groups | July 2026 | Operate a local, physical-footprint business |
| Rise Family Office | RISE Advisors, Frisco TX | Full family-office services plus an annual deal symposium | Symposium in its 9th year | Want warm introductions rather than a fund process |
The July additions are the part worth watching. Dave Cantin Group, an automotive retail M&A advisory firm at 45 Rockefeller Plaza, launched DCG Athlete Investment Services on July 1 to formalize athlete-dealer partnerships. DCG President Brian Gordon framed the pitch against the old model: “Done right, the opportunity is much bigger than a few appearances, some PR or even putting a recognizable name on a building.”
Days earlier, Rise Family Office held its ninth annual Athlete Enterprise Symposium at the Hall Park Hotel in Frisco, Texas, under the theme “Cowboy Culture: Protect the Ranch.” NFL veteran Terron Armstead sat on a panel about converting first-generation wealth into multigenerational holdings, per D CEO Magazine. Nine years in, that event predates the trend everyone is now writing about.
The $500 million figure is not in the official announcement
Read the actual L Catterton and Patricof Co press release from April 23, 2026 and you will not find $500 million anywhere in it. You won’t find a fund size, a minimum commitment, a fee structure, a carry split, a closing date, or a governance description. The release never even calls CHAMP a fund. It uses “strategic partnership” and “platform.”
The only CHAMP-specific number the two firms disclosed is this sentence: “To date, more than 250 elite athletes have partnered with CHAMP.” Every dollar figure attached to the story since then, the $500 million target and the reported 10%-plus athlete commitment, comes from press reporting rather than the sponsors.
That gap is worth naming, because the “$500 million athlete fund” framing has been repeated across dozens of outlets as though it were disclosed. It may well be accurate. It isn’t confirmed by either firm on the record.
The numbers that are on the record are useful. L Catterton manages approximately $40 billion in equity capital, has made over 300 investments since its founding in 1989, and runs a team of more than 200 investment and operating professionals across 18 offices. Its funds write checks between $5 million and $5 billion. Patricof Co, by contrast, published no AUM, no headcount, and no investment count in its own boilerplate. Separate reporting puts Patricof Co’s total invested capital at roughly $140 million since 2018, with athletes behind about half of it, across a client base of more than 230 athletes.
Hold those two numbers next to each other. L Catterton has deployed capital at a scale roughly 280 times Patricof Co’s lifetime total. The institutional money is doing the investing here. The athletes are supplying alignment, distribution and a story. That’s not a criticism of the model, but it does tell you who sets terms.
Why athletes are building family offices now
The timing comes down to a compensation curve that runs backwards. Most executives peak financially in their forties and fifties. Athletes get their largest contracts in their early twenties and retire in their thirties with fifty or sixty years left to fund.
Reynolds put it this way: “Athletes have this very unique situation where they make most of their money when they’re least equipped to deal with it.”
The failure data supports the urgency, though it’s messier than the popular version. A frequently cited Sports Illustrated figure claims 78% of NFL players hit serious financial trouble within two years of retiring. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found a far lower but still alarming number: 15.7% of NFL players filed for bankruptcy within twelve years of retirement. Average career length across MLB, the NBA and the NFL sits around 4.6 years. Even the conservative figure describes a group failing at rates no other high-income cohort matches.
Pooled vehicles address that directly. They swap a wasting asset, fame, for an appreciating one, ownership. They also bring diligence the athlete cannot perform alone, which matters given how many athletes have been sold bad deals by advisors who collected fees regardless of outcome.
Patricof Co’s client demographics tell you where this is heading: about two-thirds of its 230-plus athletes are under 30. This generation is structuring ownership before the peak contract, not after. Compare that with the older path documented in GJ’s look at the world’s highest-paid athletes, where off-field income arrived mostly through endorsement stacking.
What these collectives look for in a company
These vehicles want consumer companies with proven product affinity and a distribution ceiling that attention can raise. L Catterton’s own language is specific: the strategy “is particularly oriented toward companies with strong underlying brand affinity but untapped visibility, where athlete activation may catalyze growth.”
Read that as a filter with three parts.
The product has to be physically usable by an athlete. Rhoback makes performance polos and quarter-zips. Coco5 is a sports drink born in a locker room. Reynolds’ rule was that syndicate members had to drink the product. A B2B compliance platform fails this test no matter how good the metrics look.
The bottleneck has to be awareness, not product. If nobody has heard of you and people love you once they try you, athlete distribution is a real unlock. If your churn problem is the product itself, athlete attention accelerates the leak.
The check has to be large enough to matter. CHAMP’s first deal was a nearly $50 million minority investment in Rhoback, a company founded in 2016 that started out selling from a wooden truck. These are growth-stage checks, not pre-seed. Founders raising a $2 million round are not the customer here.
Jameis Winston, one of the CHAMP athletes in the Rhoback deal, described his own screen to Forbes: “Anytime that you’re analyzing investments, you always look at the people.” He’d visited the three founders in Charlottesville before committing. That’s a diligence process a founder can actually prepare for, and it’s closer to how early equity conversations go than to a media buy.
One practical move: if athlete capital is genuinely a fit, build the relationship through a lead institutional investor or a family office rather than approaching athletes directly. CHAMP deals come through L Catterton’s pipeline. The athletes join a round; they don’t originate it.
Where the model breaks
The honest answer is that nobody has published a return yet. Across CHAMP, the Loop Capital syndicate and ATHLOS, there isn’t a realized exit, an IRR, or a measured sales lift in the public record. The central claim, that co-ownership beats endorsement, currently rests on anecdotes about a confiscated bottle and a Barkley TV moment.
Three specific risks deserve attention.
Liquidity mismatch. Private equity holds run seven to ten years. A 24-year-old committing capital in 2026 may want that money at 31, in the middle of a lockup, right when his playing income stops. There’s no established secondary market for athlete LP positions.
League conflicts. The Russell incident is funny until it’s expensive. Athletes own equity in brands that compete with their league’s official sponsors, and the governing agreements were not written for cap-table participation.
Concentration. Consumer brands are correlated. A vehicle holding several athletic apparel and beverage companies is one consumer-spending downturn away from a synchronized markdown, and the athletes are also personally exposed to the same sports-adjacent economy.
ATHLOS shows the model at its cleanest. Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit cofounder who runs Seven Seven Six, launched the women’s track league in 2024 and gave athlete owners equity in the thing they create value for. By 2026 it ran across London and New York with more than $2.1 million in prize money, with Sha’Carri Richardson, Gabby Thomas and Tara Davis-Woodhall as owners and advisors. The alignment there is total. The exit path is still unwritten.
For founders, the takeaway is narrower than the trend coverage suggests. Athlete capital in 2026 is real, institutional, and concentrated in growth-stage consumer. If that’s you, the path runs through the institutions, not the athletes. If it isn’t, an endorsement deal is still the honest version of what you’re actually buying.
Related reading on GJ: what the CHAMP fund is and why founders should care, how retail investors buy into sports teams from $500, and the micro-SaaS business models solo founders are building in 2026.
