It’s a simple idea that seems to have lots of obvious appeal: An athlete sells a future stream of income in return for a bucket of money today. For the players, the cash helps bridge the time to the pros, pay for travel or extra training that will boost their chances or simply allow them hedge with the reality that only a few athletes ever make it big. In return, investors get to participate in the upside, with fan-investors getting the added frisson of a future star to cheer for.

But it seems athlete income-sharing, in most cases, just isn’t getting off the ground.

“It’s hard predicting what 16, 17 year-old kids are going to do,” said Chris Heller, the cofounder of Cordillera Investment Partners, an alternative investment firm planning to direct hundreds of millions of dollars into sports in the coming years. “What is their career going to be? If you get to them early enough, your expected returns are going to be higher, but the volatility—the range of outcomes—is much wider as well. It’s a problem.”

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been notable successes: Big League Advantage with Fernando Tatis Jr. is the best-known example of investing smartly in a young player. There is no source of information to suggest how many athlete income-sharing deals there are, so conclusions are hard to reach. But it seems there are few big wins like Tatis.

On the institutional side, the main problem is how to evaluate and invest in enough players to start to have predictable returns. “We have looked at it for a very long time and have never been actually able to get to the end” and invest, Heller said. “It’s this really unique combination of a quantitative problem, which means you need an algorithm to predict the future earnings of athletes, and on any single athlete you’re going to be wrong. You need enough athletes to get a normal distribution of outcomes.”

Big League Advantage, which as of 2022 had invested in more than 400 athletes, said then about 100 of its players had made one of the world’s major baseball leagues while another hundred were out of hardball. While fundraising is not necessarily a reflection of BLA’s investment performance, its third fund, which was targeted to raise $250 million, had $41.6 million in assets as of a March 2024 regulatory filing. That suggests that even at scale, the big money of the type that would invest through BLA isn’t sold on the player investing idea.

Yet a number of efforts have been launched that seek to get retail investors—fans—buying into players’ potential fortunes. In January, French firm Manse floated its first U.S. offering in tennis player Nick Kyrgios. Manse operates Royaltiz, a platform that the company says has offered securities in Europe for some 220 public figures including Brazilian soccer player Vinicius Jr., British racecar driver Oliver Bearman and MMA fighter Ciryl Gane. Manse is offering up to $4 million worth of securities in Kyrgios.

While the offering is still ongoing and no results are yet public, other examples of athlete offerings toward fans suggest there is mixed demand for such deals. Offerings remain open for Guardian pitcher Emmanuel Clasé, launched by Finlete six months ago, as is a year-old offering from Commonwealth for a slice of golfer Cooper Dossey’s earnings. Offerings for pitcher Echedry Vargas and pro golfer Joey Vrzich, also from Finlete and Commonwealth, respectively, raised funds and closed to new investors. A third athlete investment platform, Vestible, closed on an offering with NFL player Baron Browning last year with $653,000 in share orders, near the low end of the $600,000 to $1 million range they projected raising. That company has yet to offer another athlete deal. Perhaps the biggest bust: a direct offering by NBA player P.J. Washington that sought $1 million for the player to invest and split any profits with fans. Subscriptions topped out at $12,700 before the offering petered out.

Reviewing all of the retail-focused deal terms show the fan-focused offerings probably have two stumbling blocks. One is that these offerings tend not to be attractive from  an investment standpoint. In the case of Kyrgios, each $2 security will initially receive a $0.04 yield annually, a dividend that changes based on a complex algorithm that tracks the tennis player’s social media growth. The initial yield means the investor would get their money back in 50 years—except that the Kyrgios security expires after 10 years. The security theoretically could pay up to $10—five times the initial share price—if Manse is successful in selling data on users and their trading in its platform to third parties, among other potential income streams, according to the offering document.

The other stumbling block is simpler and probably the reason these deals haven’t seen greater demand: There is no example of a big win for buyers. Sports betting firms can promote the parlay that paid a bettor thousands of dollars, while meme stocks, the fervor for which athlete stock issuers dream of creating, also provide the thrill of huge profits, even if just briefly and just on paper for most. In athlete investing, there’s been no big winner to point to outside of Tatis Jr.—and that paid off for BLA’s deep-pocketed investors, not everyday fans.

“It’s venture on steroids,” said Heller, of trying to invest in single offerings on an athlete. “You wouldn’t want to invest in a single athlete.”

So far, a lot of people agree with him.