A newsletter about money, athletes, and the financial life nobody prepares you for.
Before we get into this week's topic.
This week, the WNBA's newest team was unveiled in Cleveland. A new city, a new arena, a new generation of young girls watching a league that didn't exist in this form when I first started paying attention to basketball. Women's basketball is in the middle of a genuine growth moment — not just on the court, but in the business built around it.
That growth is showing up in NIL numbers too, and it's worth a closer look, because a story about fast growth usually hides a second story about what isn't growing at the same pace.
Get this in your inbox every Monday.
Free financial education for athletes, parents, and advisors — written by a former pro athlete turned finance professional.
The numbers behind the growth
Learfield Impact's 2025-26 NIL report — their own data, self-reported in a sales context, worth reading as a snapshot of their client base rather than a neutral industry census — points to a real shift. Female athlete participation in NIL activity grew 123% year over year, jumping from 2,136 to 4,772 deals. That's a count of deals, not a dollar figure — worth being precise about, since the two get conflated easily. Separately, and across all student-athletes, not women specifically, Learfield reported student-athletes took part in multimedia rights partnerships worth more than $300 million. And at Learfield itself, 70% of the NIL team are former student-athletes or former college administrators.
Even with the caveat that this is one company's numbers, not an independent audit, the direction is hard to miss. Women's NIL isn't a side story anymore. It's one of the fastest-growing parts of the entire market.
Distribution solved, literacy untouched
Here's the pattern that should sound familiar if you've read this newsletter before. Every one of those numbers is about distribution — more deals, more revenue, more staff dedicated to making the deals happen. None of them are about literacy — whether the athletes receiving that money understand what to do with it once it arrives.
That's not a criticism specific to women's NIL. It's the same infrastructure gap we've talked about all year, just showing up in the fastest-growing segment of the market, which makes it more urgent, not less. When the number of deals in a category more than doubles in a year, the systems built to support the people inside that category rarely grow at the same speed. Deals get signed faster than habits get built.
There's a version of this that's actually encouraging: at Learfield, 70% of the team working directly on NIL are former athletes or administrators — meaning more of the people building this infrastructure, at least at that one company, have lived some version of the experience themselves. That's a meaningfully different starting point than an industry run entirely by outsiders. But lived experience negotiating deals isn't the same as lived experience in personal financial planning, and knowing someone's background doesn't tell us which one they're actually equipped to teach.
Why this deserves its own conversation, not just a footnote
It would be easy to treat "women's NIL" as a subset of the broader NIL story and move on. But the growth curve here is steep enough, and recent enough, that the support infrastructure hasn't had time to catch up in a way it arguably has — imperfectly — for men's football and basketball, where NIL has existed a year or two longer at scale.
That means a real number of the athletes at the center of this year's growth are the first in their sport to be earning at this level, without the benefit of an older generation of teammates or peers who've already made the mistakes and learned the lessons. There's no institutional memory yet. That's exactly the kind of gap this newsletter exists to talk about.
One action this week
If you're an athlete, coach, or administrator inside a women's program experiencing this growth firsthand: don't wait for the literacy infrastructure to catch up on its own. Ask directly — who on this team, or in this athletic department, is actually responsible for financial education, separate from whoever's responsible for closing deals? If the honest answer is "nobody yet," that's worth raising now, while the growth is still new enough to build the right habits before they calcify.
The distribution side of this story is being told everywhere. The literacy side needs someone telling it too.
Final Whistle Finance is written by a former professional basketball player and ACCA-qualified finance professional with Big Four audit experience. This newsletter is for educational purposes and does not constitute regulated financial advice.
If you found this useful, forward it to one athlete you know who needs to read it.
Next issue: your name and your image are two different assets — and the rules for protecting them don't work the way you'd assume once you're playing across borders. What actually travels with you from country to country, and what doesn't.