By Weston Blasi
Joe Burrow, Blake Griffin and other top-flight professional athletes have purchased a corn and soy farm in Iowa
Over the past two years, companies operating in the nascent cryptocurrency space, such as Coinbase (COIN), Block (né Square) (SQ) and the now-bankrupt FTX, have inked sponsorship deals with a number of top athletes, typically paying them in company shares, or in crypto itself.
That didn’t work out well for some of those athletes, including future NFL hall-of-famer Tom Brady. Now, a group of sporting luminaries is putting their money into something a bit less flashy.
Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, Boston Celtics forward Blake Griffin, Milwaukee Bucks forward Khris Middleton, New York Islanders forward Anders Lee and Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Kevin Gausman are among the pro athletes who recently purchased a 104-acre corn and soy in Iowa.
See also:Usain Bolt is missing millions from his investment portfolio, his manager says
The acquisition was made through investment vehicle Patricof Co. The plan is to lease the land to farmers, in hopes of a single-digit-percentage annual return — with 24 athletes in total part of the purchase, according to FrontOfficeSports.
Patricof Co. didn’t reveal how much it spent on the farm, but said it will be buying more farms as investments for the athletes.
"The $5 million was the first capital call in what will be a pool of capital to acquire multiple farms," according to Peter Drummond, of BerlinRosen, a firm that handles PR and communications for Patricof.
See also:Athletes like Tom Brady and Odell Beckham took crypto as compensation. As of now, that’s backfiring
"We did three investments last year after doing six the year before," said Patricof Co. founder Mark Patricof. "The market changed. The world changed. Prices didn’t necessarily go down, but valuations should have, so we held back. It was the right time in the cycle to put money into this asset class."
In addition to being world-class competitors in their primary fields of endeavor, athletes are increasingly finding success in business. MarketWatch has chronicled how athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Serena Williams have ballooned their sporting fortunes via their rosters of multimillion-dollar ventures.
-Weston Blasi
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
01-14-23 1114ET
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