The profile of young pro athletes has changed dramatically since the NFL Players Association’s Rookie Premiere was founded 30 years ago. The annual event, built on group licensing rights and developing relationships between brand partners and players, is serving a client base that today has plenty of experience in the business of football, especially in the wake of name, image, likeness rules that since 2021 have allowed college start to get paid for brand deals. It’s a phenomenon exemplified by top-drafted Bears quarterback Caleb Williams, said to have made $10 million in NILs while at USC.

Williams nevertheless will be among 40 NFL freshmen huddling with brands, posing for photographs and signing a lot of football cards this week at Rookie Premiere in Los Angeles. The four-day event, which begins today, resembles a speed-dating service for rookies that gets them exposure to potential business partners. Even if players come into the league more business savvy than ever before, the NFLPA says it can still teach young players about the benefits of group licensing rights and networking with brand partners.

“I think we’ve always known what some people are starting to find out, that there is absolute power in the brands of our individual players,” said Gina Scott, VP, partner services for NFLPA,  which is the union representing players. “That’s why we have worked so hard to showcase those collective personalities over the years with events like Rookie Premiere. Players have taken control of their own popularity, their own promotion, their own branding, and we’ve decided to lean into that.”

Brands at the event include NFLPA licensing partners Fanatics, Panini and EA, along with Sleep Number, all of whom will interact with a group of invited players who stood on stage at the NFL Draft three weeks ago. Lowe’s, FedEx, Exos, Jewelmark, New Era, Outerstuff and Whoop are marketing around the event, with product and service giveaways or events.

10,000 autographs

Rookie Premiere has roots as a trading card event, providing the first opportunity for new players to suit up in official pro uniforms—and to be photographed wearing them. Participants are by invitation only, and skew towards those the trading card companies deem as the most collectible—or whom the NFLPA sees as the most marketable. This means the group skews toward high-drafted offensive “skill players,” but later-round quarterbacks have been known to make the cut, as they could find themselves in the spotlight when the season begins.

“We’re making some bets of who are going to be future stars and most marketable down the road,” said Matt Curtin, president of NFL Players Inc. the marketing arm of the NFLPA.

Along with Williams, this year’s list includes quarterbacks Jayden Daniels (Commanders), Drake Maye (Patriots), Michael Penix Jr. (Falcons), J.J. McCarthy (Vikings) and Bo Nix (Broncos). Others include edge rusher Laitu Latu of the Colts; wide receiver Rome Odunze of the Bears and Raiders tight end Brock Bowers. All were first-round picks of their teams, with Williams and Daniels the top two picks overall.

The players are paid to attend, but organizers did not reveal how much, except to describe it as “modestly compensated.”

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For the licensed trading card company Panini America, Rookie Premiere presents an opportunity to photograph players in their official gear that wouldn’t come otherwise until preseason games begin in August. Participants will spend all day Saturday shooting in the LA Coliseum; product from that shoot will be on Bowman label cards available in Target and Walmart as soon as early August, said Jason Howarth, senior VP of marketing and athlete relations for Panini America, parent of the Bowman and Prizm trading card brands.

Players on trading cards are covered under the NFLPA’s group licensing deals, and most have already struck individual deals with Panini prior to the event, said Howarth. At Rookie Premiere, Panini holds a Q&A event for hobby fans with some players, and collects a minimum of 4,000 signatures per player to be used in inserts throughout the year, Howarth said.

The advent of NIL has helped this process too, with 33 players last year signing a record 10,000 autographs at the event.

“They had grown accustomed to signing cards when they were in college,” Howarth said. “They knew exactly what they needed to do when they got into the room.”

Speed dating

Because it allows the players’ union to tackle multiple licensing tasks at a single time and place, Curtin compares Rookie Premiere to an expo for NFLPA sponsors. Interactions with brands are a kind of “speed dating” whereby groups of about five players at a time visit with brands, and other exhibits at the event like content studios.

Sleep Number, an NFL sponsor, is on site demonstrating its beds to players and introducing them to the concept of sleep as a means to improve performance, said Andrea Marsh, senior brand manager of partnerships at the Minneapolis bed maker and retailer. The brand’s goal is to meet each of the rookies and demonstrate to them what a better sleep experience can mean for their careers.

“It’s cool, because it’s a light bulb moment,” Marsh said. “They’re looking for every competitive advantage to succeed in the NFL and quality sleep is the foundation of that. Seeing them make that connection is really cool.”

While the rookies inspect beds, Sleep Number is doing its own assessment, looking to augment its roster of roughly 20 players with whom it has endorsement deals or content partnerships each season.

“We don’t leave the event with new partners. But we do keep track of what were they like? Were they engaged? Did they feel the information was relevant to them and were they interested in learning more about sleep? They do a lot of video content there, and we take a look at how they feel in front of a camera,” Marsh said.

Rookies are better prepared to be brand representatives today than they were when Sleep Number first participated in the event eight years ago, Marsh said. NILs have helped, but so too has a better knowledge of the reality of a sports career.

“You can totally see a difference. They’ve advanced by leaps and bounds,” she said. “The average NFL career is not very long. And so they have to think about their own brand, and what they’re going to be afterwards. Some of that is the partners you associate with.”

While the 2023 Rookie Premiere had eight sponsors—including big NFL and NFLPA sponsors such as PepsiCo, and FedEx— the NFLPA rolled it back this year in response to player feedback.

“One of the things we heard from our attendees was it was a lot of partners,” Curtin said. “We’re trying to make it a little more social, and do a bit more team building and camaraderie for the players and build that into their schedule.”

Partnerships, parties and performance

Events include a Friday night jersey reveal party, this year highlighted by a performance by the rapper Quavo. On Saturday, following the day-long photoshoot, players are invited to a function at the Beverly Hills home of Michael Rubin, founder and executive chairman of Fanatics.

Lowe’s is participating by hosting events for its consumers throughout the week, including a Hospitality Zone activation at the Saturday event at the Coliseum.

FedEx will have a popup suite on-site to handle players’ shipping needs.

Exos will have an offsite performance lab, where players will be able to get in their workouts and go through onsite recovery, ensuring they do not miss any time away from strength and conditioning while in Los Angeles. (The NFL collective bargaining agreement designates attending Rookie Premiere as an excused absence from rookie camp, noted Scott).

The event also includes orientation sessions led by union leadership meant to provide players with information about group licensing and passive income opportunities, or what Curtin called the “bread and butter” of the NFLPA.

“The concept of monetizing player rights … is more lucrative for the collective to do together than to do individually. With selling jerseys, or the Madden video game, being a part of that is more valuable if every player is part of that,” Curtin said. “So you have to get to that critical mass, which is not something that they've sort of been exposed to.”

These types of group opportunities can become individual opportunities.

“Once you’re in a group licensing program, and Madden wants to promote itself, who does it promote the game with? It promotes it with the stars,” Curtin said. “So when I think about Rookie Premiere, it’s a way for people to get engaged with our group licensing program for the first time, which is something new to them. And … to develop their own relationship with the sponsors so that they can do premium royalties and their own individual monetization.”