NFL players will visit Paisley Park Studios, the recording complex that was owned by the late artist Prince, as part of the NFL Players Association’s annual business tour of the Super Bowl host city.
Players also will visit Target Corp.’s headquarters in Minneapolis and the Mayo Clinic, the renowned medical research and practice facility, in nearby Rochester, Minn., as part of the annual union event.
NFL players, including NFLPA player leaders, come to the Super Bowl city every year, and three years ago the union decided to enhance their experience by touring local companies and cultural institutions, said Ahmad Nassar, NFL Players Inc. president.
“So it is now an integral part of what we do at the Super Bowl, and that will continue every year,” Nassar said. “We’ve actually called it ‘Sports Biz Local,’ and the idea is every year we will do a mix of business-oriented, hopefully educational, hopefully fun activities at local institutions.”
Target embraced the idea and will make its top executives, including CEO Brian Cornell, available to meet with the NFLPA delegation. Players also will meet with Target talent acquisition executives Damu McCoy and Nick Boyd, CMO Rick Gomez and Chief Legal and Risk Officer Don Liu, as well as talk about retail and distribution channels and product sales, Nassar said.
At the Mayo Clinic, players will meet with Dr. Michael Stuart and Dr. Edward Laskowski, co-directors of the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center, and Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, medical director at the sports medicine center, as well as Tommy Hillman, sports medicine marketing manager.
This year, though, the hottest ticket of the players’ tour is the visit to Paisley Park, Nassar said, even though many of them are too young to remember the heyday of Prince, who died in 2016 at the age of 57.
“So the players, they know Prince,” Nassar said. “I think several of them — I don’t know if they would admit this — but they probably know Prince better because of the fact that he passed away recently. And less so because they remember being alive in 1999 and playing Prince’s songs.”
The NFLPA makes the tour available to all players in the league, but just a few hundred are typically at the Super Bowl city. The NFLPA started the tours in 2016 at Super Bowl 50, which was held in the San Francisco area and afforded players access to many tech companies in Silicon Valley. They continued it last year in Houston, visiting NASA as well as some Houston area companies.
The tours, along with contacts with the NFLPA’s corporate partners, have led to internships for NFL players at several companies, Nassar said, including Fanatics, Lyft, Marriott International, ESPN, NBC Sports, SB Nation, StubHub, United Way, Under Armour and Whalerock Industries.
While the business tour is relatively new, for many years the NFLPA has facilitated player appearances during Super Bowl week for corporations and hospitality events. The payments to players range from a few hundred dollars to more than six figures, depending on the player and what he agrees to do at the appearance.
This year, the NFLPA has booked about 500 appearances for the roughly 250 players who will be in Minneapolis during Super Bowl week. That’s on a par with last year’s event in Houston but down from the record 625 appearances when the Super Bowl was held in the Bay Area, Nassar said.
