Infinite Athlete is a name that Chelsea FC fans have seen countless times throughout the year. Last season, the name was the sponsor on the front of the Premier League powerhouse’s shirt, an advertising opportunity that brands will pay big money for and that can turn a startup into a household name.
But Infinite Athlete isn’t a consumer-product company, a rarity for any team’s front-of-shirt sponsor. It’s building what’s called an “operating system for sports”: software that aggregates data collected from disconnected platforms. Using its platform, leagues, teams and other third parties can access a variety of information, including data from biometric sensors attached to players, raw camera footage and real-time statistics, and do whatever they see fit. Coaches can analyze player performance, and sports betting app developers can access historical statistics.
Ebersol said this is laying the foundation for developers and artificial intelligence to build things “no one can imagine today.”
Think of Infinite Athlete like Google Maps: The ubiquitous mapping app combines location data collected from GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell tower signals with information about various navigation routes, traffic conditions, and businesses. But the real value of the app is organizing all that disparate data, creating opportunities for other companies to build applications on top of it that rely on location data, like Uber, Airbnb, and Postmates.
The National Football League (NFL) uses Infinite Athlete’s technology, as does the University of Colorado’s Chelsea football program and the soon-to-be-launched Tiger Woods co-founded TGL Golf League.
Ebersol’s goal in signing the Chelsea sponsorship was, like any other company, to gain attention and build brand power. And it worked: Within six weeks of signing the deal, Ebersol said he had inquiries from every major sports league in the world asking, “So, what is it?”
Mr. Ebersol, 41, moved to Atlanta from San Francisco with his wife and daughter three years ago after spending months traveling the country on a tour bus looking for a place to live. He bought a house and entered the business world over Zoom, inviting executives to lunch and asking them to introduce him to three of the most interesting people they know.
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He chose Atlanta because it’s a hub for financial technology and cybersecurity, a hotbed of engineering graduates, and an emerging center for fantasy sports and gambling.
Additionally, every major sports league except the National Hockey League is based in the city, and state corporate tax breaks for the technology and entertainment sectors were also an attractive draw.
“All the ingredients are there for this culture,” Ebersole told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “All the ingredients are there. All it takes is a supernode in the middle that brings it all together.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
“Bet on the jockey”
Colleagues say Ebersol has a “bold” approach to business, or as he describes himself, “I’m not good at taking small steps, so I just take big steps.”
Maybe it’s because of his background, or maybe it’s just him, but Ebersol speaks in quotes and movie quotations. He uses a line from “The Matrix” to convey his belief that everything can be survived except death, then quotes Bane, the villain from “The Dark Knight Rises,” to explain his transition into sports: “You just embrace the darkness. I was born in the dark, I was shaped by the dark.”
Ebersol is the son of actress Susan St. James and television executive Dick Ebersol, former president of sports at NBC and legendary producer of Olympic and Super Bowl telecasts. At age 13, Charlie Ebersol worked as a handyman at the 1996 Centennial Olympics in Atlanta, his first visit to the city.
Ebersol was a film major in college. During his senior year, he was involved in a plane crash with his father and brother, Teddy. Charlie Ebersol, who had broken his spine in two places, managed to pull his father to safety after the crash, but was unable to find his 14-year-old brother in the wreckage. Teddy Ebersol died along with two other crew members.
Charlie Ebersol then moved into television, creating and producing reality shows about human perseverance and trying again. He produced two documentaries directed by his other brother, Willie, including one about the Itteng Trust School in South Africa that inspired Oprah Winfrey to donate more than $1 million to the school. He directed a documentary about the first iteration of the XFL, a football league formed by NBC and the World Wrestling Federation to compete with the NFL; his father took the helm and helmed the venture, which lasted just one season.
During this time, Ebersol began working with Steve Koonin, CEO of the Atlanta Hawks and president of Turner Entertainment Networks at the time. Ebersol pitched Koonin several ideas, three or four of which came to fruition. Koonin said Ebersol was good at coming up with ideas. Ebersol’s work includes the reality shows “The Great Escape” for TNT, “The Moment” for USA Network and “Off the Grid: Million Dollar Manhunt” for the History Channel.
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“When you buy a show, you’re often buying an idea, and with Charlie, you’re betting on the jockey, not the horse,” Koonin said. “It wasn’t the best idea I’d ever heard, but I believed in Charlie and knew he could take an idea and make it even better, so I wanted to invest in him and go into business with him.”
Planting the seeds
Infinite Athlete’s roots go back to an earlier venture, the Alliance of American Football (AAF).
Nearly a decade into his television career, Ebersol realized the TV business model was no longer as lucrative for entrepreneurs. He was used to owning the shows he pitched and licensing them to networks. But it soon became the norm for networks to own the shows, and Ebersol was lucky to even be on set. So he started thinking about how to go beyond TV.
Plans began to take shape in 2016, when Ebersol was working on a documentary about the XFL and thought to himself: “This seems like a good business opportunity. Is there something I’m missing?”
He mulled it over with sports executive Tom Bate, who had served as general manager of an XFL team, and the two spent a week crafting a business plan for the new league.
Ebersol then called Bill Polian, a legendary NFL executive, and over pancakes at a restaurant, Polian said, “If you have the money, do it.” So Ebersol changed course and worked with Polian to create an eight-team minor football league called the American Athletics Federation.
The AAF had a business problem: Ebersol wanted to develop a proprietary technology that would process real-time data on players and deliver it to fans through a mobile app. Connecting data collection with historical statistics and data analytics applications could theoretically improve player training, game planning, fan experience, and even sports betting.
Additionally, the AAF could also sell back-end technology to partners rather than relying solely on ticket sales and television rights deals to generate revenue for the league.
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
The league hired former software engineers from Tesla and Lockheed Martin. The inaugural season began in February 2019, and the AAF’s app rocketed to the top of the charts. The league outfitted players with chips that captured inertial, physical and special data, which it then sent to the app.
But three months later, owner Tom Dundon walked away, saying the AAF was unsustainable, and the league and its app were shut down due to a lack of funding to stay afloat.
The league filed for bankruptcy in April 2019. Business disputes surrounding the AAF remain pending in court.
Moving Forward
After the AAF was shut down, Ebersol took a year off, dieting and losing more than 20 pounds, he said, to deal with the mental and physical strain of running a fledgling football league and to focus on spending time with his daughter, who was born a few months before the league began.
But he started getting calls, one of which was from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who thought Ebersol was on to something with the AAF’s technology.
“He was like, ‘Hey, can we build this together?'” Ebersole said.
He talked with his longtime colleague Annie Gerhardt about continuing the technology in a controlled environment, and focusing initially on the NFL. He pitched the idea to the heads of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which had previously passed on an investment in the AAF. The firm offered to take the lead.
The company, then called Tempus Ex Machina, Latin for “time out of the machine,” raised nearly $60 million in its first two rounds of funding from Silver Lake, Founders Fund and several others. It hired an engineering team to develop its software in-house and last year acquired injury-analysis company Biocore, renaming itself Infinite Athlete.
Infinite Athlete, which had about 70 employees as of June and plans to hire more according to PitchBook, has been building its platform for the past few years and is now in the process of opening up its technology to third parties.
The challenge for the company is getting people to understand what it’s capable of. Infinite Athlete is disrupting a stigmatized industry, one that has been incredibly profitable without changing anything, Gerhardt said.
“When you say, ‘But you’re missing out on benefits,’ that’s hard for people who are still making a ton of money to understand,” Gerhart said.
In Atlanta, Infinite Athlete is expanding its engineering team. The company is hiring graduates from Georgia Tech and Atlanta’s historically black colleges and universities, notably Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College. Infinite Athlete is in talks with Morris Brown University, Clark Atlanta University and Georgia Tech to create job training programs for students.
Ebersol said the company also plans to sign a deal with one of the world’s top five sports leagues to build a dedicated facility in the city for the league — it’s not the NFL, with which Infinite Athlete already works, though Ebersol declined to say which — that facility would house the company’s performance testing, labs and live production operations.
The company signed a one-season shirt front sponsorship deal with Chelsea worth approximately $49 million, according to ESPN, and hopes to build on the brand awareness generated by this season’s deal by sponsoring the club’s training tops next season.
“But if our earnings over the last 12 months speak for themselves, on a per pound, per dollar basis, it’s been a very good relationship for us,” Ebersole said.