Chapter 1: What is the black market for high school football players?
It's well known nowadays that millions of dollars are flowing to college football players. Now that players are allowed to do endorsements through name, image, and likeness deals, playing for a big college can mean big bucks. But did you know that millions of dollars are now flowing into high school football too?
High school football is this kind of beloved and cherished institution in our country, and we have a lot of warm feelings about it, like Friday night lights and all that.
That's our colleague Harriet Ryan. She's an investigative reporter based in Los Angeles, where high school football is a very big deal.
Southern California is just a completely different beast. The competitive level, the number of D1 prospects, it rivals Florida or Georgia or Texas. Families come from all over the country to have their kids play in Orange County or L.A.
And for a long time, Harriet's been hearing rumors that high school players there were getting paid under the table.
There's a lot of great high school football teams here, and I always got this, well, everybody knows it's dirty, but I'd never seen it proven. And when I started working on this story and I started seeing the amounts, I was very surprised.
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Chapter 2: How did Phillip Bell's early talent impact his life?
At its most elite levels, there is a very ugly side to it that basically turns the best players into commodities that can just be sold around their assets. What I was hearing from agents and other people, you know, they said, look, when you're giving teenagers vast amounts of money, a lot of bad stuff happens.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, January 16th. Coming up on the show, inside the black market for high school football players. This story is about a young man named Philip Bell III, whose situation came to light in court following a tense custody battle.
Our colleague Harry was able to piece together Bell's story via court records and interviews with friends, relatives, and others who knew his family. Bell himself didn't comment for this story. Bell is a wide receiver, and he grew up in the Sacramento area.
Chapter 3: What role do street agents play in high school football?
Bell's parents divorced when he was a baby, and he was raised with help from his grandparents. Pretty early on, it was clear that Bell was going to be a football phenom. Here's a clip from a highlight reel. Bell was so good, he got his first D1 college scholarship offer when he was in eighth grade.
He's an amazing player. And what one of his coaches, one of his youth coaches said was that no matter who goes up with Philip in the end zone to get a ball, Philip comes down with the ball.
Chapter 4: Is paying high school football players legal?
You can double team him, he will still come down with the ball.
Here's Bell in a Day in the Life video from YouTube. I feel like it's going to be a good game.
I feel like if you're overly too excited for a game, that's where it messes you up.
So I feel like every game day, be regular. By the time he was in high school, Bell got on the radar of scouts in Southern California. But not just scouts from colleges. Bell got on the radar of high school scouts, otherwise known as street agents.
They sort of prowl parts of California and I'm sure other states looking for outsized talent that they can turn around and essentially sell to a booster at a school or a parent at a school. They make the deal.
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Chapter 5: How did Phillip Bell's family dynamics influence his football career?
They make the connection.
So there's some booster at a high school that'll pay someone for introductions to talented high school players that they may not have heard about.
Yeah, I mean, I talked to a youth coach in Sacramento who said, like, look, I get calls from people from Southern California who are like, I'm looking for two wide receivers. I'm looking for like an O-line guy. And, you know, they're willing to pay $20,000 and they have a lead on a job or $50,000 and you get a house. He said, like, the deals are structured.
Like, sometimes this is like for all, you know, the rest of high school. And sometimes it's just this season.
Chapter 6: What challenges did Phillip Bell face during his high school years?
We'll see how things go.
The street agents don't work for the schools. They typically represent deep-pocketed alumni, or parents who want to see their kids play with talented players. Through these agents, players and their families can get paid tens of thousands of dollars, and some are even offered rent money, cars, and jobs. Is this legal?
It's against interscholastic rules in every state. You can't pay a player to play, but it doesn't violate any criminal laws that I know of, but it does violate the rules of sports.
Right. The cops aren't going to show up, but you might get kicked off the team or something like that. But is anybody out there enforcing that, though?
So every state has, like, an association, a federation that's supposed to do this. But, you know, like, California Interest Classification, it's not the FBI. They don't have, like, hundreds of agents. They're not going to, you know, subpoena your bank records.
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Chapter 7: How did Phillip Bell's mother's struggles affect his future?
But for some families, the risk that their kid gets kicked off the team is worth taking. The money is just too good. As Philip Bell's high school career was kicking off, his mother, Samantha Barnes, was dealing with money issues. She'd recently married a man who, according to court records, had no full-time job, unpaid child support bills, and depended on her for living expenses.
So when Bell got an offer to a school in L.A., Barnes took it.
She was telling people, like, look, we're getting a deal down here. We're getting the equivalent of $15,000 a month, and this is, like, a deal I can't resist.
Bell and his mother were also put up in a mansion that was formerly occupied by the rapper Soulja Boy. They got help on the lease from a parent whose son was the quarterback on Bell's team. According to Harriet's reporting, Barnes started telling her friends, quote, "'My son is going to be a millionaire.'" In the past, players couldn't become millionaires unless they made it to the NFL.
But thanks to name, image, and likeness deals that are now legal in college and allow players to sign endorsement deals, players can become millionaires much sooner. And that money also flows to the people around the player, their families, and their agents.
You have agents who, you know, formerly represented NFL players who are now watching middle school practice.
Middle school practice?
Yeah. I mean, there's like, you know, there's travel teams in football. And, you know, these are under 13 kids. I mean, the thing is, if you can identify talent at a young age and get in, even if that kid can do nothing for you financially... By the time they're in college, they're going to be able to do a lot for you financially. And you want to build that relationship as soon as you can.
I mean, I think the agents would also say, like, we're trying to get in there because if we're not in there, they're going to be getting bad advice from people that don't know what they're doing. But people are trying to form relationships with younger and younger athletes.
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Chapter 8: What was the outcome of Phillip Bell's journey in high school football?
It's backed by Jeff Bezos and private equity firms. Bell played on a team called Trillion Boys.
It is the unstoppable, flashy Trillion Boys going head-to-head against a high...
In OT7, players are permitted to make endorsement deals, but pay for play is forbidden. However, according to court testimony, Bell was paid $400 to $700 per game, but his stepfather allegedly kept the money. In a statement, one manager from OT7's parent company said that teams that don't follow the rules are, quote, "...in direct violation of their agreements with us and don't belong in OT7."
According to Harry's reporting, all this football didn't leave much time for Bell to study, and his grades started to suffer. Up in Sacramento, Bell's grandparents and father started to worry.
Philip had always been, like, an A and B student, according to his dad and court records. And he got to L.A. and he was failing all of his classes. And there were text messages he sends to his grandma where he's just like, oh, my gosh, like, I'm failing everything. And she's like, look, we're going to get you a tutor. We can get a relative to tutor you.
And, you know, let me come get you this weekend. And he's like, I got to go out on 77 tournament. Like, his life just became about football. He just kept telling relatives that he really wanted to come home, that he was really unhappy, that he felt like he couldn't leave because his mother had so much financially on the line with him being there, but he desperately wanted to leave.
After he sent all these panicked and upset messages to his relatives in Northern California, unannounced, five of them from both sides of the family drove down and went to his school. And when he saw them outside, he said, you guys are going to get me in trouble. And they went to a restaurant and they talked and he just said, like, I can't go back with you. I can't go back with you.
And he had a lot of concerns about the amount of money his mom was making. He was concerned about her health. She had diabetes. He didn't want her to work too much. Or, you know, he said she was having trouble. And he just, you know, said he was going to stay down there.
Eventually, his father sued for full custody, and he wanted to bring Belle back to Sacramento. His father and his grandparents were worried about the mental and physical state of his mother.
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