College sports spent the early years of name, image, and likeness organized around one structure: the collective. Booster-funded groups, often set up as nonprofits, pooled donor money and routed it to a school’s athletes. That model is now under pressure from two of the most consequential referees in the system, the NCAA and the IRS, and its strain has accelerated a shift toward platforms where athletes earn from their own brand rather than through booster intermediaries.
One of the most visible companies in that shift is NIL Club. As collectives face legal and tax scrutiny, NIL Club has grown into one of the largest athlete platforms in the country by operating on a fundamentally different, agent-free model. Here is a detailed look at what NIL Club is, how it works, where it stands today, and why its structure matters against the backdrop of a collective model in retreat.
What Is NIL Club?
NIL Club is a digital platform that helps college and high school athletes earn money and build their personal brands by connecting directly with fans and companies. It was created by YOKE, an Atlanta-based fan-engagement technology company founded in 2019. According to the company, NIL Club now serves more than 650,000 registered student-athletes across over 2,000 schools and 20,000 active team-based clubs, representing a combined social media footprint of over 1.7 billion followers.
The platform is frequently described as a “Patreon for teams.” Rather than joining as individual stars, athletes participate as part of a team-based club. Fans pay a subscription to support their favorite team, and the earnings are split among the athletes on that roster, so role players and walk-ons can participate alongside headliners. Athletes share exclusive content such as training clips, behind-the-scenes footage, and game-day moments, and earn from the community that forms around them.
How NIL Club Works
NIL Club has expanded from a single subscription product into a multi-channel platform, giving athletes several ways to earn within one app. Those channels now include fan subscriptions, brand deals, and merchandise.
The brand deals feature, launched in August 2025, added an in-app tab where athletes can browse and accept campaigns from companies directly. According to the company, in the first 90 days after that feature launched, more than 50,000 athletes completed at least one brand deal. NIL Club has publicly named brand partners including SoFi, Amazon, Gatorade, Ulta Beauty, Acorns, Revolut, and LoveShackFancy, along with campaign work with Subway. Many of these campaigns are structured around athletes creating authentic content in their own voice rather than scripted endorsements, which is part of why brands have gravitated to the model.
The platform is available on both iOS and Android, and athletes can join through the app or the NIL Club website by creating an account and setting up or joining their team’s club.
The Collective Model Under NCAA and IRS Pressure
To understand why NIL Club’s structure matters, it helps to understand what is happening to the collective model it operates apart from.
The first source of pressure is NCAA enforcement. In January 2024, the NCAA sanctioned Florida State after an assistant football coach facilitated impermissible contact between a booster and a transfer prospect; according to ESPN’s reporting, the collective made a specific offer to the player, and the coach received a two-year show-cause order and a suspension. The NCAA also opened investigations into NIL activity at other programs, including Tennessee. Then, in February 2024, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction barring the NCAA from enforcing its NIL-recruiting rules nationwide, and Florida State moved to have its penalties rescinded, leaving the rules governing collectives enforced, challenged, and suspended almost at once.
The second, more structural pressure came from the tax code. Many collectives had organized as 501(c)(3) nonprofits so donors could deduct their contributions. In a June 2023 memorandum, AM 2023-004, the IRS Office of Chief Counsel concluded that many NIL collectives do not qualify for tax-exempt status, because paying athletes for their NIL primarily serves the athletes’ private interests rather than a public charitable purpose. As the law firm Vinson & Elkins summarized it, athlete compensation was not incidental but the very reason many of these organizations existed. Analysts at Nixon Peabody warned that nonprofit collectives soliciting deductible donations were on shaky footing, and the IRS has continued to scrutinize them since.
Layer on the House v. NCAA settlement, which now lets schools pay athletes directly, and the collective’s role has been thrown further into question. Some have merged, restructured, or wound down.
Why NIL Club’s Agent-Free Model Is Different
NIL Club describes itself as an agent-free platform structured differently from a collective, and the distinction sits at the center of how the company positions itself. In materials published through PR Newswire, NIL Club states that its clubs “are not a collective,” that they “are run by students and do not involve adults, boosters, or school staff,” and that compensation begins only once a student creates and posts content, tying earnings to work performed rather than to enrollment or athletic performance.
That structure is meaningful because the features that drew NCAA and IRS scrutiny to collectives, booster involvement, recruiting inducements, and pooled donations paid out based on athletic value, are the ones a content-based model is built to avoid. Earnings on NIL Club flow from fan subscriptions, brand campaigns, and merchandise tied to an athlete’s own content and brand, not from a booster pool.
How NIL Club Approaches Compliance
Compliance is central to how NIL Club presents itself, and the company has described specific steps on the record. According to its materials, NIL Club reviews each state’s bylaws with legal experts before launching there, has worked with a state high school athletic association to align with its guidelines, avoids the use of school logos and trademarks, and runs an automated system that flags and removes school intellectual property. The company has also stated that every brand deal on the platform is reviewed by YOKE along with schools and legal experts to align with NCAA guidelines and state laws, and that it works to protect athletes’ eligibility while helping them understand and manage their own personal brand.
These measures speak to the central compliance challenge across NIL: keeping an athlete’s earnings clearly tied to their own brand and separate from the school marks and booster structures that carry regulatory risk. That separation matters most as NIL extends to younger athletes. In North Carolina, for example, state rules bar any booster-club or collective representative from using an NIL offer to recruit a student and require high school athletes to keep NIL activity separate from school branding, with commercial use of a school jersey or logo capable of jeopardizing eligibility, according to state guidance summaries. Several state associations restrict high school athletes from collective involvement altogether.
Where NIL Club Fits in the 2026 NIL Landscape
The broader NIL economy has grown quickly, expanding 53 percent from 2024 to 2025 to reach roughly $2.75 billion in spending, according to industry figures reported by The Business Journal. As that market matures and oversight tightens through new bodies like the College Sports Commission, platforms that emphasize compliance and athlete-owned brand building have positioned themselves for the shift.
NIL Club has leaned into that position, describing 2025 as a year focused on building infrastructure and trust rather than chasing headlines, and continuing to add channels, brand deals and, more recently, merchandise, that let athletes earn year-round rather than only during the season or through one-off deals.
What Is Happening to NIL Collectives, in Short
NIL collectives face pressure on two fronts. The IRS has concluded that many nonprofit collectives do not qualify for tax-exempt status, undercutting the deductible donations that funded them, while the NCAA’s attempts to enforce recruiting rules against collectives produced sanctions, lawsuits, and a nationwide injunction that left the rules in flux. Combined with direct school revenue sharing after the House v. NCAA settlement, these forces have pushed athletes and platforms toward models built on athletes owning and earning from their own brand, the approach companies like NIL Club were built around.
The Bottom Line
The collective was the improvised answer to a sudden rule change, and for a while it worked. But it was built on assumptions, deductible donations and loosely enforced recruiting boundaries, that have not survived contact with the IRS and the courts. In its place, a more durable approach is taking shape: athletes treating their own name and brand as the asset and earning from it through compliant, agent-free structures. NIL Club, with its team-based clubs, multi-channel earnings, and stated compliance framework, has become one of the clearest examples of what that model looks like at scale.
