Athletes First Is Taking Its NFL Playbook to the NBA. Here’s Why Now Was the Exact Right Time to Do It.

For 25 years, Athletes First has been one of the most dominant players in the sports management game. Founded in 2001, the firm represents some of the NFL’s biggest names, including Ravens RB Derrick Henry and Cowboys QB Dak Prescott, and its President of Team Sports, David Mulugheta, is the top-ranked NFL agent on Forbes’ 2025 Most Powerful Sports Agents list. 

Now the company is doing something it’s never done before: launching a full basketball division, adding industry veterans John Noonan and Brandon James to build out an NBA and NIL practice. Mulugheta spoke with Entrepreneur about why this was the perfect time to make the move.

Dan Bova: How long have you been with Athletes First?
David Mulugheta: I did an internship right before I started, summer or spring of ’08. So, 18 years.

What was your focus when you first started?
Figuring out how to get a job! I was an intern — printing, binding packages, getting lunch orders, picking up dry cleaning. I was doing as I was told while at the same time trying to figure out how to make myself indispensable to the company.

Athletes First is known for football. What made this the right time to launch a basketball division?
We’ve always had our eye on continuing to diversify our business. We consider ourselves at the forefront of football representation, and we have what we believe is the best coaching practice in the business, representing NFL coaches, front office executives, and college coaches. We have an agent, Scott Gaffield, who also represents college basketball coaches, which got us into broadcasting a few years back. So as we continued to diversify, basketball made sense — but we had to find the right people we felt comfortable with. We’re really big on culture here. We’ve had a lot of opportunities to start a basketball division before, and it didn’t feel right until now. That’s why we felt like it was the right time.

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For people who don’t fully understand what a management agency does, what’s the day-to-day of what you guys actually do for your athletes?
That’s a great question — there’s not really a day-to-day. Every day is different, and that’s the cool part about this business. You’re dealing with people, not commodities, so every day is an adventure. Some parts of the year you’re focused on contract extensions during free agency; a lot of the year you’re recruiting new clients. With the growth of NIL, that adds a whole different dimension — now you’re working with clients who are younger and younger. The cool thing is watching them go from high school players trying to figure it out, to college, to hopefully the NFL, NBA or WNBA. It’s really cool watching that transition, watching them grow into young adults, then parents, then business people and entrepreneurs.

How does that differ as a starting point versus when you’re taking on a client who’s already a pro-level athlete?
When I first got into the business, you couldn’t even talk to a student athlete until they were three years removed from high school. Now you can sign guys when they’re basically kids, if you see the right things in them. Guys who are 20 or 21 and turning pro have a different maturity. Now we’re talking about kids who are 15, 16, 17 — for us, that means working with families a lot more, with mom and dad, because these kids are so young. The cool part is being able to pull them in at a much earlier age so they can start good habits — taking care of their body, learning how to become a professional sooner. We talk to a lot of our current pro clients and they tell us, “Man, if I’d have known this when I was fifteen.” Now we actually get to teach that to kids who are fifteen. The financial part is pretty cool too — you’re building good habits long before a guy hits the NFL or NBA and starts making real money. It’s like a practice run at seeing how money works, how it spends, how taxes work. They have a much longer runway now, and I think that’s going to be huge for their long-term understanding of how money works.

What does the NBA opportunity look like these days compared to a couple years ago?
I don’t know that the same barrier to entry exists anymore, especially with NIL and recruiting guys a lot earlier. You’re able to build relationships earlier. As far as the NBA as a brand — football is huge in America and a phenomenal business, but the NBA is more of a global sport. It’s a different model. We’re excited about it because that barrier to entry has changed significantly, and you’re able to show your worth a lot earlier to these families.

How do you parlay your success in football into starting a new vertical like basketball?
The baseline for what it is to be a good representative — whether it’s football, basketball, baseball — is pretty much the same. Our goal is to make our athletes’ lives as easy as possible off the field or court, and to help maximize the hard work, sweat, tears and sacrifice it took to get to this level. Whether that’s football or basketball, it doesn’t change. The sport isn’t going to dictate the success — it’s how we operate, how we treat our clients, and what position we put them in. We’re not getting into a lane we don’t understand. This is literally just a different vertical of the same business we’ve always been in. It’s just a new application.