Founded by Jay-Z, Roc Nation Sports only entered soccer in 2019. Seven years later, the agency represents Vinícius Júnior, Endrick, Yan Diomande, and Gabriel Martinelli, and claims a spot in the global top 8. Here's a look back at a rapid rise and at a representation model that treats the athlete as a brand.
Last updated: 09/11/2026
An agency founded by an American rapper that now ranks among the eight largest soccer agencies in the world? In seven years, Roc Nation Sports International has brought Vinícius Júnior, Endrick, Gabriel Martinelli, and Yan Diomande into its portfolio, and placed twelve clients at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Soccer, however, was not this agency's original business. Launched in 2013 as the sports arm of the group founded by Jay-Z, RNS first grew in the United States. Its expansion into soccer began in 2019, with an approach that differed from the one used by long-established European agencies.
Let's take a closer look at who actually owns the agency, how it gained a foothold in soccer, which players make up its portfolio, and the logic its representation model is built on.
Roc Nation Sports is the athlete representation division of Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded in 2008 by Jay-Z. The sports arm was created in 2013, with baseball player Robinson Canó as its first client. Its early years played out in the United States, across baseball, basketball, American football, and boxing.
Soccer arrived in 2019, under a separate entity, Roc Nation Sports International (RNSI). That is the company that runs the soccer business, out of London, under the leadership of Michael Yormark.
The soccer operation is built on three hubs:
The agency also claims commercial coverage that reaches well beyond those three offices. It organizes its offering by major region — Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific — which allows it to present a single player as a brand that can be monetized across several continents at once, and not only in his home sporting market.
That architecture explains the agency's positioning: it recruits in South America and Africa, places its players in Europe, and commercializes their image rights out of the United States.
One detail that is often missing from quick overviews of Roc Nation Sports is worth spelling out. When the sports division launched in the spring of 2013, Jay-Z did not enter this market alone. The company relied on an initial partnership with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the largest talent and sports agencies in the United States. That backing gave the young operation immediate access to established negotiating methods and to an existing network in American sports, before Roc Nation built its own teams and became fully independent, in particular when it opened its soccer business in 2019.
Roc Nation is co-owned by Jay-Z and Live Nation Entertainment, one of the leading global operators in live entertainment. That ownership structure sets the agency apart from most of its competitors in soccer, which are generally owned by their founders or by funds specializing in sports.
Leadership is split among several clearly identified figures:
The FFAR (FIFA Football Agent Regulations) issues licenses to individuals, not to companies. An agency is therefore never a license holder. It operates through licensed agents who declare every deal on the official FIFA Agent Platform. From a regulatory standpoint, the names Alan Redmond and Frederico Pena carry more weight than the agency’s own.
In September 2019, Roc Nation opened its first international office in London and handed the leadership to Michael Yormark. At that point, the agency chose to build its player portfolio one signing at a time rather than buy an existing European agency.
The decisive addition came in September 2020 with the hiring of Alan Redmond, whose agency R10 Sports Management was absorbed in the process. In one move, Roc Nation gained a license issued by the Football Association and a network of clubs in England. The first big names followed, notably Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, and Federico Dimarco.
That hire produced concrete results fairly quickly. In 2021, Kevin De Bruyne extended his contract at Manchester City F.C. for four additional seasons. The agency then highlighted the role of a proprietary data study in shaping the negotiation, a way of showing, from the earliest days of soccer at Roc Nation, that the analytics approach was not just a marketing argument but a tool genuinely put to work case by case.
On July 7, 2023, RNSI announced the acquisition of TFM Agency, a São Paulo agency that represented more than a hundred soccer players at the time. The deal gave rise to Roc Nation Sports Brazil, run by TFM founder Frederico Pena.
It is the most consequential deal in the agency's soccer history. In a single move, it brought Vinícius Júnior, Gabriel Martinelli, and Endrick into the portfolio. Juan Perez, President and founder of Roc Nation Sports, said at the time that Brazil is the center of soccer and that the deal showed the world what the agency intended to do.
The acquisition also changed the nature of the Brazilian business. TFM was described as an export agency, focused on selling young talent to Europe. Roc Nation applied its full-service approach there, marketing included.
The agency says it has guided more than twenty African players to Europe in the space of twelve to fifteen months. It launched the Roc Cup, a youth tournament that brought together 160 players from across the continent over six days, in front of some thirty European scouts. A second edition has been announced in Ghana for 2027. Yan Diomande, an Ivory Coast international, and Habib Diarra, a Senegal international, serve as proof of concept for that strategy.
The North American market represents the most recent strategy the company has put in place around soccer. The agency has announced plans to build out a representation business in the United States, through hires and possible acquisitions, leaning on the strength of the Roc Nation brand in its home country.
| Year | Deal | Players involved | What the deal brought |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Hiring of Alan Redmond and absorption of R10 Sports Management | Initial European portfolio | An FA license and a network of English clubs |
| 2021 | Kevin De Bruyne's contract extension at Manchester City F.C. | Kevin De Bruyne | A four-year contract, supported by a proprietary data study |
| 2023 | Acquisition of TFM Agency, which became Roc Nation Sports Brazil | Vinícius Júnior, Gabriel Martinelli, Endrick | More than 100 Brazilian players and an office in São Paulo |
| 2026 | Move from West Ham United F.C. to Flamengo | Lucas Paquetá | A fee of $46 million, a record for a South American club |
| 2026 | Move from RB Leipzig to Real Madrid | Yan Diomande | One of the biggest deals of the summer transfer window |
| 2026 | Contract extension at Real Madrid | Vinícius Júnior | A contract running through 2032 for the agency's most visible client |
The agency is reported to have around 137 active clients, including 67 in major leagues, for a combined market value estimated at $815 million. The portfolio combines established internationals with very young players. Four cases show how the agency works.
Brought into the portfolio through the TFM acquisition in 2023, the Real Madrid winger is the agency's most visible client. He extended his contract through 2032, after extensive speculation about a possible move to the Premier League. Michael Yormark publicly credited Frederico Pena and the Brazilian team for that extension, a way of pointing out that the São Paulo office runs the Brazilian files even when the player is playing in Spain.
Scouted in Ivory Coast and then developed at RB Leipzig, the winger joined Real Madrid in the summer of 2026. The reported figure varies depending on the source, at around $140 million, with some specialist databases adding as much as $17 million in potential bonuses on top of the fixed amount. The deal validates the agency's African strategy, which consists of identifying a player very early on the continent, placing him in a mid-tier European league, and then negotiating the sale to a top club.
Short on playing time at Real Madrid, the forward was loaned out for six months to Olympique Lyonnais in January 2026, with no purchase option. He scored eight goals and provided eight assists in twenty-one matches there, a run of form that opened the door to the Brazil squad for the World Cup. Back in Madrid, he was given the number 9 shirt for the 2026–27 season.
The Belgian winger made his move from Olympique Lyonnais to Sunderland A.F.C. on September 1, 2026, in the very final hours of the summer transfer window. Olympique Lyonnais announced a deal worth $40 million including add-ons, along with a 12.5% sell-on clause on any future resale profit. The negotiation went down to the wire, with Arsenal F.C. walking away over the asking price and Crystal Palace F.C. mounting a late counter-bid on deadline day. The case is a compelling illustration of the reality of the sports agent business, between the time limits involved, the soccer calendar and the selling club's financial constraints.
The portfolio also includes Gabriel Martinelli and Lucas Paquetá, who returned to Flamengo in January 2026 for $46 million, the highest fee ever paid by a South American club, as well as Luis Henrique and Senegal international Habib Diarra. Other European players are regularly linked to the agency from one season to the next, among them Axel Witsel, Eric Bailly, Jérôme Boateng, Marcus Rashford, and Reece James, while Romelu Lukaku was part of the portfolio before a split that came in 2023.
No. To date, the offering remains centered on players. No manager or head coach appears among the marquee names the agency publicly promotes.
Soccer accounts for only part of the overall Roc Nation Sports portfolio. The division maintains a significant presence in the sports that built its reputation before 2019, which partly explains its ability to build brand strategies for its soccer players modeled on methods already proven elsewhere.
In basketball, the agency has represented or represents names such as Kevin Durant, signed on June 24, 2013 in one of the division's very first deals, Kyrie Irving, and LaMelo Ball. In American football, Dez Bryant joined the portfolio in November 2014, alongside players like Victor Cruz, Saquon Barkley, and Todd Gurley. Baseball is still defined by longtime client Robinson Canó, while boxing rounds out a smaller but still active roster.
That multi-sport foundation gives Roc Nation expertise in advertising, media, and image rights markets that are far more mature than European soccer's, and that experience fed directly into the approach adopted when the soccer division was launched in 2019.
What sets Roc Nation Sports apart from traditional representation agencies is above all the way the mandate is defined. Where classic representation is organized around negotiating the playing contract, Roc Nation treats the contract as one component among several.
Michael Yormark makes a simple argument: an athlete should think like a business owner and use his playing career to build his own brand. In his view, storytelling then creates value that can outlast the playing career.
That can translate into four levers:
Behind the scenes, that offering comes with legal and tax support and assistance on immigration matters for players moving between countries, along with an analytics unit deployed both in scouting and as negotiating support, as the Kevin De Bruyne extension mentioned above illustrates.
The most fully realized example remains Vinícius Júnior, who has built a portfolio of commercial partnerships, equity stakes, and nonprofit activity through the Vini Institute. Added to that are investments in clubs in Portugal and Brazil.
The same logic has been applied to less media-exposed players. Federico Dimarco, represented by the agency for several seasons before they parted ways, is a good example. Initially seen as a player defined mainly by what he did on the field, he gradually became one of the most commercially attractive names in Serie A thanks to that support, to the point of securing a contract extension from Inter Milan with a sharply increased salary.
Since its launch, Roc Nation Sports has gone from newcomer to established player in the European market, relying on the acquisition and development of new markets. What makes it distinctive is above all an approach borrowed from the entertainment business, where personal branding and commercial partnerships sit at the center.
For anyone preparing for the FIFA agent exam, there are three points to remember:
Identifying a skill the market is missing and building your business around it remains possible, even as an independent agent.
