As Name, Image and Likeness opportunities continue to blossom at schools everywhere, the collegiate collectibles industry is blooming as well.
OneTeam Partners and ONIT Athlete have entered into a multi-year partnership to create trading cards for thousands of athletes and integrate them into a group licensing program.
The first six schools with FBS programs to receive deals under this partnership umbrella are Iowa State, UCLA, Washington, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M and Penn State.
Iowa State and UCLA cards are already on-presale, while Washington will go live this week, with Virginia Tech, Texas A&M and Penn State launching in early September.
Each company is relatively new, yet both have shaken up the memorabilia world.
OneTeam Partners, established in 2019, handles licensing negotiations for several league player associations, including the NFL, MLB, WNBA and NWSL.
Meanwhile, ONIT Athlete, which was founded in 2021 and is a collectible and fan engagement brand, aims to work with more than 10,000 collegiate athletes during the 2024-25 academic year.
ONIT Athlete is currently licensed at 96 universities across the country, which OneTeam will be a major partner of moving forward, ONIT co-founder Sheridan Hodson said. Deals at these schools feature athletes across a number of sports, including football, basketball, baseball, soccer, gymnastics, wrestling and more.
“We’re trying to win over every university ... to work with every collegiate sport,” Hodson said. “It's important for those athletes to feel like they're getting paid their fair-market value to be part of our deals.”
What makes this agreement groundbreaking is creating broad team sets, rather than individual athletes. Creating cards for collegiate athletes isn’t new. Caleb Williams, for example, signed an exclusive agreement with Panini while at USC.
ONIT, which was the first trading card company to create collegiate team sets, is now able to expand this program with OneTeam’s collegiate partnerships already in place, which both companies believe will be much greater for general fan engagement across the country.
“If I'm a Washington Huskies fan, I would probably rather have the starting tight end’s card, then the starting quarterback of Mississippi State,” Hodson said. “My guess is most UW fans might not even know who that athlete is this year, but they probably all know who their starting tight end is. They really want to support their athletes. If there's NIL going out, they want it to go to the athletes on their team.”
The scale of the operation is something that hasn’t been done before, added Aaron Solender, OneTeam’s senior director of college strategy and operations.
“The Bowman U, which is a tremendous product,” Solender said, “they're signing the top 200 athletes from a given sport ... What ONIT’s doing is covering that in two teams.”
And that scale is where OneTeam’s pre-existing licenses are very important. OneTeam negotiated deals for more than 12,000 FBS athletes alone for their NIL to be showcased in “EA Sports College Football 25”, and the company additionally has other collegiate programs throughout the country, including establishing the first-ever college jersey licensing deal in partnership with Fanatics.
Penn State is a premier example of the effectiveness of what the ONIT-OneTeam partnership is capable of. ONIT wanted to launch trading cards with Penn State football for the upcoming season, but only managed to have confirmations from 50-60 players, Solender said. OneTeam already had licenses in place with all but five athletes from the roster.
Because of that pre-existing agreement, OneTeam is able to facilitate the inclusion of the remaining players, and now a Penn State fan is able to purchase an entire Nittany Lions team set, apart from the players who opted out of the initial OneTeam group licensing agreement.
“We can just kind of flip the switch,” Solender said.” “The more athletes we get into the program, the more opportunities we can bring to those athletes. And the more opportunities we have, the more athletes are going to want to sign on. And the flywheel keeps turning and turning.”
What further validates this landmark deal, is the payment structure, of which there are several components.
The first is individual athlete compensation.
ONIT pays royalties five to six times the rates of its competitors, according to Hodson, and confirmed by Solender.
“We forecast how many card packs or boxes we think we can sell for each team, and then we guarantee a pretty substantial portion of that, so the athletes know that they're going to be taken care of,” Hodson said. “It's not, you know, if we sell this, then we'll be able to pay you this.”
The first goal in making the guarantees, according to Hodson, is making sure the players didn’t lose out if ONIT didn’t meet its goals.
“That floor number is higher than the majority of the professional group licensing deals than we have in the trading card space,” Solender said.
Athletes who opt into these deals will be divided into two categories: passive and active.
Passive use involves simply opting in to have a trading card in the set, Hodson said. There is no other obligation aside from allowing ONIT to use their name, image and likeness to create a trading card.
All athletes who opt into passive use will receive a minimum base pay. That pay is the same among everyone on a given team, but can and most likely will differ from team to team.
Then there is active use, which typically goes to more high-profile athletes, and involves additional responsibilities such as signing autographs and other advertising and promotional purposes. Athletes who are asked to and choose to opt into the active use, will receive additional compensation on top of the base compensation.
And all of this is non-exclusive for the athletes, so they can sign supplementary NIL merchandise agreements. agreements
“You're going to have market-leading royalties associated with it, and everything that you're signing off on is non-exclusive,” Solender said. “If you're an athlete, why would you not want to be a part of that?
So, if all athletes on a team are paid the same for passive use, why are different teams at the same school paid differently?
ONIT developed an heuristic model to break down payment to athletes, which includes elements of the following:
- Fan base size (which for college football is based off the Tony Altimore study)
- Fan social media engagement
- Team season projections
- Prior year’s sales (if applicable)
- How willing are athletes from the teams willing to engage in promotion
- How willing are the partners (such as the school, Learfield) willing to engage in promotion
For every team across every school, variables are weighted differently. For example, athlete engagement might be a much more important factor than fan base size for a Big Ten gymnastics program, and it will be weighted as such in the algorithm for that specific program.
But that same equation will not be applied to an SEC football program that averages 97,000 fans at its home games, and it won’t even be applied to the football program at that very same Big Ten school because the variables would be weighted differently based on the sport and its athletes.
And because of this, while football is the highest-selling collegiate sport in terms of cards and memorabilia, football players will not always have the highest base compensation due to those weighted factors.
Even if the football team is given the most money overall, that base compensation is then divided among an entire roster of 110, as opposed to a basketball team with a roster of 15.
And for athletes to access their own cards, all they have to do is download the ONIT app, and they will automatically receive a few cards for themselves as well as friends and family, Hodson said.
The goal of all of this is simply to continue to expand and generate more opportunities for athletes in the NIL space through non-exclusive licensed memorabilia.
“I was a walk-on to a college football team, and accidentally got slipped into a college football game,” Solender added. "But I can't even imagine having the opportunity to have my picture and bio information on a trading card. That's the stuff that dreams are made of.”
Matt Liberman is a reporter and video producer for cllct.