Closing Shot: A game-changing deal in college sports

ISP Sports founder Ben Sutton stands in his company’s headquarters in 2010, the year IMG acquired his agency.J. Knight Photography

When the late IMG Chairman Ted Forstmann approached Ben Sutton early in 2010 about acquiring his business, ISP Sports, Sutton fired back with an unexpected response.

“Well, I want to buy IMG,” he said.

The absurdity wasn’t lost on either of them. IMG stood as one of the most iconic sports businesses and helped forge an industry over a 50-year span. Sutton founded ISP in 1992, and it was a growing, trailblazing force in collegiate marketing and media, but not on the level with IMG.

The outcome proved to be rather predictable. IMG’s Forstmann and company President George Pyne engineered a $100 million acquisition of ISP Sports, a deal that was announced in late July 2010.

It was a game changer at the time. The deal combined IMG College’s previous acquisitions, Collegiate Licensing Co. and Host Communications, with ISP, which brought more than 50 college properties to the mix to go with IMG College’s 20.

The arrangement also took the collegiate multimedia rights business a step closer to consolidation, with IMG College challenging Learfield.

Selling to IMG was not the deal most expected. In 2010, it was widely rumored that Sutton’s ISP Sports and Learfield were on the brink of a merger. Some people in both companies thought the deal was done.

In a reversal of sentiment, though, Sutton changed course and sold to IMG instead.

IMG College and Learfield, the two giants in collegiate marketing and media, eventually merged in December 2018.

But it was the 2010 deal that set the table for all of the moves that followed over the next decade. Pyne installed Sutton as president of IMG College that year and shortly thereafter the company created its first joint venture with Learfield, a ticket sales and marketing business that showed the two dominant forces could work together as long as it enhanced the bottom line.

The 2010 sale essentially retired the ISP Sports label, although it continued to exist subtly inside the IMG College headquarters in Winston-Salem, N.C., which previously was home to ISP. Sutton built the $3.6 million building and ISP branding was everywhere, from the office chairs to the counters in the restrooms.

Most of it stayed in place for years after the 2010 sale.

As for Sutton, he remained with IMG College until 2016 and one year later launched a private equity firm, Teall Capital.