FILE – NFC coach Eli Manning cheers on his players during the tug of war event at the NFL Pro Bowl football game in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/John Raoux, File)
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Brand Velocity Group, a private equity firm whose partners include former New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning, has acquired RCX Sports, a company that manages and controls the official youth sports licenses for most major U.S. professional leagues.
BVG bought RCX from the Raine Group, a merchant bank. The companies would not disclose financial terms of the deal, although they said the RCX brand and leadership team will remain intact, including CEO Izell Reese who played in 93 NFL games as a defensive back from 1998 through 2004.
RCX is the youth sports operating partner for the NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer. The company works with local parks and recreation departments, YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs and for a fee provides officially licensed uniforms, equipment and support for leagues, tournaments and events.
RCX’s largest partner is NFL Flag, the league’s youth flag football initiative. More than 800,000 children participate in NFL Flag leagues, up from 500,000 when RCX took over the license in the fall of 2019.
“I jokingly tell people a lot of time when I’m trying to explain it that we’re like Little League Baseball meets Fanatics,” Reese said. “The pro leagues’ (intellectual property and trademarks) all go through us when a local rec organization wants to run these programs.”
Instead of raising a fund, BVG capitalizes its investments on a deal-by-deal basis. For this transaction, BVG’s limited partners included investment firms Hamilton Lane and St. Cloud Capital, as well as NFL Hall of Famers Peyton Manning, Emmitt Smith and Larry Fitzgerald, current NFL players DK Metcalf and Jameis Winston and Dallas Mavericks guard Klay Thompson.
“Everyone’s investing real dollars,” said Austin Ramos, a BVG partner who founded the company in 2019 with Steve Lebowitz and Drew Sheinman. “It’s not a, ‘Hey, let us give you some equity for your name to be associated with this.’ There are enough people with real brands themselves that truly care about RCX and the mission RCX has, so everyone’s invested real dollars and is very aligned in supporting Izell and his mission.”
Reese said that he has been in contact with some of the investors, including Smith, his former teammate with the Dallas Cowboys.
“I feel like I’m back in the locker room and he’s drilling me like I was a rookie,” Reese said. “Every other comment he makes is, ‘How can I help?’ These are individuals, they’re not just a name, they’re strategic and mission-aligned. They truly believe in the transformational power of sports and youth sports and they’re willing to put in their time, energy, effort, brain power, leadership and resources to be a part of that.”
Eli Manning, who led the Giants to two Super Bowl victories, joined BVG as a partner in 2021, one year after retiring from the NFL. He was involved in BVG’s acquisition in 2022 of Score Sports, a designer, manufacturer and seller of youth sports uniforms and equipment. Manning, who has been involved promoting NFL Flag for years, also aided BVG in its acquisition of RCX.
“He helped with a lot of the coordination as we thought about bringing the deal together with the right individuals,” Ramos said. “He is already neck deep in that (flag football) world because he is so passionate about it.”
Reese said that the NFL and other leagues want RCX to not charge as much as it could for the flag football leagues and focus more on increasing participation. RCX also earns money by offering leagues support such as training coaches and officials and helping with registration.
“The price points have continued to steadily rise for these organizations, but that’s not the case with us,” Reese said. “With us, it’s meant to stay at a very low price point even though it’s a pro league’s IP, which could easily be substantially more….It’s a mandate to keep these programs low-cost and affordable and build the model more off of scale.”
Reese said he expects participation in NFL Flag to continue to increase, particularly as more girls become involved. Several states are now sponsoring girls flag football at the high school level, while the NCAA in January added flag football to its emerging sports for women program, meaning it could become an officially sanctioned sport with a championship tournament. Flag football will also become a medal sport for the first time at the 2028 Summer Olympics, and Reese and Ramos expect the sport to expand internationally, as well. They said that RCX is in conversations with other sports leagues and governing bodies about partnerships, as well.
As RCX grows, Reese said the company should be able to secure more sponsorships and be in better position with suppliers.
“It holds a lot of weight when you can say you’re the largest flag football league in the world at the youth level,” he said. “There’s a lot of demand around that…That’s the core of the business model – keep it affordable, get more kids playing, use the IP at affordable rates, which you don’t really get anywhere else.”
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