AROUND NIL | Private equity meets NIL as Utah tests new funding model

Utah’s private equity move offers a blueprint for future NIL funding

Dec. 13, 2025—College sports just got a new kind of booster: private equity.

The University of Utah has just approved a first-of-its-kind partnership with New York-based Otro Capital, an agreement that’s expected to generate roughly $500 million for its athletic department. The deal creates Utah Brands & Entertainment LLC, a for-profit arm that will run key business lines, including sponsorships, ticketing, trademarks, licensing, and related media and NIL strategy, while Otro receives a share of revenues.

The structure and the timing make it a groundbreaking play, with Utah keeping control over competitive decisions and holding a majority of board seats while preserving the right to buy out Otro’s stake, even as it taps outside capital and expertise to plug growing financial gaps.

In an era of looming athlete revenue-sharing, rising costs, and strained traditional funding, this becomes more than a local story; it is an early test case for a new funding model that other athletic departments, conferences, and athletes will be watching closely.

Utah junior and Golf NIL College Men's Top 40 player Gabriel Palacios at the 2025 Golf Club of Georgia Invitational as the program explores a new private equity-backed model to boost NIL opportunities for athletes | Stew Milne/AP Photo

NIL money is now on the IRS’s radar—and mistakes are getting expensive

Dec. 14, 2025—The IRS is stepping into the NIL era with a focused outreach campaign, according to Law360, aimed at student-athletes and other creators to explain how taxes work on income from endorsements, brand deals, and social media. The timing isn’t accidental. The IRS is also tightening NIL enforcement, taking a harder look at how athletes report income and how NIL collectives are run.

NIL income is taxed like self-employment, so athletes who clear $400 or more have to file a federal return, pay self-employment tax, and make quarterly estimated payments if they expect to owe $1,000 or more. A lot of first-time earners are stumbling on the basics—keeping receipts, tracking write-offs, and dealing with taxes in multiple states.

At the same time, the IRS has signaled that most donations to NIL collectives aren’t tax-deductible and many nonprofit collectives don’t qualify for 501(c)(3), forcing some high-profile groups to shut down or convert to for-profit models.