Welcome to The Signal, Box Score’s Wednesday newsletter. This week, we continue our series on the GOATs of the sports economy. In our first edition, we made the case for Lionel Messi and argued that today’s superstars work as economic engines, moving money through franchises, leagues and entire cities. This week: an NFL legend who earned less than some of the QBs he beat, yet whose value keeps compounding.
When Lars Anderson’s biography Brady came out in late September, the internet skipped straight past the football and went for the tabloid fodder: a blind date, a forensically reconstructed paternity timeline and, above all, the fraying final days of Tom Brady’s marriage to Gisele Bündchen. When couples counseling collapsed, Bündchen, by one insider’s account, consulted her horoscope. “We’re not compatible,” she declared, and that was that. Brady never saw the hit coming.
The book’s takeaway is clear enough: football’s GOAT organized his entire life around becoming the greatest quarterback who ever lived, and everything else receded to the margins. That obsession had another casualty: his paycheck.
Another scene in the book shows what it cost him. In the spring of 2005, Brady, then 27, already had three Super Bowl rings, but his $5.5 million salary hardly matched all that bling. Peyton Manning and Michael Vick, with no Super Bowls between them, had just signed for more than double what Brady made. With extension talks at a stalemate, Brady took the negotiation into his own hands. He walked into Patriots executive Scott Pioli’s office and, after some back and forth, the two landed on a number: $10 million a year for six years, still comfortably under what both Manning and Vick made. Brady also was set to make less than a fading 35-year-old Brett Favre, who would throw a league-high 29 interceptions that year.
On his way out, Brady offered Pioli his cost-benefit analysis: “If my family and I can’t live on $60 million, there’s really something fucking wrong.”
Brady held to that philosophy as a player. In 2013, he signed for far less than Joe Flacco got after winning his first (and only) Super Bowl. And in 2016, now with four rings, Brady took a smaller signing bonus than Flacco again.
As the Patriots spent the savings on bolstering rosters that helped Brady win three more Super Bowls, the QB clearly felt he could afford to leave the last dollar on the table. As he once told Jimmy Kimmel, “My wife makes a lot of money.”
Business Insider later tried to put a number on what Brady left on the table. Its analysis assumed he had signed the going rate for a top quarterback every four years starting in 2005, matching the contracts of Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Drew Brees and Ben Roethlisberger. By that fairly conservative measure, Brady gave up about $60 million during his Patriots years, enough to have made him, at the time, the highest-paid player in NFL history. A more aggressive (but reasonable) estimate puts the figure closer to $100 million.
Given his apparent indifference to money, it feels strange to think of Brady as one of the great economic forces in sports. Michael Jordan built an empire at Nike while he was still hanging midair over the rest of the league. Lionel Messi has remade Miami’s economy while still threading passes at 39. Brady was a 199th overall draft pick who spent two decades taking less money so his team could win.
Still, more than three years after his last snap, the GOAT of the field has become one of the GOATs of the sports economy, too.
The GOAT case for Brady
In just the past few years, private equity has muscled its way into the owner’s box, and the money in sports has outgrown the games. The NFL now runs its own venture fund, and whole new categories, from prediction markets to mega Comic-Con-like events, have appeared almost overnight. Wall Street has a name for what’s emerged: “Sports, Media, and Entertainment.” It’s a space worth, according to a recent World Economic Forum report, $2.3 trillion a year, with little of that money changing hands on the field.
When Wall Street decks refer to today’s sports “ecosystem,” they include everything new that the game touches, from the stadium to the smartphone: streaming rights and Netflix docuseries, FanDuel and Polymarket sponsorships, fantasy leagues and Fanatics Fest, supplements and wearables, and the real estate rising around new stadiums that more and more serve as year-round multipurpose venues. Not to mention youth sports, a $40 billion industry increasingly backed by private equity.
Most athletes can capture value at a handful of points in this chain. Brady seems to have a stake in nearly all of it. He owns pieces of teams in three leagues on two continents: the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces and Birmingham City in England’s second tier. In Birmingham, he’s helping plan a £3 billion stadium district.
He’s a one-man holding company. He’s the second-largest shareholder in NoBull, the Boston-born apparel company, after folding his TB12 wellness brand and Brady Brand clothing line into it in 2024. Because the NFL had already invested in NoBull through its 32 Equity fund, the merger made Brady an official league partner, and in January the company raised $50 million at a $1 billion valuation as it moved into supplements. He also co-founded Autograph, a digital collectibles company, all while he still collects endorsement checks the old-fashioned way.
Then there’s the booth, where Brady holds the richest broadcasting contract in sports history: $375 million over 10 years. Fox pays Brady more each year than ESPN pays Joe Buck and Troy Aikman combined.
Even if the overall reviews have been mixed at best, Fox doesn’t care much. When Lachlan Murdoch announced the hire on an earnings call, he described Brady as an ambassador for clients and promotions, and that’s how the network has used him: getting sponsors, cutting promos and lending his name to Fox properties well beyond the NFL. The deal reportedly even includes Fox stock options. For Brady, the paycheck matters less than the airtime.
Brady owns part of the Raiders while calling games involving their rivals. It’s an awkward arrangement. Whether one man should be both an owner and the voice of one of the NFL’s biggest broadcasts is a fair question. Ethics aside, no one has more ways to profit from the league’s growth.
Back in 2005, surely Brady had no master plan to become a sports mogul. But in retirement, he has behaved like a venture capitalist, throwing darts at nearly everything, with plenty of misses. His dalliance in crypto, FTX, went to zero, and the company’s founder went to prison. TB12’s stores closed before the brand was folded into NoBull.
It’s the VC approach of making lots of bets, expecting most to amount to nothing, and letting the few big winners like the Raiders stake pay for the rest. It also happens to suit the moment. The modern sports economy rewards whoever is willing to place the most bets, and Brady has placed more big ones than almost anyone.
Among active athletes, Lionel Messi and LeBron James still are the favorites in our sports economy GOAT debate. Brady’s case is the long game, and it says as much about the new sports economy as it does about him. He’s 49, his Fox contract runs through 2034, and Birmingham’s stadium won’t start construction until 2028. He never leaves the conversation, whether he’s in the booth on Sunday or trading dumb insults with Logan Paul. In a sports economy that largely runs on attention, that may be his most valuable asset.
The subtitle of Brady is An American Story and the Price of Greatness, and the book counts the cost in personal terms. The ledger runs the other way, too. To win on the field, Brady was willing to leave money on the table. Two decades later, a chunk of that table belongs to him. 🐐
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