When a star athlete gets their jersey retired, Nicole Pullen Ross might be in the room. Not as a family member, not as a fan—but as a trusted financial advisor who helped make sure the wealth that came with the career didn’t disappear before the ceremony.
“When a client has their jersey retired, that’s pretty cool,” said Pullen Ross, a Goldman Sachs partner who leads the firm’s Sports and Entertainment Solutions (SES) business within its Private Wealth Management division. “To be there and experience that with the client and their family … Nobody really gets to see the success in a way that we get to see the success and the failures.”
It’s a rare perch, and one she’s earned over nearly three decades at one of Wall Street’s most storied institutions. With the NFL Draft just concluded and a new class of young millionaires entering the league, the stakes of her work have never felt more urgent. But Pullen Ross is quick to remind Fortune in conversation: the games themselves are just one chapter of a much bigger story.
A billion-dollar problem
According to research cited by Pullen Ross, athletes lost nearly $974 million to fraud over a 10-year period ending in 2024, and the pace is accelerating. “Over the past six years, 40% of that loss has occurred,” she said, citing a recent study by EY. “The ability to really have a strategy that includes risk management, whether it relates to cyber threats or physical security, is increasingly important.”
It’s precisely the kind of problem that prompted Goldman Sachs to formally launch SES in 2018, when Pullen Ross and her team saw a gap in the market. The firm had long served wealthy clients — tech founders, family offices, business owners—and this included athletes but Goldman formalized the unit to address athletes’ unique wealth planning and investment needs, particularly a rather compressed financial timeline.
“If you’re a CEO, and you’re in your 50s, you kind of know what to do—you’ve got expert advice,” she said. “If you’re in the NFL Draft, and you just signed a $50 million contract at 21 years old, you might not have that expertise. That’s what we wanted to solve for, that leveling of expertise.”
The CEO playbook for the locker room
Pullen Ross draws a consistent analogy between athletes and corporate executives, not as flattery, but as a framework. A CEO has a COO, a treasurer, a full organizational chart of people managing complexity. A 22-year-old with a nine-figure contract does not.
“When you’re an athlete, and someone gives you $50 million before you’re 25 years old, you don’t have that same infrastructure,” she said. So her team helps build it, working with athletes across the NBA, NFL, and every major sports league.
The challenge isn’t always technical. Sometimes, she said, the biggest obstacle recalls that old hit HBO comedy about stardom in the entertainment world and its problems: the entourage. “The hardest part is penetrating the folks that may be around an individual who is a trusted person on their team, and is an important person on their team, but may not have the expertise that is needed for where they’re going,” Pullen Ross said. She added that’s it’s “very challenging” when the person an athlete trusts most is someone like a roommate who simply isn’t qualified to make multimillion-dollar decisions.
In those cases, she said, all you can do is keep chipping away. “You just kind of have to keep chipping away at it to earn that trust, to demonstrate value.” Just like any relationship, trying to find a way to build that trust over time can be really hard, she said.
The most rewarding moments, she said, come when things click.
“When you’re talking with an athlete who hasn’t shown that much interest, and you actually see the light bulb go off,” she said. “You see them make the connection—maybe what I need to do is buy one house, not two. Or maybe if I pay attention to the decisions I make today and look at this line that Nicole is showing me in terms of the wealth projection, I can have this wealth projection go further up and to the right.” When that happens, she said, “we get to have a small role in helping them live out that legacy and live out the things that bring them joy, which is a lot of fun to be part of.”
Bigger and broader than expected
The SES business has grown well beyond what Pullen Ross and her team anticipated when they launched it eight years ago. The biggest driver, she said, isn’t NIL, the name, image, and likeness rights that have transformed college sports, but the media rights boom underpinning the entire sports economy. As league valuations have soared on the back of blockbuster broadcasting deals, the pressure to share more of that wealth with the athletes generating it has grown, eventually cracking open doors that were long closed to them. “NIL is actually the beneficiary of the growth that’s happened across sports,” she said. “It’s finding its way down.”
The investment thesis also looks different depending on where a league sits in its lifecycle, specifically, how its revenues are generated. Established properties like the NFL and NBA are driven overwhelmingly by media rights and ticket sales, businesses with decades of compounding infrastructure behind them. Newer or emerging leagues are a different story: their value proposition is growth. “That ratio really changes, depending on where the league, the sport, the business is in that ecosystem and in that journey,” she said. Women’s sports are getting huge right now, but even niche properties like sailing or bull riding all fall into that category, earlier on the curve, and for investors, potentially more room to run.
The result is a wealth creation machine that now starts earlier than ever. Young athletes today may arrive in their professional league with two or three years of NIL earnings already accumulated. Still, Pullen Ross was quick to note, even an extended window doesn’t change the fundamental math. An athlete’s career is “still a very short period of time,” compared to how most professionals build wealth across decades-long careers.
Her client base now spans the full spectrum—from rookie draft picks to family offices buying stakes in teams—and both ends have grown more complex than she expected. “The wealth creation has been more extraordinary than we thought,” she said.
The next frontier
If there’s one area where Pullen Ross’s enthusiasm visibly sharpens, it’s women’s sports. When Goldman hosts events for women clients, she said, almost every hand in the room goes up when asked about interest in sports team ownership. The New York Liberty, women’s soccer, college volleyball: the audiences at these events increasingly mirrors what you’d see at an NBA game.
“I think it’s a little bit of demographics and also excellence and exposure,” she said of the cultural moment women’s sports is having. “Young fans, men and women, grow up appreciating excellence and athleticism regardless of gender.” It’s hard not to be impressed by the overwhelming skill that female athletes are showing, she added. The difference now is that great female athletes have more exposure than they used to in the past.
As for what keeps her in this work after 26 years at Goldman, the answer isn’t the contracts, the draft picks, or even what teams her clients represent. Her one allegiance, she discloses, is to the Dallas Cowboys, ever since her childhood in Roanoke, Virginia, as the daughter of a father who raised three girls to root for “America’s team.” Today, she said, she roots for whoever her clients are—in every sport, on every team, something that’s sometimes hard for her husband, a New York Giants fan, to swallow.
“It’s very easy to root for clients,” she said.
