WTSL, the Silver Lake-backed investment firm led by Patrick Whitesell, is getting into the management business, bringing on former WME Sports co-head Josh Pyatt to launch the new division, WIN Artists.
Pyatt will also be joining WTSL as a partner, and will also work for WIN Sports Group, the firm’s football talent agency that was built out of its acquisition of WME’s NFL representation business last year. The agent had left WME Sports last summer as part of that deal. The new banner, WIN Artists, will represent a roster of sports stars outside of the field, with the goal to widen its lens to musicians, creators and more.
“It seemed like a natural time to have Josh come in and lead this inside of WIN and create our artist group,” Whitesell tells The Hollywood Reporter, comparing the current moment to the boom time of the late aughts. “It is similar to the tailwinds that we saw in 2008, 2009, 2010 in the core movie and television business, as far as at that time, directors, actors, showrunners could build out businesses around what they were doing in their day job.”
“The ambition, the goal is to build a business around around icons, around the 1 percent, with the idea that talent these days are multifaceted, they’re interested in doing a bunch of different things, and being able to help them build businesses from scratch or get them into new areas is exciting to me,” says Pyatt. “Ultimately, long term, I want to build a management company with a group of people that I really like and respect, and that starts with the clients, but ultimately the broader management company will look to fill out other people that we want to work on an everyday basis with.”
WIN Artists is focused on helping the people it works with scale up business in media and content, brand partnerships and other ventures. Clients include pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau, who has forged a sizable following on YouTube, as well as Shaquille O’Neal’s Jersey Legends, Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions, and Derek Jeter’s Cap 2 Productions.
O’Neal, of course, garnered international fame as an NBA star, but it is his TV roles and social media ubiquity that have kept him culturally relevant for decades. DeChambeau, meanwhile, has leveraged his pro golf career to build a YouTube empire with millions of followers.
As Pyatt alluded to, however the firm will not limit itself to working with only athletes.
“We want to walk with unique personalities and and business builders,” he says. “They could be an athlete, they could be a musician, they could be a race car driver, they could be a podcaster.”
As a senior partner and co-head of WME Sports, Pyatt was involved in helping athletes build out brands beyond the field and the court, working with clients that included LeBron James, Lionel Messi, and the late Kobe Bryant.
“I think having a point of view is is very important, but then you also have to have clients that are willing to actually do the work, otherwise it falls flat,” Pyatt says. “And I think that ultimately is what we want to do at WIN. We want to work with clients that we know have an appetite and an interest, but that will also follow through on the execution to bring something to life and make it transcendent.”
With athletes now among the most famous people on earth, the opportunity to build businesses around them has never been higher. Increasingly that means media, where athlete-led podcasts, YouTube channels, and scripted and unscripted TV shows and films are quietly proliferating, but it also means consumer products or other lines of business that once had barriers so high to entry that they would have been impossible to even try.
“If you’re building a viable media company that in and of itself can be incredibly valuable. But once you have that footprint and that connection to the audience and that brand recognition, your ability to move out into consumer products and other lines of businesses that that media company can help drive is enormous,” Whitesell says. “The gatekeepers that traditionally have been there have kind of fallen away. So it’s kind of the greatest time, I think, to be someone like that in the business, in a world where all we talk about is disruption.”
Whitesell spun up WTSL after Silver Lake completed its take-private of Endeavor, where he was executive chairman. The private equity firm committed $250 million to the new venture. Former Endeavor CFO Jason Lublin joined the company as a partner not long after.
WTSL acquired WME’s NFL representation business in conjunction with that deal, and subsequently invested in Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions. WTSL also inked a deal for a new joint venture with Universal Music Group.
