The most important thing NIL has produced is not a brand deal, but the raising of a question not seriously considered before in college sports: Who actually owns the value that an athlete creates?
That question does not yet have a clean answer. Until it does, everything else — the marketplaces, collectives, compliance frameworks, and revenue-sharing settlements — is just rearranging furniture in a building without a foundation.
I competed as a college athlete in the 1990s, then worked as a securities attorney, and have since built companies at the intersection of sports, culture and capital markets. Across those vantage points, one thing is clear: The commercial infrastructure underneath athlete identity has never been built properly. If the market keeps moving at its current pace, the athletes who were supposed to benefit most will remain the least protected participants in their own ecosystem.
That is both the problem and the opportunity.
A market has been created. A system has not
The scale of change in four years is historic. The House v. NCAA settlement, finalized in 2025, opened the door for schools to directly compensate athletes and formalized centralized review through NIL Go.
Washington is now structurally involved. The proposed SCORE Act aims to establish a national NIL framework, clarify athlete employment status and stabilize what has been a patchwork of laws and policies.
The market is real. Volume is real. Regulatory attention is real.
What is not yet real is a coherent operating system beneath it. Rights are scattered across contracts, emails, collectives and compliance offices, and payments and auditability become inconsistent. The athlete generating the value is still the least protected party in the transaction.
What the marketplace model gets wrong
The dominant model is transactional: connect a brand to an athlete, close a deal, take a cut, repeat.
None of that is wrong, but it is insufficient.
A marketplace facilitates a transaction. It does not establish ownership of rights, persistence across institutions, auditable payment records, or how value compounds over time.
Even sophisticated systems fall short. Consider the evidence from the most sophisticated compliance infrastructure in college sports today: Learfield’s Compass platform manages more than 200,000 brand deals, and yet the College Sports Commission has denied 711-plus deals because the platform records that a deal was agreed and logged, but produces no cryptographic proof that the commercial deliverable actually executed. The most advanced marketplace in the space still cannot answer the most basic infrastructure question: did this happen, and can you prove it?
What has been built is a system optimized for the brand and intermediary. The athlete gets a check tied to a platform they didn’t choose, with records that don’t travel.
The leverage is not in the venue. It is in the rails. Whoever controls the identity, rights and payment layers controls the market. That is not a marketplace business. It is an infrastructure business.
Fan engagement is not a feature. It is the thesis
The most underappreciated dynamic in college sports monetization is this: The fans most likely to drive value are not passive — they want to be early participants.
Building a consumer-facing company has taught me things about fan behavior that no amount of industry analysis could replicate. The turning point was a strategic pivot: I stopped asking how many people were watching and started asking what would make them put something on the line. That reframe changed everything.
It’s clear that engagement depth and level of participation are the leading commercial indicator, not how long fans merely watch. A user who competes around a sport converts at multiples of a user who observes. A fan who discovers an athlete early and feels genuine ownership over that discovery becomes an evangelist, not just a consumer.
That has direct implications for NIL infrastructure. Systems that activate audiences early, generate measurable participation, and create loyalty that travels with the athlete build the demand layer that makes everything else valuable.
Without demand, infrastructure is theory. With it, infrastructure becomes an amplifier.
On the regulatory moment
The SCORE Act and federal push are directionally correct. Standardization reduces risk.
But regulation is focused on transactions: what deals are permissible and how they are reported.
The harder question is what rights athletes retain after a deal concludes. Who owns the data? What portability exists?
The current framework treats NIL as discrete transactions. A more durable one treats athlete identity as a persistent asset owned by the athlete.
That requires infrastructure. Right now, no one has built it.
What building the infrastructure layer means
This is not a product category. It is a strategic position.
It means:
- Athlete identity sits in an auditable, portable framework the athlete controls — payment rails are fast, documented, and persistent across transitions.
- Fan participation is measurable and tied to value.
- The system is interoperable across brands, schools and platforms.
A Career Equity model — linking athlete IP to verified execution, routing royalties directly, and enabling fan participation — is not theoretical. It is buildable.
The demand is already there. It is just not being served.
What happens if the gap persists
If identity remains fragmented, payments opaque, and records non-portable, athletes will remain in the same structural position: generating value while holding the least durable stake in it.
The deals will continue. The money will flow. But the value will concentrate with platforms, brands and collectives, not just the athletes.
The bottom line
NIL has created a consequential new market. The infrastructure around identity, rights, auditability, portability and payment remains underbuilt and misaligned with athlete interests.
The current model has produced volume without durability. Deals without ownership.
The next wave of value will not come from more deals. It will come from building the foundation that makes those “deals’” matter.
That foundation does not exist yet. It will not build itself. And the cost of waiting continues to rise
Lavell Juan Malloy II is CEO of Brag House, a media technology and gaming platform.
