As Major League Baseball opens its fourth international series of 2024 Saturday, with the Mets and Phillies facing off in London, the MLBPA is expanding its international ambitions as well.
Earlier this week, the PA and group licensing rights firm OneTeam announced OneTeam International. The culmination of months of discussions about how growing athlete unions in the U.S. can play a larger role with overseas colleagues, OTI is also the start of what MLBPA and OneTeam leaders anticipate being a significant expansion of their work.
Jonas Baer-Hoffmann will lead the new organization as SVP of global business affairs. Baer-Hoffmann was previously the general secretary of international soccer players association Fifpro and has been working with the MLBPA since the beginning of the year, based out of Europe.
The MLBPA, NFLPA and RedBird Capital came together in 2019 to form OneTeam, seeing an opportunity to maximize the group NIL rights of pro players beyond what athletes typically received from licensees such as video game makers and trading card producers. OneTeam now represents the commercial interests of more than 10,000 players, including many college athletes. RedBird sold its 40% stake in 2022 at a $1.9 billion valuation, while Sean Sansiveri took over as CEO of the organization in 2023. In addition to working with related unions internationally, Sansiveri has his eyes on further developing US players’ relationships with international brands, such as games available around the world.
“It’s so core to our business to expand,” Sansiveri said. “Using the success that we found on behalf of the American sports unions and applying that, with nuance, internationally is a big focus.”
One challenge OTI is prepared to face is the relative underdevelopment of player unions and collectively bargained rights in other countries compared to US counterparts. Country to country, groups sit at very different places along the organize-bargain-commercialize timeline.
“A big piece for us is to really invest in what we call the incubation of those opportunities,” Baer-Hoffmann said.
There is also Winners Alliance, the for-profit arm of the Professional Tennis Players Association, which has inked deals with the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations (FICA) and EuroLeague Players Association, among others. Former OneTeam executives Ahmad Nassar and Eric Winston sit atop Winners Alliance’s org chart. Sansiveri said he continues to collaborate closely with Nassar and Winners Alliance in a shared pursuit of athlete empowerment.
Or, as Baer-Hoffmann put it, tongue in cheek, “There are enough monopolies in sport already.”
MLBPA executive director Tony Clark figures to play a large role in the international efforts given his other title as president of the World Players Association. Clark was elected to that position in 2023, after leading baseball’s union through a 99-day lockout a year prior. The WPA speaks for more than 85,000 players across more than 100 associations in 60-plus countries. In January, Clark spoke at the organization’s Gender Equity in Sport Conference in Melbourne, Australia. Stateside, the MLBPA has grown in recent years to include minor leaguers. While Clark has led baseball players since 2013, the men atop the NFLPA, NHLPA, and NBPA have each been in the role for less than two years.
The MLBPA has long been considered the strongest of its kind, dating back to Marvin Miller’s leadership and the first pro sports CBA signed in 1968. The group quickly brought group licensing rights in house, allowing it to fund battles with owners that resulted in revolutions such as free agency. Growing up in Germany, Baer-Hoffmann said he read Miller’s work as a teenager entering the world of player representation.
“It’s been five decades since the MLBPA started aggregating group licensing rights,” Baer-Hoffmann said. “To try to fast-forward that development (elsewhere) and share that capability … just makes a lot of sense both from a union and from a business perspective.”
The baseball union did face internal dissension this spring, however, following a string of disappointing free agency results.
OTI plans to marry OneTeam’s existing expertise and services departments with MLBPA’s global reputation. Executives declined to discuss ownership or governance breakdowns for the new venture. It’s also possible that additional US PAs join the effort.
OTI is now in the process of speaking to player groups in other countries and evaluating potential partnerships, with an eye toward situations ripe for relatively short-term monetization opportunities as well as other places where more legwork is needed to firm up player rights in the first place. The expectation is that additional rights will be added to the portfolio within 12 months.
“There are right markets and right players associations that could use this right now,” Sansiveri said. “Or it’s about—and equally as important—it’s about putting the frameworks, the advice, the roadmap in place, so that whether it’s a year from now or 10 years from now, that other players associations know how to get control of those rights on behalf of the athletes and thereby maximize them.”
