Well, anyone who’s been following college football this year knows that one of the biggest storylines heading into the season was the experiment brewing down in Chapel Hill: the unlikely duo of legendary NFL coach Bill Belichick and former GM Michael Lombardi taking over for the Tar Heels. After Mack Brown – a program legend who steadied the ship with six straight bowl appearances following the rough Larry Fedora years – was let go, UNC launched a coaching search that caught nation attention. And somehow, it ended with one of the most decorated pairs in football history, with nine Super Bowls between them, trading Foxborough for Franklin Street.
Two weeks before Belichick’s debut, though, Lombardi was thousands of miles from Chapel Hill… on a fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia. As first reported by Pablo Torre, the UNC general manager traveled to Riyadh to meet with “high ranking government officials” to explore potential partnerships on behalf of Tar Heel football. The visit, which has since been confirmed by UNC officials, was funded not by the university, but by the Saudi government itself. The schooled called it an “exploratory fundraising” trip, and although no deal was signed, the message was undoubtedly sent – college football’s new money machine has gone fully global.
If we needed a sign that the sport’s moral compass is spinning, well…. this just might be it. Once upon a time, college football fans and pundits debated whether a booster could quietly slip a recruit a duffel bag or take them to a nice dinner. Now, we’re talking about sovereign wealth funds. How did we get here?
The $3 Million Freshman and the Free-Agent Quarterback.
This obviously isn’t happening in a vacuum. The modern college football is largely unrecognizable from what it was even five years ago. Television contracts have ballooned, collectives have all but replaced compliance departments, and the transfer portal now functions like free agency with even fewer rules. The top high school recruits are no longer looking for scholarship offers – for the most part, they’re looking for the highest bidder. And who can blame them? In a sport defined every offseason by the coaching carousel, lucrative buyouts, TV deal negotiations, and bowl contracts, the athletes have finally cut themselves a slice of the bloated college football financial pie.
Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood (19) / Junfu Han / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Take Bryce Underwood at Michigan. He’s seven games into his college career and already pulling in a reported $3 million annually through NIL deals – more than a few NFL backups and even some low-end starters. That’s not a typo… the 18-year-old freshman quarterback from Belleville High School is out-earning professionals at the highest level of football.
Then there’s Nico Iamaleava, who left Tennessee for UCLA after a messy spring saga that played out much like a traditional NFL contract dispute. His camp allegedly asked to bump his NIL pay to $4 million, didn’t get it, and by the next week, he was in the portal. A week later, he was a Bruin and Tennessee’s new quarterback was the guy UCLA just lost. As the past two offseasons have demonstrated, the NCAA didn’t need to legalize free agency. The market did it for them.
What NIL was supposed to do – level the playing field for players who’d been locked out of the billions swirling around them – has instead created a sport where everyone negotiates, leaks, and re-negotiates. Coaches recruit each other’s rosters. Boosters become brokers. And now ladies and gentlemen, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund wants in on the fun.
Riyadh, Meet Franklin Street
Truthfully, UNC’s trip to Saudi Arabia feels like the inevitable next chapter in a story college football has been edging towards for years: the steady march from amateurism to enterprise. The university called Lombardi’s trip an “exploration.” The Saudis, apparently, saw it as more than that.
The details of the trip remain fuzzy. No partnership has been signed, and UNC insists it used no public money for the visit, but the optics are glaring. The Saudis, through their Public Investment Fund (PIF), have already transformed global professional sports (see below) – why not college football next?
EXAMPLES: LIV Golf, the purchase of Newcastle United, multibillion-dollar investments in esports and video games, and the newly minted Six Kings Slam tennis tournament in Riyadh, where Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz pocketed seven-figure appearance fees and Jannik Sinner walked away with $6 million in winnings this year – more than the champion’s purse at Wimbledon.
Saudi Arabia isn’t investing in sports for the love of the game. It’s investing for legitimacy – for reputation, leverage, and global relevance. And now, a college football program in North Carolina, led by the most recognizable coach of his generation, has entered the kingdom’s portfolio.
The Price of “Amateurism”
The irony here is that NIL was sold as a way to empower players, not foreign states. It was supposed to correct an imbalance, not invite a geopolitical power – with a human-rights record that is at the very least… questionable – into the equation. The moment a public university’s football department starts taking meetings in Riyadh, the line between name, image, likeness and national interests blurs fast.
The Saudis love visibility. They’ve poured billions into golf, soccer, and now tennis because those sports buy headlines, broadcast slots, and Western acceptance. College football, with its passionate fan base, institutional prestige, and cultural footprint, is the next logical step. And they’ve found the perfect entry point – a program hungry for relevance and a front office comfortable doing business the NFL way.
But college football isn’t the NFL. At least, it’s not supposed to be. Right? RIGHT? When NIL laws passed, the ideal was fairness – to let athletes profit from their own likenesses, to restore balance in a system where everyone but the players made money. But instead of empowering the individual players, the system empowered the investor. Collectives became shadow payrolls and school loyalty is now tied to NIL contributions.
So when UNC’s general manager boards a flight to Riyadh…. it’s not an aberration, it’s the logical endpoint of a sport that decided there was no such thing as too much money.
The Soft Power Playbook
Saudi Arabia’s playbook is familiar by now – buy access, control the narrative, and rebrand through spectacle. It worked in golf, it’s working in tennis, and it’s quietly creeping into American college sports. The Six Kings Slam wasn’t about the game or even the trophies, it was about prestige. And if Riyadh can buy prestige in tennis, it can buy it in football too.
That should terrify anyone who still believes college sports stand for something more than broadcast rights. Because the second college football opens the door to foreign sovereign funding, it stops being a uniquely American institution. It becomes a global commodity. When the PIF bankrolls your quarterback or your NIL collective, I’m not sure the fight song sounds quite the same. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe winning cures all the moral reservations that should stem from this development.
What’s Left of the Game
There’s a tragic irony to all of this. The locker room, that sacred place where young men from everywhere come together for a shared goal, used to be what made college football different. In my opinion, it’s the last frontier of unity in an otherwise divided world. Now, the locker room is just another asset in someone’s portfolio. In this case – another asset in a foreign government’s portfolio.
Lombardi famously calls UNC “the NFL’s 33rd team.” Maybe he’s right… but not in the way he intended. Because if boosters, private equity, and now sovereign wealth funds all have a seat at the table, what’s left of the sport that used to belong to the people in the stands?
For all the billions flowing through it, college football has never felt poorer in meaning.
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