Victor Wembanyama is 22 years old. There is a plausible scenario in which he earns more than $1 billion in NBA salary over the course of his career.
That sounds ridiculous, but the math is not crazy. Forbes ran the exercise a couple of years ago. If the NBA salary cap keeps growing and Wembanyama remains a max-level player, his annual salary could eventually exceed $100 million, with cumulative on-court earnings crossing $1 billion.
Wembanyama is obviously an extreme outlier. Almost no kid playing basketball today will become anything close to him. Still, I think his potential earnings point to something broader. Sports are becoming a more premium economic, cultural and social category. And as the value of athletic success rises, people will spend more trying to improve their odds.
Sports are becoming more valuable
A few different forces are moving in the same direction.
The most obvious is economic. Professional sports continue to attract more money across media rights, franchise values, sponsorships and athlete compensation. College sports are becoming more commercial. NIL has introduced real economics below the professional level. New leagues and emerging sports are creating more ways for athletes to make money.
There is also something broader happening culturally. We are moving toward extraordinary digital abundance. AI can generate software, images, writing, music and increasingly video at almost no marginal cost. More of our work happens behind screens. More entertainment is algorithmic. More of our lives are mediated by technology.
Sports are unusually resistant to that. Someone still has to run the race, make the tackle, shoot the ball. The putt has to go in. The game has to be played. Athletic performance is physical, scarce and difficult to fake. I suspect those characteristics become more valuable in a world where many other forms of output become easier to manufacture.
At the same time, fitness and wellness continue to matter more. Being athletic carries social status. Sports provide community and identity in ways that are hard to replicate online. Put all of that together and athletics sit in an unusually attractive place: health, entertainment, competition, identity and status all overlap.
The value is moving down the pyramid
The obvious impact shows up at the top. Athletes make more money, teams are increasingly worth more, and the financial payoff for being exceptional keeps increasing.
That said, I think the more interesting effect happens further down the pyramid. A 14-year-old soccer player does not need a realistic path to the pros for her parents to justify spending heavily on her development. Maybe she gets recruited, earns a scholarship, and gets NIL opportunities. Maybe she just makes varsity.
And if none of that happens, the family can still feel like the money went toward something worthwhile. She got fitter, made friends, competed and learned how to work at something difficult. That makes youth sports a compelling category for household spending. The upside can feel enormous, while the downside still feels productive.
So families spend. On travel teams, private coaching, strength training, camps, equipment, film, and on and on and on. The serious amateur athlete increasingly looks like the professional athlete of a generation ago, and I think that trend still has a long way to run.
The professional performance stack is moving downstream
Twenty years ago, the distinction was much clearer. Professional athletes had strength coaches, nutritionists, recovery protocols, specialized equipment, film rooms and detailed performance data, while kids mostly played sports.
Today, a serious high-school athlete might train year-round, play for a club, see a private instructor, travel nationally for competition, upload film, track statistics, attend showcases and follow a structured development plan. More of the infrastructure that once surrounded elite athletes is becoming available to ordinary consumers.
There are good precedents for this. Protein powder moved out of bodybuilding culture and into mainstream grocery stores. Skincare moved from dermatologists and celebrities into elaborate routines for ordinary consumers. WHOOP took physiological monitoring that once belonged in elite training environments and turned it into a day-to-day consumer product.
In each case, the pool of people who considered themselves a serious user got much larger, and I think sports are following the same path. The relevant market is therefore much larger than the number of people who will ever become professionals. It includes everyone who wants to train, recover, eat and prepare more like one.
Follow the spend
If this thesis is right, a meaningful set of businesses should emerge around this increasingly serious athlete.
Some categories are already obvious, like coaching, camps, facilities, and equipment.
Others feel earlier. Performance measurement and biomechanics that used to require a lab, software that gives ordinary athletes sophisticated film and analytics, or recruiting infrastructure, athlete identity and verified performance data. Even things like recovery and nutrition, as ambiguous as they may seem.
Nutrition is especially interesting because the mismatch is easy to see. A family might spend thousands of dollars a year on club fees, travel, private training and equipment, then finish a two-hour practice and hand the athlete a rice krispy treat. The athlete has become more sophisticated, while a lot of the products serving the athlete have not.
There are probably many other versions of that same gap.
The picks and shovels of athletic ambition
There are obvious reasons to be cautious here. Most children will not become professional athletes. Families can spend irrationally chasing scholarships that never materialize. Youth sports can become expensive, exclusionary and overly serious too early. And growth in sports spending does not automatically make every sports business attractive. Many of these categories are competitive, operationally difficult or easy to commoditize.
The best businesses will probably be the ones where the product still creates real value even when the athlete never reaches an elite level.
Better coaching can still make someone better.
Better nutrition can still improve health and performance.
Better equipment can still improve the experience.
Better training can still teach discipline and build confidence.
That genuinely matters because the market does not depend on millions of kids actually becoming professionals. Rather, it depends on millions of athletes deciding that getting better is worth spending money on. My bet is that more of them will.