Overtime—on Pace to Generate $100 Million This Year—Inks NFL Partnership

Sports brand Overtime penned a new distribution deal with the National Football League on Thursday, an expansion of a prior partnership between the two parties and a key cosign for the 8-year-old company.

The Overtime portfolio now includes four proprietary sports leagues, their media rights partnerships, an arena in Atlanta and an apparel and licensing operation, among other ventures. 

Its four leagues—OT7, a seven-on-seven football league; OTE, a basketball league; OTX, an eight-event boxing series; and Overtime Select, a women’s basketball league—feature high school-aged athletes, with the exception of OTX boxers, who are 18 years or older.

Through its emphasis on rising stars and social media distribution, Overtime caters to a young audience of sports fans. According to the company, 83% of its viewership is under 35 years old, and it has over 100 million followers across its social channels and YouTube.

“The NFL partnership is huge because we now have a partnership with the biggest sports league in America,” said chief executive Dan Porter. “The idea that Overtime is not just a disruptor, but can play nice at the highest levels, is significant.” 

The business is currently on pace to generate over $100 million in revenue this year, according to Porter. If it does, that figure would represent half of what a leaked internal deck predicted it would generate by 2024, but a 40% uptick year over year. 

Overtime, which employs more than 300 full-time workers, has raised $250 million and was valued at $500 million in 2022. The company is not yet profitable, although its decision to build and vertically integrate its sports leagues required a significant outlay of capital.

Its content and business models sit at the intersection of a number of paradigmatic shifts in the sports and media industries, including the professionalization of teenage athletes and changing patterns in sports consumption, especially among young audiences.

“The biggest challenge in media right now is that live sports are one of the few things driving engagement, and there are only a finite number of sports rights,” said LightShed Ventures partner and analyst Rich Greenfield. “Overtime’s ability to create new sports content presents a huge opportunity if they can create meaningfully engaged audiences.”

Expanded distribution deals bring new revenue, viewership

The company brings in around 50% of its revenue from league sponsorships, a group of 15 brands that includes companies like Adidas and State Farm.

The remaining half of its revenue comes from a mix of media rights deals, advertising and commerce. Its commerce business alone is on pace to generate eight figures in revenue and projected to grow 50% this year, according to Porter.

Distribution deals for its media rights have also become a significant tranche of its business, and its expanded partnership with the NFL aims to supercharge this effort.

Through the new distribution arrangement, the NFL will broadcast the games from the upcoming season of OT7, which begins April 6, on both the NFL Network and NFL+. The two channels will air OT7 games on Saturday and Sunday for two hours, exposing fans of professional football to the rising athletes who could one day become fixtures of the league itself.

“The partnership helps the NFL expand beyond live football,” Greenfield said. “It also ages [the NFL] down and allows it to connect with a demographic that isn’t watching linear TV.”

The NFL partnership follows on the heels of other distribution agreements Overtime has signed with prominent media partners. It inked a three-year deal with Prime Video in 2022, through which it airs 20 OTE games per season, and will air the first and second seasons of OTX exclusively on DAZN. It also has a distribution deal with Bally Sports Network.

Its media rights strategy is part of a broader plan in which Overtime aims to capture, package and distribute its footage in a manner that allows it to monetize the video several times over. 

For instance, it livestreams games as they occur, sells the rights to air the games to a variety of streaming services, houses the footage on its YouTube channel and repackages it as highlights to share across its social channels. It monetizes this content, at various points, through sponsorship, advertising, media rights, branded content and apparel sales.

This approach positions Overtime as both a builder of disruptive sports leagues and a creator of original sports content, but one without a singular website, channel or product to which it drives viewers. 

The strategy runs counter to the prevailing logic of the media industry, but for Overtime—whose primary goal at the moment is building awareness of its players, products and leagues—it has so far proven successful.

“Many companies have failed because they think that the purpose of platforms is to push fans back to their websites,” Porter said. “If you can flip that on its head, you can be successful. We hope to do $100 million this year, but none of that comes from the website.”