Business Daily meets: Leigh Steinberg
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lawyer Leigh Steinberg had no big dream to become a sports agent. He was a huge sports fan, but the job was not something he was aspiring to – more something that he stumbled across.
Today, he's built up a career representing more than 300 professional athletes across a range of disciplines: from big money-making sports like football and basketball, to Olympic gymnastics; building sporting careers worth billions of dollars.
His influence in sport is so influential that he's often credited as the real-life inspiration for the sports agent in the film Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise.
We speak to Leigh Steinberg about how he started his career as an agent, how he builds a brand around a sports star, and how he's succeeded in such a competitive environment - overcoming some personal struggles along the way. And - how he responds when members of the public approach him with the famous phrase, "Show me the money".
(Picture: Leigh Steinberg. Credit: Getty Images)
Presenter: Roger Hearing Producers: Matt Lines and Hannah Mullane
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Sophia Smith Gaila and I'm Sachi Cole and we're on a quest to find out where in the world women are living their best lives. |
| 0:07.3 | We're here to shine a light on some surprising and inspiring places and what we can learn from them. |
| 0:12.0 | Where to be a woman from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:22.3 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Roger Hearing. |
| 0:26.4 | Today we're speaking to the real-life Jerry Maguire, the man the Tom Cruise movie was |
| 0:31.5 | based on American sports agent Lee Steinberg. |
| 0:35.3 | He's represented more than 300 professional athletes from football and basketball to |
| 0:41.1 | Olympic gymnasts, building sporting careers worth billions of dollars. |
| 0:46.0 | Teams that got $2 million in the National Football League is their share of the television |
| 0:52.5 | contract. |
| 0:53.6 | They're now making $220 or $230 million just from TV. |
| 0:58.9 | You have money which has exploded from a television perspective. |
| 1:04.7 | And it's so much more than how good the athlete is on the field when it comes to making money. |
| 1:10.3 | It's about the talent and skills outside of the sport |
| 1:13.2 | to help build a brand, jumpstart a second career, |
| 1:16.6 | alongside giving back to the community that you came from. |
| 1:20.1 | You're going to try to make a difference in the world in a positive way. |
| 1:24.6 | We give them examples and then challenge the player to find something in their own life |
| 1:29.7 | that they'd like to tackle maybe a disease or a condition that they went through or someone |
| 1:35.1 | their family went through. Today we speak to him about how he started his career as an agent, |
| 1:41.0 | how he builds a brand around a sports star, and what's really needed to be a success in such a |
| 1:47.0 | competitive environment. That's all coming up on Business Daily. |
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