When Peyton Manning officially retired from the NFL after a distinguished 18-year career, he made it clear that he did not want to be a typical broadcaster. In speaking with Josh Pyatt, the co-head of WME Sports, he outlined a situation where he would be able to stay home on the weekends and work on Monday from his living room. This idea materialized into Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli, the hit alternate broadcast that recently averaged more than 1 million viewers for its fourth consecutive season. The show was part of the formation of Omaha Productions, a growing media company that produces original audiovisual content disseminated to various partners.
Throughout his time with William Morris Endeavor, Pyatt has successfully actualized a vision to create distinctive media entities surrounding athletes. For example, he represents Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James on the entertainment side and helped proliferate the reach and scope of SpringHill Company. Moreover, he and his colleagues started working with international soccer star Lionel Messi and his 525 Rosario business to ensure that upon his retirement, he is able to step into a multifaceted media venture.
“I look at each client like they’re a business, and, ‘How do I grow that business?,’” Pyatt said. “Their business may just be in the broadcasting space, and that’s fine, and we figure out ways while they’re playing to kind of make sure they’re still doing things or they’re involved in things or they’re watching what’s happening in the marketplace.”
Pyatt does not consider himself to be a conventional broadcast or television agent, instead exhibiting characteristics of those focusing in both genres. While he has the ability to build and scale businesses for someone interested in cultivating a production company, he also knows how to ink deals for broadcasters with major networks. Furthermore, he is able to blend both of these enterprises to work on unparalleled portfolios for those in the business. For example, WME signed Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant three years before he retired from playing basketball, and Pyatt understood that he did not want to do the same thing as other athletes.
“I was on the one-yard line of Kobe Bryant joining Turner as someone who was going to help them create programming,” Pyatt said. “Not be on Inside the NBA, not be on a basketball show – he was going to help them create kind of next-generation basketball analysis that helped educate and inform, and it all [fell apart] at the last minute, and ultimately, he ended up getting into business with Disney and ESPN+ and created Detail, which was a version of an idea we were talking about.”
Pyatt represents a variety of professional athletes and broadcasters who take part in studio programming, live game broadcasts and other projects, some of whom include Stephen A. Smith, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kevin Burkhardt and Álex Rodríguez. In his role, he also shares oversight of the rest of the department, which consists of other clients in sports media and representation for collegiate and pro athletes. In the end, it is his job to gather information, present it to his clients and chart a path forward to determine how to achieve their individual goals.
“It’s on me to figure out what everybody’s doing, what people are looking for, crafting a strategy with my clients for what they want to accomplish,” Pyatt said “Then it’s knowing what the marketplace looks like so we can take that strategy and drive it home. It’s part of the areas of the job that I really like. It allows you to go out and learn a bunch of different things about a bunch of different companies.”
Upon graduating from Loyola Marymount University, Pyatt worked in finance for three years as investment banking and venture capital endeavors proliferated. Yet he had always been around sports and had friends who thought that he would become an agent. After three years in finance, Pyatt decided to explore a career in representation and wrote a letter to longtime WMA agent Steve Dontanville, an alumnus of his school. From there, he proceeded to call him once a week for nine months before Dontanville finally answered, took a brief meeting and hired him to work in the mailroom as a trainee, a tangible display of persistence and dedication.
“If you believe in something and you want to go do something, it’s not going to come to you,” Pyatt said. “You have to get up and you have to take it every day, and that’s kind of the way I’ve tried to model what I do. It is, ‘Every day, how do I get up and make my business better than it was the day before?’ so I just stayed on it.”
After some time in the business, he decided to explore sports representation and signed Michael Strahan in the early days of his time with FOX Sports. Although Pyatt does not work with him anymore, he has a profound amount of respect for Strahan and recognizes the impact he had with athletes exploring other genres. In addition to analysis on FOX NFL Sunday, Strahan started working on daytime television with shows such as Live! and Good Morning America.
“There’s not a lot of people who have the opportunity to be Michael Strahan where they’re a broadcaster, media personality, producer, an ambassador, and I think that’s the trick – finding those guys that are multi-hyphenates that can do all of those different things,” Pyatt said. “But at the same time, finding guys that are just broadcasters but are very good at that, making sure you all explore all the different opportunities for the different types of clients, and I think that starts candidly with listening to people.”
Pyatt was named the co-head of WME Sports in 2020 with Karen Brodkin, who looked to move back into the representation business after largely focusing on action sports, tennis and golf. The company had moved out of team sports such as baseball, football and basketball in previous years, but it detected an opportunity to return to the space and began systematically recruiting agents.
“The idea was, ‘How can we organically grow this?’” Pyatt said. “We weren’t going to go out and buy five or six other sports agencies. We were going to find the right people culturally that aligned with what we were looking to do, that were aggressive, that were animals, that wanted to go out and build a business and build it fast, and we started slowly but surely building this group and went from 40 people to over 200.”
In approaching a typical negotiation, Pyatt ensures he has knowledge about the marketplace and the desires of a client while searching for premium properties. For instance, he wants to have clients in golf working on The Masters Tournament since it represents a pinnacle of the sport. Additionally, he aims to work with the top echelon of professionals in whatever business they are working in and scaling businesses that can generate success in a variety of ways.
“I want them on high-profile opportunities getting paid as much as they can in the right situation with the right people because that’s how the network’s going to win, right?,” Pyatt said. “You look at Inside the NBA – that show works because those guys get along, and in turn because those guys get along, it works for the network and the network looks good and the network makes money, so it’s a triple asset.”
Whenever Pyatt is evaluating potential clients, he tries to find people who are entrepreneurial and have interest in growing a business. In order to effectuate that process, he ensures his clientele are speaking with subject-matter experts in relevant fields. Pyatt does not believe people can effectively represent themselves in the business, pointing to relationships, experience and previous mistakes that agents can leverage. With a proclivity to work, he remains focused on his existing client roster and also contemplates how to continue its growth.
“A lot of it is, now, working with the clients that we represent, which means really sitting down and spending time with them in the offseason when they can focus, and their attention span is directed at what we’re there to do and accomplish, and then what I try and do is work with the people in their lives to move the ball down the field,” Pyatt said. “Each one of these guys has someone in their life that is helping them. My job is to work with them to create opportunities so that when they are not playing their sport, whether that’s an offseason or when they retire, that we have already started the process, that we’re already down the field.”
Over the last several years, a variety of technology firms and digital media companies have been involved in conversations surrounding sports media rights. Amazon’s Prime Video recently added a marquee property in the NBA to its overall portfolio, which had included the NFL on Thursday Night Football for the last three seasons. Pyatt has also evinced what Netflix is doing with its foray into live sports, airing events such as the NFL Christmas Day doubleheader, Paul-Tyson fight and Monday night editions of WWE Raw. All the platforms have their differences, he said, but they have collectively helped augment the number of total buyers who are interested in hiring media talent.
“The changing of the business dynamic in terms of the impact streaming has had on the building, I think that’s probably the scariest and most exciting [thing] all at the same time,” Pyatt explained. “It’s creating opportunities, [and] it’s taking away other opportunities.”
Sporting events were responsible for 80 of the 100 most-watched television shows in 2024, demonstrating the value the competition has in attracting audiences. Seeing that Game 5 of the World Series made the list, along with incontrovertible growth in women’s sports and college football, were encouraging signs for Pyatt entering the new year. As WME Sports aims to work with best-in-class clients and defy the odds in building businesses, Pyatt looks forward to being immersed in sports media in the present moment while molding a canvas for tomorrow.
“The business is changing,” Pyatt said. “I enjoy learning about those changes and finding clients that I feel like are interesting and that I get excited about. I think working with new clients that I’m a fan of allows me to look at it in a way that keeps me excited in the business, and if I’m not excited, I won’t do it anymore.”
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Derek Futterman is an associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, email Derek@BarrettMedia.com or find him on X @derekfutterman.
