When one NIL door closes, another one opens.

In the rapidly shifting world of college athlete pay, one NIL (name, image, and likeness) business is shutting down, and another NIL business is already stepping in. 

Opendorse is rapidly grabbing some of the NIL collectives that were using Student Athlete NIL (SANIL), a third-party operator that abruptly shut down this week.

“We’re proactively picking up the pieces, if you will, to make sure that athletes get paid and schools maintain a positive relationship,” Opendorse cofounder Blake Lawrence tells Front Office Sports.

SANIL at one point worked with more than 40 schools, according to Sports Business Journal, which first reported the news of SANIL shutting down. In February, NIL agency Blueprint Sports announced it was acquiring SANIL in a deal aimed at “establishing a $100M+ NIL powerhouse agency,” according to a press release at the time. That deal was never finalized.

Nearly 100 Division I athletic departments or NIL collectives use Opendorse to process payments. So far “a handful” of school collectives have transitioned to Opendorse, according to Lawerence. As of Thursday afternoon the number was nearly 10.

“In markets now where SANIL was active and the school was a partner of ours, we are proactively taking on the agreements and payment processing, just ensuring that athletes continue to get paid as planned,” Lawrence says. “It’s been a busy morning of fielding in-bound calls from our partners, and getting them set up for a transition.”

The downfall of SANIL is another inflection point in the wild world of college sports, as athletic departments are now allowed to share up to $20.5 million of revenue with athletes this year, and third-party NIL deals are coming under tighter scrutiny. 

On June 30, the day before the revenue-sharing era officially began, collectives funneled close to $20 million to college athletes through Opendorse, the largest day in the company’s history, in an effort to front-load payments to athletes.

Now multiple major power conference collectives are already giving up on trying to work through the newly created NIL Go clearinghouse and within the bounds of the new rules set up by the House v. NCAA settlement, FOS reported earlier this week. At least two collectives have gone ahead and paid players before the submitted deals have been approved.

Meanwhile, the College Sports Commission, which runs NIL Go, is creating an “anonymous reporting tip line” to share information about NIL rules violations across Division I college sports—with some in the industry calling it a “snitch line.”

“More and more, there is indifference to the NIL Go process, simply because the process is either slow, confusing, or deals are stuck in purgatory,” Lawrence says. “The process of disclosing an NIL Go is tedious, it adds weight and stress to an athlete relationship, and therefore, until it is a definitive requirement, and an athlete loses eligibility due to their lack of disclosure, I just see more and more collectives not disclosing at all.”

The former president of the NWSL’s San Diego Wave is accused of knowingly misleading the team’s new owners by promising to remain with the club after its sale, only to resign two days after the deal was completed.

Jill Ellis, who was president of the Wave for more than four years and now works for FIFA, repeatedly pledged to stay with the team amid negotiations, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in California state court.

The suit, first reported by The San Diego Union-Tribune, was filed by an entity associated with private-equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, led by Lauren Leichtman and Arthur Levine. They were “particularly interested” in buying the team because of the “renown and involvement” of Ellis, who won two Women’s World Cups as head coach of the U.S. women’s national team.

The firm purchased the Wave last year in a then-record $120 million deal (that record was broken a few months later when Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, bought Angel City FC at a $250 million valuation).

According to the suit, Ellis was a major factor in Leichtman and Levine deciding to buy the Wave. 

However, two days after the deal closed, Ellis revealed she was resigning to join FIFA as chief football officer. She was officially appointed to that role by FIFA on Dec. 3, 2024. Leichtman and Levine suspect Ellis was in negotiations with FIFA at the same time she was maintaining she would stay with the Wave.

“Ellis had no intention of continuing any involvement with Wave FC upon commencing her negotiations to join FIFA,” the suit says.

The Wave represented the first sports team purchase by Leichtman and Levine, so they were counting on Ellis to continue helping guide the franchise. When they bought the team—formed in 2022—the Wave were riding high. Led by Alex Morgan, the team finished in third place in its inaugural season and first place in its sophomore year. By the end of 2024, Morgan had retired and the team’s on-field play was suffering. The team finished in 10th place that year.

Leichtman and Levine estimate that the team’s poor performance, which they attribute in part to Ellis being preoccupied with the potential FIFA job, resulted in at least $40 million worth of revenue lost.

No specific amount of damages was requested. The suit seeks a trial by jury, plus damages to be determined at trial as well as pre- and post-judgment interest.

An attorney for Ellis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The San Diego Union-Tribune story on the suit featured a quote from Ellis’s attorney calling the suit “meritless” and describing it as “retaliation against Jill Ellis for asking the current owners of San Diego Wave FC to pay the deferred compensation she is owed under her employment agreement and California wage laws.” 

Douglas Silverstein, an attorney for Ellis, said in a statement that the suit is “meritless” and described it as “retaliation against Jill Ellis for asking the current owners of San Diego Wave FC to pay the deferred compensation she is owed under her employment agreement and California wage laws.” 

“Ms. Ellis attempted in good faith to work out these financial matters directly with the owners, but she was rebuffed,” Silverstein said. “Ms. Ellis was then forced to retain counsel, who last week requested in writing that she be paid. This lawsuit is a direct result of that written demand.”

That written request, dated Sept. 23, says that Leichtman and Levine are responsible for paying out the rest of the contract Ellis signed with the Wave in December 2020. It says she is owed $1 million in deferred compensation and more than $236,000 in unpaid interest under her contract with the Wave, plus attorney’s fees.

This isn’t the first legal battle Ellis has fought. In July 2024, Ellis filed a defamation lawsuit against former Wave videographer Brittany Alvarado, who alleged she was an abusive boss. That October, Alvarado and four other team employees sued the Wave and NWSL over how they handled their allegations against Ellis.

In the latter suit, a sixth plaintiff was added this January alleging sexual harassment and other claims against a supervisor identified as “E.R.” The amended complaint also describes sexual assault and harassment claims from another one of the “Jane Doe” plaintiffs about the same supervisor, with both plaintiffs alleging they ultimately had to bring their claims to the NWSL when the team didn’t act. 

The NWSL has previously said it conducted investigations into the Wave, but uncovered no league policy violations, according to The Coast News.

GREAT TEW, England — Saudi Arabia is investing billions of dollars across soccer, MMA, and more, as part of its ambitious Vision 2030 plan. A key cog is SURJ Sports—a firm led by former Australian soccer player Danny Townsend that invests in sports domestically with the aim of strengthening the country’s sports ecosystem.

Townsend was appointed CEO of SURJ in 2023, a few months after its launch. He has overseen investments in Kings League (7-on-7 soccer), Professional Fighters League (MMA), and Professional Triathletes Organisation (triathlon). 

He’s well aware of the critics of the Kingdom who say SURJ is part of a “sportswashing” campaign to distract from its human rights record, including the fallout from the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Townsend doesn’t dodge the baggage, but insists there is “genuine commitment” from Saudi Arabia to use sports to drive real social and economic change at home, not just improve its image abroad. 

“This is the job of someone like me—I’m not a Saudi, but I live in Riyadh,” he told Front Office Sports on the sidelines of the IMG x RedBird Summit 2025, a three-day conference in the U.K. focused on the future of sports.

“I can legitimately sit here and talk about it because I live there, I see it, I breathe it, and it’s real,” he said. “There is genuine commitment to the long-term impact of sport, but more importantly, social change domestically.”

He also says sports is a “great vehicle” for making progress toward gender equality and getting more women to play sports.

A recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers on the sports industry outlook for the Middle East suggests there is substance behind Townsend’s vision. Sports has been integrated into girls school curriculum in the country, and more than 700,000 girls now participate in school soccer leagues, the report says. Since 2021, the Kingdom has experienced “remarkable growth metrics,” the report says, including a 195% increase in professional female athletes and a 56% increase in the number of women’s sports teams.

“This growth in women’s sports not only demonstrates the region’s progress in inclusivity but also contributes to a more diversified and dynamic sporting landscape, which is critical as the Middle East looks ahead to hosting transformative global events,” Mona AbouHana, a partner at PwC focused on the Middle East, says in the report.

In addition to the investments named above, the SURJ portfolio includes a stake in the global sports streaming platform DAZN, and the firm has reportedly held talks with World Athletics, the international governing body of track and field, about investing in a new company to manage the sport’s commercial rights.

“Probably the best is yet to come, if I’m honest,” Townsend tells FOS. “One of the challenges in our investment mandate is to try and invest in a sport—not just a stakeholder in the sport, but the sport itself. That takes time. It’s complicated.”

A common misconception is that SURJ is involved with LIV Golf. The investment in that organization was separate from SURJ; it sits within the PIF.

“LIV was established before SURJ,” Townsend says. “We are not involved. That’s a question I get quite a bit.”

Another question he often fields is whether SURJ will follow the trend of investing in pro sports teams, particularly in the major U.S. sports leagues, where valuations are soaring and the need for capital has led to leagues loosening their rules around who can invest (the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL all now allow some form of private-equity investment, for example). Townsend is quick to draw boundaries.

“I’m not interested in U.S. sports teams,” he tells FOS. “Not because they’re bad investments, but because our mandate is return on capital and driving the sports economy in the Kingdom. I can’t pick up the Minnesota Timberwolves and move them to Riyadh.”

Editors’ note: RedBird IMI, of which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is the primary owner of Front Office Sports.