In April 2026, private equity firm TPG agreed to acquire Learfield in a deal reportedly valued at roughly $1.8 billion to $2 billion. Three months later, after the NCAA approved commercial uniform patches, Ohio State announced a JPMorganChase partnership reportedly worth about $17 million annually. Later that same day, Notre Dame announced a six-year deal with SoFi reportedly worth $18 million to $20 million a year, making it the most valuable college jersey sponsorship reported to date.

Five years after the NCAA cleared the way for college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, the money moving through college sports is staggering. Almost all of it, though, moves through the same handful of doors: the schools, the conferences, the athletic departments and a thin band of stars at the top of football and basketball. The more interesting question at year five is who else is getting paid, and how the walk-on and the non-revenue athlete reach a share.

That answer runs through a set of platforms built around the athlete rather than the school.

How the NIL market grew up

For decades, college athletes were barred from earning anything off their own names. That changed after years of legal pressure and shifting public opinion, capped by a wave of state laws and a Supreme Court ruling that left the NCAA little room to hold the line. On July 1, 2021, the door opened, and athletes could finally be paid for endorsements, appearances, autographs and social posts without losing eligibility.

The early years were loud and improvised. Booster-funded collectives sprang up around big programs, agents circled the top recruits, and the rules changed from state to state and sometimes month to month. A policy shift in 2025 let athletes negotiate deals before they even enrolled. Most of the attention, and most of the money, went to a small group of stars in football and basketball. For everyone else, the promise of NIL was real but hard to reach. The market needed infrastructure, and the open question was who that infrastructure would serve.

The rise and fall of the collective shows how much the market has changed. In the early days, booster-funded collectives were everywhere, pooling donor money and steering it to athletes mostly as a recruiting and retention tool. That role has shrunk. After the House v. NCAA settlement in 2025 let schools pay athletes directly through revenue sharing, the middleman job many nonprofit collectives were built for became, in a lot of cases, unnecessary, and legal analysts have written openly about their decline. Oversight arrived at the same time. A College Sports Commission now reviews third-party NIL deals above $600 through a clearinghouse called NIL Go. The early free-for-all is mostly over, and what replaced it rewards platforms that can work cleanly inside real rules.

Two paths out of the chaos

The companies that launched in the first NIL wave, around 2020 and 2021, mostly answered the question of who to serve in one of two ways. The larger path, and in commercial terms the more established one, led toward the institution. Opendorse and INFLCR, the latter now part of Teamworks, built the software that athletic departments, compliance offices and collectives came to rely on: disclosure and compliance tools, deal tracking, payments and content systems. They won the school side of the market. Teamworks in particular has grown into a broad operating system for college athletic departments, a real and valuable business serving thousands of schools. It simply treats the school as the customer, not the athlete.

The second path was narrower and harder. It meant treating the individual athlete as the customer and building the whole experience around that person, which matters most for the large majority of athletes who are not five-star recruits and will never see a jersey-patch dollar or a revenue-sharing check. The clearest large-scale example of a company that took that path and grew on it is NIL Club, built by the Atlanta technology company YOKE.

How the athlete-first model works

NIL Club is organized around teams rather than individuals, and it gives athletes three ways to earn: team subscriptions, brand deals and merchandise. Under the subscription model, fans pay to support a roster and the money is split evenly among the athletes taking part. In August 2025, YOKE added a brand deals layer that lets members browse and accept endorsement offers right inside the app. Merchandise, the third channel, runs through the company’s Athlete Merch product. The company’s stated aim is to let an athlete earn without an agent, a middleman or a national profile.

The company reports that NIL Club now has more than 650,000 registered athletes, including over 400,000 active, verified college athletes across the NCAA’s three divisions, the NAIA and the NJCAA, in every sport. It reports more than 20,000 teams and groups and more than 2,000 schools. In California alone, NIL Club says roughly 37,700 college athletes are on the platform. The company also reports that athletes have earned more than $50 million through it to date, and the app holds a 4.6 star rating across several thousand App Store reviews.

At the individual level, the amounts are smaller. Alex Smith, a track and cross country athlete at Columbia College, calls the platform proof that college athletes can make real money. By completing multiple deals on NIL Club, he has earned more than $315, while his team has brought in more than $2,152 through the platform. Kenneth Brian Biggs, a baseball player at McMurry University, tells a similar story, earning $939 without a big social following by stacking brand deals through the app. Neither figure changes a life on its own. But for a non-revenue athlete, a few hundred dollars can cover groceries, gas or a phone bill.

The brands on the platform

The other half of the model is the brands. According to NIL Club, national companies including Amazon, Meta, SoFi, Cash App, Subway and Uber Eats have run campaigns on the platform, reaching athletes directly instead of through a handful of famous names. One publicized campaign shows how that works at scale.

In January 2026, NIL Club announced a nationwide activation with Subway in which nearly 200 college athletes posted content across TikTok and Instagram. The campaign delivered more than 1 million impressions, roughly three times what Subway had projected, according to results the company reported. The reach came from spreading the work across a full roster of athletes rather than leaning on one or two big names, which is the core of the model. The company says more than 60,000 college athletes have partnered with Amazon alone through the app.

Advertisers of that size typically run their own brand-safety, procurement and compliance review before partnering with a platform, and the campaigns listed above indicate those brands cleared that internal process for NIL Club.

Track record and criticism

In its February 2026 look at the company, Sportico noted that, unlike many startups from the dawn of the NIL era, NIL Club had survived and scaled.

Athletes have talked about the platform on Reddit and social media, and some of NIL Club’s early recruiting tactics drew criticism. The sharper questions, though, were less about whether college athletes get paid and more about how the model fit high school athletes, and how high school NIL was still evolving. Those questions helped shape the company’s approach, and ultimately pointed it toward the more clearly separated college and high school products it runs today.

Maturation, and a second product

The distinction between college and high school athletics also appears to have shaped NIL Club’s product strategy. As it expanded, YOKE decided that high school and college were different enough to need different tools, and instead of forcing one model on both, it built a second product centered on merchandise. Athlete Merch lets athletes design and sell their own branded gear while YOKE handles production, shipping and payouts, and it is already live for NIL Club’s college athletes, with thousands of athlete storefronts opened within its first weeks. A standalone Athlete Merch app is scheduled for fall 2026, intended, the company says, to serve high school athletes and centered on selling merchandise alone.

NIL Club itself has stayed centered on college athletes across the NCAA divisions, the NAIA and the NJCAA. The split is a deliberate move toward specialization, building around the differences between the two markets rather than treating them as one.

What revenue sharing changed, and what it left out

The biggest structural change since 2021 is revenue sharing. Under the House settlement framework, schools that opt in can now pay athletes directly. It is a meaningful shift, but it does not reach most college athletes. NIL Club co-founder Mick Assaf has estimated, in Sportico’s reporting, that more than 90 percent of the college athletes on the platform take no part in revenue sharing with their school. For that large majority, direct paths to fans and brands are the whole opportunity.

New money has continued entering the category in 2026. In August, Publicis Sports and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce launched TEKTA, a venture to help major brands structure and measure NIL partnerships with college athletes. The open question is how far down the roster that money travels.

Where things stand after five years

NIL Club comes with trade-offs worth stating plainly. Because team revenue is split evenly across a roster, a marquee player’s draw is shared with teammates, so a star tends to earn less through the team model than a standalone endorsement might pay. The platform, like any marketplace, keeps a small fee on what moves through it. And the rules are still in motion. Disclosure thresholds, revenue-sharing terms and state policies can all change, which shifts the ground under every platform in the space, this one included.

Still, the arc of the past five years points in one direction. The market opened in chaos, sorted itself out, and split into companies that sell to schools and companies that serve athletes. NIL Club bet on the second path and grew while many early peers folded or pivoted toward the schools. The era is no longer new, but it is far from finished. What it suggests is a durable place for platforms built around the athletes themselves, star and walk-on alike. By that measure, NIL Club has built both meaningful scale and a level of athlete trust that few of its early peers reached.