Welcoming a New “Mid-Major”

Mid-majors, or those agencies that lie somewhere between a small, young boutique firm manned by one or two rookie agents and the industry giants that tend to frequently be the talk of the town (IMG, Wasserman Media Group, Blue Equity, Octagon, etc.) seem to be pervasive in the industry. In fact, I would certainly consider those agencies run by Leigh Steinberg, Scott Boras and Drew Rosenhaus and the majority of other notable agents to fall into this category since there are only but a handful of those ‘industry giants’ and they’re all bigger corporations.

All that aside, as Sports Business Journal reports, Marquee Sports Management, which is the product of a merger between Ian Greengross’ ‘Greengross Athletic Management Enterprises’ and Ken Sarnoff’s ‘Sarnoff Total Athlete Representation’ comes into the game 34 clients strong. Of those 34 clients, 20 are represented by Sarnoff including Chester Taylor and Nate Burleson and included in Greengross’ 14 are Joseph Addai and Amobi Okoye.

As far as agencies that specialize in representing football players are concerned, 34 clients is nothing to scoff at and in light of this merger the question then becomes, how will it affect the ability of both agents to attract hot rookie prospects? I of course imagine that the aggregate client roster and additional resources should enable Sarnoff and Greengross to at least get in the door with a couple more draft hopefuls per year; but we’ll have to wait and see what sort of noise Marquee Sports Management will make.

–Samyr Laine