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By Jesus Mesa and Jennifer Cunningham
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Most athletes, when presented with a $15 million sponsorship deal, would sign it faster than they can drive the lane to score a slam dunk. But Rich Paul witnessed early there was a better opportunity waiting elsewhere.
“Anybody could do a deal,” Paul, 45, says, gazing out of the windows in Newsweek’s global headquarters in New York City. “Not the right deal, but you can do a deal. That’s one thing. But if you’re trying to build a business, that’s different. You have to feel it. You have to have a pulse on that.”
In this case, it was turning down an assured $15 million from McDonald’s to make a $1 million investment in a much smaller chain, Blaze Pizza. That stake is now estimated to be valued at more than $30 million. It is lessons like that, ensuring athletes get equity in a business instead of just a paycheck from a brand, that has led the player involved, LeBron James, to become the first active billionaire NBA player.
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Paul met the then-high school basketball prospect at Akron-Canton Airport in 2002, where they began talking about the vintage jersey Paul was wearing. They became friends, then business partners. Paul has worked with James ever since he was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2003, and officially became James’ agent in 2012, guiding him through the most productive decade of his NBA career.
The association helped make Paul, sure. It has also handed his critics their most durable line—that he’s a one-trick pony, that his influence is borrowed. If his client left, any leverage Paul had would go with him.
Paul built a company to answer those critics. He founded Klutch Sports Group in 2012 around a single idea: the company should outlast any one athlete, even the one who made it possible. Twenty-four NBA drafts and hundreds of athletes across multiple sports later, that idea is no longer being tested. Paul has pushed players to build commercial identities that outlast their playing days. The same instinct that shaped James’ own business empire, built on deals including a lifetime tie-up with Nike reported at more than $1 billion, an equity stake in Fenway Sports Group (owners of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC in the English Premier League) and the founding of the production business SpringHill Company.
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“When thinking about the name [Klutch], the idea was just that. I didn’t want to be dependent on just one thing. I wanted to be able to grow legs in due time,” Paul says.
The agency has expanded rapidly in recent years. It acquired the baseball agency Rep 1 in 2023 and, after two years of negotiations and repeated trips between Los Angeles, Munich and London, finalized a partnership with Munich-based soccer agency ROOF, which represents more than 130 players. United States Men’s National Team forward Folarin Balogun signed with Klutch this year following his World Cup campaign, becoming one of its highest-profile soccer clients.
Fara Leff, who has watched Paul build Klutch from the inside as its chief operating officer, said that instinct, turning wanting something into a plan for getting it, never really left him; it just changed scale. “There really isn’t a box he fits into,” she said. “He’s created a distinct lane that has opened doors for him, the clients and the agency.”
Klutch now represents more than 700 athletes across basketball, football, baseball and soccer, according to the company—a list that includes Washington Wizards forward Anthony Davis, Philadelphia 76ers guard Tyrese Maxey, New York Knicks guard Jordan Clarkson, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and Arizona Diamondbacks catcher Gabriel Moreno. In 2025, Forbes ranked it among the five most valuable sports agencies, with more than $7 billion in athlete contracts under management.
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Beyond athlete representation, Paul launched Klutch Athletics, an apparel brand with New Balance aimed at middle school, high school and college athletes. In 2019, United Talent Agency, one of the largest talent agencies in the U.S., acquired Klutch, and Paul became UTA’s head of sports.
The company he founded was landing deals on its own now. It was no longer just “LeBron’s agency.”
“We started out in just basketball,” Paul says. “It took me a while to get into football. Even though the calls were coming in, I didn’t feel we were ready. Now we have it, in all these different sports.”
People First
Ask Paul what makes him different from every other agent in the room, and he does not talk about leverage, or contracts or the size of a deal. He talks about knowing people.
“I think you have to support them. First of all, you have to know them to support,” Paul says.
Paul told much of this story in his autobiography Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds, published in 2023 with the journalist Jesse Washington. James wrote the foreword, describing the two of them as young Black men from Northeast Ohio whose childhoods had been shaped by crack, guns and trauma, and who bonded not over a jersey but over faith in their families.
Victoria Will
Where the book lingers on the texture of Cleveland—a mother who loved him even as she struggled with substance misuse and a father whose love came stern and unbending—Paul now tells a version of the same material more like a closing argument: not what happened to him, but what he built because of it.
“We had to learn people’s silhouettes in the dark, for different reasons,” he says. “The characters don’t change. The environment changes, but the characters stay the same.” He can take someone from “a boardroom full of executives” and someone from “the roughest place in Cleveland,” he says, and “show you the similarities.”
For Paul, it was never just the job. He says understanding a client’s context has to come before the relationship, and the relationship before the negotiation, an idea he formed with his first client, James. “The person at that time when I started was someone who came from exactly where I came from,” he says. It shaped how he approached everyone who came after.
“You’re a basketball player second,” he says. “You’re a person first.”
That distinction, small as it sounds, is what separates his model from the one that came before it. The traditional agent model treated the athlete as an asset to be optimized, an annual salary to be maximized, a single transaction to be closed and moved past. Paul’s model, part of what the industry has come to call player empowerment, treats the athlete as a business to be built over a career, and the difference shows up in the questions he asks before a deal, not after.
“Sometimes in representation, most times it’s a transactional thing,” he says. “Most representatives don’t know their client the way they think they know, the way they should know them. And they probably don’t want to. They don’t care to because it’s the job.”
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The royalty structure Paul preaches to his clients has a decades-old case study he points to without needing to name it: Michael Jordan. The former Chicago Bulls NBA star—and alongside James, the other man in the conversation about the greatest to ever play the game—has not stepped onto a basketball court as a pro since 2003. Yet Jordan now earns an estimated $250 million to $350 million a year from his Nike royalty on Air Jordan sales, a stake in the brand rather than a one-time endorsement check. Paul’s pitch to his own clients follows the same logic: a smaller guaranteed number today, in exchange for ownership that keeps paying out long after the playing career ends.
His relationship with James is built the same way, extending well past the basketball court. James negotiated an equity stake in Beats by Dre in 2008 instead of a standard endorsement fee, a stake reportedly worth more than $30 million when Apple bought the company for $3 billion in 2014. And the production company James founded, SpringHill Entertainment, sold a minority stake to RedBird Capital, Nike and other investors at a $725 million valuation in 2021.
Paul describes it as refusing to let the game be the whole of someone’s identity.
“These guys just don’t play basketball or play football or play baseball or soccer,” he said. “They’re people first, they do have different interests, they do have values to the world. Basketball may be something that they love, and it’s something that they do for their everyday job. It’s not the only thing that they encompass.”
One of those clients is four-time NBA champion and Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green, who said Paul’s influence extends far beyond contract negotiations.
“Most agents treat athletes as if the athlete works for them,” Green told CBS’ 60 Minutes. “But there’s a multibillion-dollar business built around most athletes that they don’t understand. They don’t have a Rich Paul to teach them.”
That reach extends beyond sports. Dave Penski, chief executive of Publicis Media, one of the world’s largest advertising companies, met Paul during an acquisition and said the deal closed in weeks rather than the usual months. “The complete decidedness was extremely impressive,” Penski said. “He is always looking for the connection between brands, talents and situations that will deliver for his clients and partners.”
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Penski does not think of Paul as a sports agent at all. “Just a business leader of a large team that functions at optimal performance,” he said. Penski struggled to name a comparison. “I really cannot think of any other examples of this type of business leader, never mind sports agent.”
Making the Room His Own
Say the word “legacy” to Paul and he does not reach for the championships his clients have won, or their contracts or the businesses he built beside them.
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In his own account, the order runs backward from how legacy usually gets told. He did not build relationships in service of success. He built relationships, and the success followed. “This idea of treating them as just a transaction to me was something that I did not want to do,” he said, “because I thought that it was probably the worst way I could be, and it was disingenuous. You have to say all these things, but you’re really pretending to get something that you may want.”
Andrea Geurin, who teaches sports marketing at New York University, said that inversion is the actual substance of what Paul changed, not a detail of his style. “Every decision he makes seems to be done with the athlete’s well-being at the heart of it,” she said. “He gives the impression that he is looking out for the athletes he represents first and foremost rather than looking out for himself.”
Mark Beal, who spent three decades running sports marketing campaigns around major events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl before joining Rutgers to teach sports business, said Paul’s real contribution is not any single deal but a relocation of power inside the relationship itself: elevating the athlete “to be the chief executive officer of their unique personal brand.”
Paul, now engaged to singer Adele, 38, grew up in a house where his father set the terms. He ran a corner store, carried weight in the neighborhood and had another family of his own, but he instilled in Paul a strict code of accountability. “I don’t care if you were buying a 5-cent piece of bubble gum. All the way up to being an adult, there was accountability every day,” Paul said.
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By fourth grade, Paul was largely raising himself, getting himself to school and figuring out how to put food on the table for his siblings. His grandparents reminded him that nobody was coming to save him. The lesson was not to wait for rescue, but to show up for the people who depended on him. It is the same balance he brings to Klutch today: close enough to care, honest enough to say what no one wants to hear.
“I don’t cheer at games,” he said. “I’m watching a different game than most people. If I have players on both sides, I want each of them to do well, but I don’t dictate the outcome. I’m not emotionally connected like that.”
That distance is not indifference. It is the same instinct that produced the disruption in the first place, the refusal to let a single game, a single season or a single client define the whole business. Legacy, for Paul, is not the score, which can turn on a single bounce or a bad night. It is the structure left standing no matter the score.
He has the evidence to back it up. In 2019, the NCAA proposed a new certification standard for agents who wanted to represent college basketball players weighing the jump to the NBA, one that would have required a bachelor’s degree. Paul, who dropped out of college after his father died, did not have one. The rule was dubbed the Rich Paul Rule within days of its release, and James called it out publicly. The NCAA rewrote it a week later, adding an exception for agents certified by the NBA players’ union in lieu of a degree.
The moment the industry tried to write him out of the room and had to reverse itself instead became the story Paul tells when the subject of his legacy comes up. It is also, unexpectedly, the clearest proof of how much he changed the game for everyone who does his job. Search his name and the word that follows most often is “disruptor,” a label he has come to claim as his own.
“If I had to pick one thing overall, it would probably be the disruption,” he said. “Disrupting an industry that was not tailor-made for somebody like myself. Normally, someone like myself was not positioned or perceived or even wanted.”
Paul is aware the disruption did not come without cost, while also earning some enemies. Inside the industry, NBA executives and insiders have pointed to player empowerment as a force that let stars cluster in a handful of major markets at the expense of competitive balance. One general manager, granted anonymity to speak candidly to The New Yorker in 2021, called it “the worst thing that ever happened to professional sports on all levels.”
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Paul does not spend much time answering critics. He has said before that resistance, in general, does not unsettle him. “I used to get so much pushback when I first walked in the room,” he said.
The Next Deal
For Paul, the future of sports representation comes down to a distinction he learned before he had any money to speak of: the difference between getting something and understanding what it cost to get it.
That is the distinction he says he is now trying to teach the athletes walking into his building, most of them barely out of their teens and suddenly worth more than the neighborhoods they grew up in. Making money young is common enough in professional sports. Understanding what to do with it is rarer, and that is the part he says the industry still gets wrong.
“All young players are gonna do young player things,” he said. “They’re going [to] buy the chains, they’re going [to] buy what’s in now, apparel and clothes. You have to let them flush all those things out. But you can’t go overboard.” What he tries to give them instead, he said, is taste.
“It doesn’t cost you a lot of money,” he said. “And if you have taste, it can carry you throughout. It’s a protector, in a lot of ways.”
The arithmetic behind that advice is blunt. “The average lifespan of an NBA player is four years,” he said. “So, what if you never get to the next contract? I always tell guys, take this rookie deal and divide it by the years you have left. That lets you know how much you really have, which is not much.”
Nowhere does he see that risk arriving faster than in NIL, the 2021 rule change that let college athletes get paid for their name, image and likeness while retaining their eligibility. To Paul, the money was never the danger.
“There’s always been some sort of compensation somewhere, throughout the course of collegiate sports,” he said. “That’s been probably the best-kept secret for the last 50 years.” His own entry point predates the rule by three years, a million-dollar internship he brokered with New Balance in 2018 for Darius Bazley, a top high school prospect who skipped college to take it. “That expedited NIL,” he said.
Paul is less worried about the college players navigating that distinction than about what is happening beneath them. NIL money is now reaching youth sports, before players have any framework for what to do with it.
“By the time kids get to where we’re at, if they develop these bad habits, we’re screwed,” he said. “Once these tiger stripes are painted, you can’t change it.”
That is why, of everything Klutch is building, Paul says the thing he is putting the most of himself into next is not a sport at all. It is the years before any of his clients would normally reach him.
“Youth sports is something that’s my next big thing in terms of really investing,” he said.
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It comes with a warning attached, the same one he gives to every athlete who signs with him regardless of age. Klutch is not built to make anyone feel good about themselves.
“So, as you sign with us, it’s not for everybody,” he said. “It’s not gonna just be an ego stroke.”
Four Words
This summer marked Paul’s 24th NBA draft. It also marked the moment his industry watched him confirm, in four words, the most anticipated free agency decision in league history—where James would play next after eight seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers. When James finally decided on the Philadelphia 76ers, in the early hours of a Friday in late July, Paul texted the news to a group of stakeholders himself. “Congrats,” he wrote. “Sixers it is.”
James, 41, signed a $7.95 million contract with Philly for the next two seasons, but Paul is already prepared for the question that has followed him into every room since he first partnered with a teenager who would go on to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer: What happens to Rich Paul once James is done playing? Paul says the way he built his business was designed for exactly that moment.
“Rich is going to continue doing even more than what he’s done before,” he said, “because I really feel like this is just the beginning for me.”
Correction 08/12/26, 12:28 p.m. ET: Washington Wizards forward Anthony Davis was incorrectly identified as playing for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Photography by Victoria Will for Newsweek
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