David Beckham just landed a billion dollars without giving up an inch of equity. Mookie Betts built his own gloves. Gilbert Arenas took his show back. Welcome back to The Closeout. Let's get into it.

I wrote about David Beckham and his trajectory to becoming Britain's first billionaire sportsman back in Issue #2. He hasn't slowed down since.

Last week, IM8, the longevity supplement brand Beckham co-founded, closed $1 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst. Here's the part that matters: General Catalyst didn't buy a piece of the company. Instead, they're fronting up to 70% of IM8's marketing spend and taking a cut of the revenue that spend generates, capped at a set amount. Once General Catalyst gets its money back plus that cut, Beckham and his partners keep everything else. No dilution. No new boss.

The business is moving fast. IM8 launched in December 2024 and hit $200 million in annualized revenue within nineteen months, pulling in $17 million in June alone. They're shipping 200,000 servings a day across 43 countries, one order every 27 seconds.

Beckham didn't stop at co-founding the supplement brand. In May, IM8 signed a multi-year deal with Inter Miami, the club Beckham co-owns, that puts an IM8 Nutrition Centre inside the team's training facility and gives the brand NIL rights to at least four players. He’s taken ownership to the next level, with one Beckham-owned entity doing business with another.

Beckham didn't rent his face to IM8. He co-founded it, kept his name on the cap table, and just watched a venture fund bet a billion dollars that the business is worth scaling. 

Steph and Ayesha Curry are bringing three restaurants to Charlotte's Ritz-Carlton with chef Michael Mina, Ayesha's Sweet July Cafe already opened this week, Steph's cocktail lounge and Mina's steakhouse to follow this winter. Both grew up in Charlotte. This is a homecoming with a lease attached.

Gilbert Arenas sold half of Gil's Arena to Underdog in 2023, split with the company this spring, and just took full ownership of the name back. The show relaunches in August through Playmaker, self-produced, distribution only, on a platform averaging 70 million views a year. He learned the business by giving half of it away. Now he's keeping all of it.

Mookie Betts stands 5-foot-9, which is short for a shortstop and shorter still for a player who's won six Gold Gloves at two different positions. That contradiction is the whole premise of LGND, the glove company he launched this month with childhood friends Cameron Lewis and Brandon McPhail, and his personal attorney, Andrew Montgomery.

This isn't a licensing deal with his name stamped on a box. Betts co-founded the company. McPhail runs day-to-day operations and strategic growth. Montgomery, a former college football player turned practicing attorney, handles the legal side. LGND launched with two lines: the MOOK Series, built around Betts' own preferences as a defender, and the MVRK Series, designed for multi-position players. Both are made from premium Japanese kip leather and sell for $329, direct to consumer.

The bigger move came days later. LGND became the official glove partner of Perfect Game, the country's largest youth baseball scouting and tournament organization, a partnership that puts Betts' equipment in front of the exact demographic that will decide whether a startup glove brand survives past its first season.

Betts has spent his career being underestimated on the field. LGND is him betting that the same attention to detail that made him a defensive outlier can be built into a product, and sold.

Travis Scott showed up to the Odyssey premiere in an unreleased Nike Moon Shoe under Cactus Jack, his brand’s latest touch on a nine-year-old Nike partnership that's produced some of the decade's most valuable sneaker drops. No release date, no confirmed retail plan, this may never leave his own closet. But it's one more data point in an ongoing pattern: Nike keeps handing Scott its archive to rework, because Cactus Jack has become a brand Nike builds around.

In similar news, Justin Bieber's Skylrk made its biggest appearance yet at the World Cup halftime show, sneakers under his own brand, capturing a global audience mid-tournament during the biggest sporting event in the world. The distinction that matters: this is Bieber's brand, not a brand endorsing Bieber.

Noah Lack built more than a newsletter. Athletes & Assets is a marketplace matching athletes with high-growth companies for equity, not appearance fees, complete with an equity agreement template and a running list of live deals. It's the infrastructure behind the exact shift The Closeout writes about: athletes trading cash for ownership. If you want to see what that shift looks like from the deal-sourcing side instead of the headline side, start there.

Remember that something different I mentioned? It happened this week, 45 minutes, one former pro who's lived every part of the story we keep telling in this newsletter. See you next week.