Screen the deal before your athlete signs it.
SidelineWealth checks an NIL deal for the problems that end careers — visa work authorization first — and gives you a straight answer to the money questions your athletes text you. You don't become the tax guy. You become the one who checked, and who knows exactly who to hand the rest to.
Your client already carries this risk in writing: a Big Ten school's NIL agreement makes the athlete “solely responsible” for visa compliance and any resulting immigration consequences — the clauses, quoted.
What an agent actually gets
Four questions — who the athlete is, what the deal asks for, where the work happens, what authorization is on file — and you get a written result with the reasons set out, the facts the screen could not consider, and the assembled facts to send to counsel. No outcome is an approval: even the cleanest result says it is not a determination and still routes to an attorney before signature. It is the difference between checking and hoping.
Not the school — its own agreement assigns the risk to the athlete in writing. Not the brand, which has never heard of CPT. Not the compliance office, which reviews NCAA and state-law issues and will tell you plainly it does not practice immigration law. If you don't check, the answer is that nobody did. This is a small share of your roster and most of your catastrophic downside — it's insurance, not an upsell.
“The brand sent $6,000 — how much is actually mine?” You should not have to say “let me find out,” and you also should not answer it yourself. What you get today is the fast version of the right answer: who this belongs to, what facts they will ask you for, and a one-click handoff that sends them along — so the athlete hears back the same afternoon from someone licensed to say it. Being the one who routes it in an hour is the retention story; being the one who guessed at a number is the liability.
The moment a question stops being “how much do I set aside” and becomes entity elections, multi-state allocation, treaty characterization or anything that gets filed, it belongs to an advisor or CPA — and the platform packages what you already collected and routes it, rather than leaving you to explain it twice. Handing it off well is the professional move; it is also how you stop owning a number you didn't compute.
SidelineWealth monitors the federal immigration and visa-policy sources — SEVP, F-1 CPT/OPT, J-1 Academic Training — alongside the tax code, and flags which of your athletes a published change touches. Monitoring published sources is what it does; it does not review your deals for you.
Drop in a contract — it reads the room
Upload a deal and SidelineWealth identifies what it is — endorsement, licensing, appearance, revenue-share, agency — and drafts the inputs for you to confirm. Most importantly, if the athlete is foreign it flags it: citizenship, visa, and the work-authorization and withholding questions a domestic playbook would silently miss — so you catch the visa problem before you sign. It's a draft you confirm, never auto-saved, and the document is processed in memory and never stored. What is and isn't independently verified about our security posture is published at /verification.
Three jobs, three people. Yours is the deal.
The fastest way to lose an athlete is to be vague about who owns what. This is the split the platform is built around — and the reason you can use it without stepping outside your lane.
Source it, negotiate it, and clear it. Run the authorization check before signature, flag a foreign athlete, keep the dated record that you checked, and route the questions you aren't licensed to answer. Deal-level and episodic. You never own a number that gets filed.
Entity election, home-state and residency questions, multi-state allocation, the quarterly calendar, retirement and cash flow. Career-level and continuous. This is a licensed seat, and the figures an athlete acts on come from here — not from you.
Files the return, signs it, and owns the position of record if it's ever examined — including confirming any treaty claim against IRS Pub 901 and the athlete/entertainer article. Year-level and annual. Nothing reaches a return without passing through here.
Illustration only — not tax, legal, or immigration advice. The clearance check is triage, not a work authorization; authorization determinations require a licensed immigration attorney, and treaty positions require verification against IRS Pub 901 by a cross-border CPA. SidelineWealth surfaces the questions and the math — it doesn't replace counsel.
The foreign athletes on your roster carry a risk nobody has assigned to anyone.
Work authorization, withholding, 1042-S reporting — none of it is in a domestic playbook, and the school's paperwork puts it on the athlete. Be the agent who checks: a screen before the deal, a dated record that you ran it, immigration and visa-policy monitoring per athlete, and a clean handoff to counsel or a cross-border CPA when the answer isn't obvious.
Running a larger agency and want roster-wide oversight, assigned work, and a record of everything your team did? That's the firm platform — see how firms run a whole book.
Agent & agency questions
Do I need to be a tax expert to use this?
No — and you shouldn't try to be. You get a screening result and the right questions, not a second job. The dollar figures, the entity election and the filing work belong to a licensed advisor or CPA; the platform is built to hand off to them, not to replace them.
Can a foreign athlete on an F-1 visa do NIL deals?
Only with work authorization. Active NIL work performed in the U.S. generally requires CPT or OPT; an unauthorized deal can cost the athlete their visa status and cost you the client. Schools have started drafting around this: a public Big Ten NIL agreement frames the money as payment for passive use of the athlete's NIL rather than for services, makes promotional appearances explicitly voluntary, and holds the athlete solely responsible for their own visa compliance. Run the screen before you sign.
Why does the tax side matter to an agent at all?
Because your athletes ask you about money and you need an answer that isn't "let me find out." But the answer is a fast handoff, not a figure you produce: knowing whose question it is and getting it there the same day. Being the one who routes it is the retention story — being the one who quotes a number is a tax position you aren't licensed to author.
What does a treaty actually change for a foreign athlete?
Less than a headline number suggests, and it is not the agent's call. A nonresident's U.S.-source NIL income is withheld at 30% (FDAP) by default. Where NIL is characterized as a royalty, a treaty claimed on Form W-8BEN can reduce that — but the athlete/entertainer article (Art. 16/17) of most treaties lets the U.S. tax performance income regardless, and 18 of the 85 countries we model give no royalty relief at all. Treat it as a question to route to a cross-border CPA, never as a number to quote in a meeting.
Is the screen an authorization to work?
No, and no outcome it produces is an approval. It records which facts you entered, names the ones it could not consider, and routes the deal to an immigration attorney with those facts assembled — including when nothing was flagged. A work-authorization determination can only be made by licensed immigration counsel.