At Bloomberg Power Players 2026 in New York, two of the sports world's most prominent brand-builders made a deceptively simple argument: the modern athlete is no longer a marketing asset to be rented out, but a business to be capitalized.

Pro Football Hall of Famer Michael Strahan and Constance Schwartz-Morini, co-founder and CEO of SMAC Entertainment, sat down with Bloomberg's Randall Williams to discuss turning athlete brands into scalable businesses and the broader growth of what the industry now calls the athlete economy. The conversation, staged inside Bloomberg's flagship event for the business of sports, framed personal brand ownership as an operating discipline rather than a vanity exercise.

The most quotable line to emerge from the session — and the one that circulated fastest across consumer finance and general news feeds — was Strahan's instruction to "use the game, don't let the game use you." It is a philosophy drawn from a career that has already been rewritten twice: first as a record-setting pass rusher with the New York Giants and a Super Bowl champion, then as a broadcast fixture and entrepreneur.

From the Turf to the Boardroom

Strahan's path is the template the panel was really about. Since retiring from the NFL and entering the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he has built a second act that spans network broadcasting, entertainment production, endorsements and equity stakes — a portfolio that spans far beyond the traditional post-career endorsement circuit. Black Enterprise, in its coverage, framed that trajectory bluntly: Strahan is "building an executive legacy from the turf to the boardroom."

That framing matters. Where sports coverage once treated post-career business activity as an appendix to the highlight reel, business and Black-owned media outlets position it as the main event — a story about ownership, capital and generational wealth, not nostalgia.

Schwartz-Morini is central to that story. As co-founder and CEO of SMAC Entertainment, she has been the operational architect behind the brand-building strategy, running a firm that sits at the intersection of talent management, production and corporate partnerships. Her own profile rose further this week with the Washington Speakers Bureau's announcement that it will exclusively represent her on the speaking circuit — a deal that signals how quickly the operators behind athlete-facing businesses have become draws in their own right.

Why the Athlete Economy Is Having a Moment

The panel arrives at a genuinely inflectional period for athlete commerce. Several forces are compounding:

• Name, image and likeness rights. Since college athletes were permitted to monetize their NIL, an entire intermediary layer — agencies, collectives, brand studios — has grown up around athletes years before they turn professional.
• Rising media rights valuations. Skyrocketing league and streaming rights deals have made athletes the scarcest input in a booming content market, strengthening their leverage with networks and sponsors.
• Institutional capital. Private equity, sovereign funds and family offices are now active owners across sports properties, pressuring everyone in the ecosystem — including talent — to think in terms of enterprise value.
• Direct-to-consumer platforms. Podcasts, newsletters and social video let athletes own distribution rather than rent it from a broadcaster.

In that environment, the distinction Strahan and Schwartz-Morini drew — between earning from a brand and owning one — is the difference between a career and a company.

The Same Story, Told Four Different Ways

Coverage of the panel divided along predictable lines, and the split is instructive.

Bloomberg, whose audience is institutional, led with the mechanics: how athlete brands scale, how they attract capital, how SMAC converts personality into repeatable revenue lines. The Washington Speakers Bureau announcement, distributed through finance portals, was treated as a talent-representation story with a corporate-events angle — the speaking economy being one of the most reliable, high-margin extensions of a personal brand.

Yahoo Finance's consumer-facing take extracted the advice. Headlined around "owning your brand and your next chapter," it packaged Strahan's remarks as a playbook for anyone navigating a career pivot, not just athletes. Black Enterprise situated the same conversation in a wealth-and-ownership narrative, emphasizing executive leadership and legacy. And mass-market aggregators reduced the whole thing to a headline about an "NFL icon" making a "major announcement" — a reminder that even substantive business conversations get flattened when they travel through general news feeds.

"Use the game, don't let the game use you."
— Michael Strahan

The Wider Bet

What all four framings share is an implicit thesis: the athlete's window of peak visibility is short, but the equity built during it can last decades — if the athlete is treated as a founder rather than a face.

That has real implications. For athletes, it argues for equity over fees, ownership over endorsements and infrastructure over appearances. For leagues and colleges, it raises uncomfortable questions about who captures the value of increasingly valuable personal brands. For investors, it suggests a growing class of athlete-led businesses — media companies, consumer products, franchises — that behave like startups, with the distribution advantage of a built-in audience.

Strahan and Schwartz-Morini are not the first to say it. But the venue matters: a Hall of Famer and his long-time business partner making the case on a Bloomberg stage, alongside a newly announced exclusive speaking representation deal, is the moment athlete brand-building officially stopped being a niche side conversation and became a line item on the business agenda.

The next test is whether the model scales beyond the handful of athletes who reach superstardom — and whether the operators, not just the talent, end up with a seat at the table when the value gets divvied up.