Introducing Institutional Athletics

All sports are now commercial. Some are still institutional.

Jim Thorpe might be the greatest athlete ever. Thirteen Hall of Fame inductions. College football national champion. College ballroom dancing national champion. Major League Baseball player for six seasons. National Football League All-Pro and, briefly, Commissioner. 

And, last but not least, Olympic champion. Thorpe won gold medals at the 1912 Summer Olympics in the pentathlon and decathlon. The International Olympic Committee stripped him of both medals the following year, after Thorpe admitted having played semi-pro baseball for $2 or so per game a few summers earlier. It took 110 years for the IOC, in 2022, to reinstate him as the sole gold medalist in both events. 

Incidentally, the recipient of last year’s Jim Thorpe Award, which annually recognizes the top defensive back in college football, was Caleb Downs – one of the nation’s highest-paid college athletes.

Amateur sports emerged in the 19th century because groups around the Western world – primarily in private schools and clubs – wanted non-profit leagues they could call their own. Over the following decades, they attracted larger audiences, better talent, and money that tends to follow larger audiences and better talent. Amateur organizations also ran themselves more formally over time; the 1912 Summer Olympics, for example, was the first Games to implement electronic timing. Some early amateur leagues gave rise to what became legendary pro leagues, including the NFL and Premier League.

Sports might be the most popular part of pop culture today. Live sports is all that’s left of must-see cable television. Pro franchise valuations continue to climb, years after Warren Buffett scoffed that teams were better sources of “psychic income” than of investment returns. And the Olympics, World Cup, and other tentpole amateur events are expanding their competitive fields and breaking revenue records. Amateur leagues – Olympic, college, and youth – were created for niches removed from the economy. But it’s now trite to say, as Nelson Mandela famously did, that sports has “the power to unite people in a way that little else does.” 

The key stakeholders in amateur sports, though, are anything but unified. FIFA leadership tried to privatize the World Cup days after the 2026 event, and nearly lost their jobs in the process. College sports leadership is overwhelmed by a frenzied, multi-billion-dollar NIL arms race that is barely five years old but already in the federal government’s crosshairs. And while some amateur athletes are finally earning a lucrative living, they have only scratched the surface of full representation as stakeholders in the first place. 

I’m fascinated by the amateur world’s struggle to survive as institutions in modern life. On the surface, for at least three reasons, it should not be nearly this hard.

First, the amateur economy has had decades to prepare. The IOC has allowed pro athletes to compete in the Olympics since the late 1980s. Larger-than-life coaches have always earned unregulated salaries patrolling college football and basketball sidelines. Pro sports bureaucrats, too, once bemoaned prior generations of athlete free agency. The adaptive systems they implemented since have become pillars of the stability and labor peace that amateur sports leaders envy today. 

Second and conversely, the commercial success and cultural standing of amateur sports are the envy of the professional world. Nothing motivates both talent and audience quite like nationalism and school pride. The highest-paid athletes in the world still play doggedly for their countries in the Olympics and World Cup, while pro all-star games go extinct. The rabid devotion of multigenerational college fan bases doesn’t wane during losing streaks like fickle pro team allegiances do. 

And most of all, amateur sports organizations now have numerous playbooks to choose from for how to navigate the modern entertainment economy. Pro leagues alone are replete with sophisticated, time-tested solutions for every conceivable economic issue, from revenue sharing to salary caps to technology development. The task for amateur sports leaders is less to innovate than to select – yet even this seems to be too much to ask.

I saw the fits and starts of this maladaptation in real time as lead advisor to the Big Ten Conference’s exploration of capital partnership last year. Both the promise and paralysis of amateur sports were on full display through the formulation of that would-be venture. On one hand, a consensus of member schools’ executives negotiated the highest-valuation investment offer ever into a sports league, pro or amateur. On the other hand, the Conference could not complete the transaction because of intense discontent and confusion in two members’ boards. 

Much of the associated deal drama unfolded in public, before an audience of bewildered college football reporters and frightened rival school executives. Behind the doors that did remain closed, though, leaders of the nation’s most prominent university systems conducted months of thoughtful diligence. Across eighteen independently-minded member institutions, patterns of recurring questions, suggestions, and concerns emerged. Together they formed a revealing sample of how leaders of cultural institutions think about the future of sports culture. 

Those patterns exposed the gaping cultural divide between higher education and Wall Street. Leaders of the world’s most acclaimed asset management firms could not speak the same language as executives from prominent university systems even when the topic was collaborating for their mutual benefit. The operative problem was plainly not talent on either side of the table. It was a lack of shared history, common culture, and ultimately trust. 

There is no shortage of sports talk. Amateur sports, particularly college football, is a round-the-clock factory of information, issue spotting, and histrionics. As the topic has spread into markets and politics, so have the participating financial and political media voices. 

But that growing noise confuses the people in charge of belatedly bringing amateur sports into the modern world. What they need are practical, tailored data and analysis conveyed in the unique language of institutions. Play-by-play coverage of the Protect College Sports Act is easy to find, but what should universities do the day after it passes or fails? Gossip about FIFA’s backroom dealings is fun, but how should governing bodies actually acquire and manage resources? 

I’m creating Institutional Athletics to fill that void. Amateur sports will become more significant, complicated, and controversial in the modern world – not less. If you are an institution leader yourself, let me know what other questions emerge that command your attention.