This may not sound like earth-shattering news, but recently a new crowdfunding site was announced. What is news, is that this one is a little bit different. Unlike Kickstarter or Patreon, that aim to provide musicians with the money they need to produce the music their fans love, or GoFundMe and Indiegogo, that aim to more generally connect those who need money for their projects with those who are willing to provide it, no matter the amount, this one is a whole new ballgame (see what I did there?).
The site, FanAngel.com, is aimed at taking the hard earned cash that sports fans have in their personal bank accounts and giving it straight to their favorite athletes and teams. These athletes encompass many sports: “football, basketball, baseball, hockey, world football – fútbol (soccer), golf, auto racing, Olympic, and other major sporting events” at both the professional and collegiate level.
Now, at first glance, this seemed odd. At the professional level, these athletes already make hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars both playing their sport and endorsing various goods and services. What in the world would they want with my twenty dollars?
But the real concern is how this is even possible at the collegiate level. I’m pretty sure that giving money to college athletes, while something that they may need, is also something that is generally frowned upon. So why would I give my twenty dollars to FanAngel?
Before we answer those or any of a number of other questions I have, let’s start at the beginning. They say they are a crowdfunding site, but what exactly is FanAngel?
First of all, let’s just ignore the “professional athlete” side of this venture. I don’t see any scenario in which regular fans will be giving any dollars to professional athletes and franchises that are already rolling in it.
Within their pitch are a lot of feel good comments, but the gist is that they are attempting to provide fans of a sport with an opportunity to connect with and make a difference for the teams and players of that sport in a real, tangible way. I understand the idea behind it, and if it were really that simple, I would be all for it. However, you can be damn sure that when it comes to anything being given from anyone to a college athlete, multiple legal departments will be combing every corner of the transaction for the slightest hint of impropriety.
So, is it even legal?
Therein lies another issue with the setup. FanAngel says that they aren’t really doing anything that any number of individuals or group booster organizations haven’t already been doing for years – setting aside cash for players to get access to once their eligibility expires. If that’s the case, then what exactly will this site even accomplish? In order to be successful as a business, you have to either do things differently or do them better. FanAngel all but says in their legality video that they aren’t doing it differently, so they must be doing it better, right?
Except that they are doing it differently, because internet. Connectivity online changes everything. What’s to stop athletes from starting accounts where they can keep an eye on who is offering them what, or stopping various administrators from creating accounts for their own nefarious reasons? Pretty much nothing, other than a disclaimer at the bottom of FanAngel’s information page:
***CURRENT AND INCOMING COLLEGE ATHLETES SHOULD NOT SIGN UP FOR FanAngel. NCAA EMPLOYEES, COLLEGE EMPLOYEES UNDER NCAA ELIGIBILITY, AND NCAA AFFILIATES SUBJECT TO NCAA RULES SHOULD NOT “FAN” OR PLEDGE TO ANY COLLEGE ATHLETE.***
O.K., but I don’t think a couple of bold, all-caps sentences will be enough to stop people who want to do those things from doing them. And they will, because even if they get caught it won’t be until well after the fact.
The fans aren’t just pledging money, either. It’s almost like fantasy sports, where they can pledge “$16 to Jimmy John if Illinois beats Penn State on Saturday November 16th.” It is performance-based compensation. You can see this very easily devolving into literal pay-for-play or even point shaving. What is to stop young Jimmy from creating his own account seeing what people are pledging for him to, say, lose the game?
I’m unconvinced they’ll avoid that, especially considering that founder Shawn Fojtik’s response to “what happens if a booster tries to use this as an end-around” was simply “if the NCAA tells us to give the money back, we will.”
But none of this really answers the question of, “what is the point?” What is the real purpose of FanAngel?
Very interesting: Sports Fans Can Now Financially Motivate Favorite Players & Teams w/ @FanAngelSports http://t.co/sSXOqt04Tn –
— Sam Marchiano (@sammarchiano) March 11, 2015
#Sportsbiz #FanAngel Permits CrowdFunding To Keep Athletes In School http://t.co/j6G1uGG2lb
— Label 55 (@Label55) March 10, 2015
No, and no, respectively. Are fans really going to be able to give an athlete, through FanAngel, enough money to provide them with additional motivation, and aren’t some of those fans already deep-pocketed enough to have other means of doing so?
And in no way are these kind-hearted fans “keeping them in school.” Describing it that way makes it sound as though most collegiate athletes 1) finish their athletic eligibility and playing career before they complete their academic studies and depart the university, and 2) that they are just fine financially until such time that their athletic eligibility (and associated scholarship) disappears.
You would be hard-pressed to prove that the percentage of student athletes who attend college much longer than they play sports is very high. More to the point, as stories like Shabazz Napier and the cost-of-attendance issue are coming out, it elucidates that these student-athletes are much more concerned and motivated by increased financial assistance while they are in school and playing.
Giving Shabazz Napier a check or a PayPal transfer in the amount of X dollars (which comes in exchange for generating social media content about FanAngel, by the way) after his basketball career and eligibility are up doesn’t make the struggles he faced every single day up until that point any lesser. It serves as reimbursement for services an athlete has rendered, not the real-time compensation the athletes actually need.
So to that end, FanAngel isn’t really doing anything that hasn’t been done before, they’re only doing it differently in ways that make it more difficult to regulate and track – which means they aren’t really doing it better. And they certainly aren’t doing what they advertise themselves as offering.
Feature photo screenshot from FanAngel.com
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