UCF Football Partners with Fanatics and OneTeam for Specialty Jersey Licensing Deal that Pays Players

Just as fans buy jerseys for our favorite professional athletes, fans will shortly be able to purchase jerseys that feature our favorite student-athletes.

Author:
Marc Miceli
Publish date:
Feb 7, 2022 7:56 AM EST

On February 3rd, Fanatics announced it would join OneTeam Partners to secure group rights for college athletes in a nationwide jersey program. The partnership will allow jerseys with the names and numbers of college athletes to be purchased by fans. Fanatics also plans to expand the program into other men’s and women’s sports in the future. Shortly after the announcement, UCF announced that it would be one of the limited schools offering it to its fans.

Imagine if this was possible for past student-athletes like Tim Tebow or Carmelo Anthony. Back in 2004, one year after winning the national title at Syracuse, Carmelo Anthony told Darren Rovell of The Action Network: “I always thought college players should get paid for jersey sales, I would have been rich.” In today's NIL landscape, current and future student-athletes will be allowed to profit from these sales.

With the AAC buyout looming, UCF realized a way they can offer unique merchandise to fans and created another source of revenue that will only help them during their transition to the Big 12. This is not the first time UCF has helped its student-athletes capitalize off their NIL.

At the spring game last year, instead of having their last names on their jerseys, the Knights featured their social media handles so that when fans watched them, they could follow their social media accounts. When speaking about the jerseys at the spring game, UCF Head Football Coach Gus Malzahn said, “This is the new age of personal branding and we’re going to embrace it, within the NCAA rules. That’s who we are and that’s who we’re going to be…”

The Knights have embraced it, and it will be interesting to see which players are among the top jersey sellers this season. Fans will be able to purchase jerseys in August 2022, right before next year’s college football season starts.

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