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Adidas joins Reliance Foundation Youth Sports to take football to campus
NEW DELHI: German sportswear giant Adidas and Reliance Foundation Youth Sports to hold School and College Football competitions starting from 27 August 2016.
The two have signed multi-year deal for this purpose. In the first year, the competition will be played in eight cities in Guwahati, Kochi, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune and Goa, featuring over 2000 teams and 40,000 youths playing football.
The RFYS Football competitions will be held across four categories – Junior, Senior and College boys and Senior Girls.
Aimed at creating a unified structure for school and college competitions across sports, Reliance wants to encourage a multi-discipline sports culture among schools and colleges and provide young athletes an integrated growth platform.
As the performance partner with RFYS, adidas will provide the official match balls for the programme and will also be the kit partner to all the City Champions qualifying for the National Finals.
adidas Senior Marketing Director Damyant Singh said, “India’s love for the sport of football has grown tremendously over the last decade. A crucial link that was missing was the existence of a unified School and College competition that would give young athletes the opportunity to showcase their skills against the best in India. RFYS will fundamentally change the way the next generation of Indians coach, train and compete. Grassroots is the bedrock on which sporting success is built and adidas is very proud to play its part in supporting the RFYS.”
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UK’s OnlyFans seeks US investor at $3bn valuation after owner’s death
The adult video platform is seeking stability after the death of its billionaire owner
LONDON: OnlyFans is looking for a new partner. The London-based adult video platform is in advanced talks to sell a minority stake of less than 20 per cent to Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm, in a deal that would value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).
The move is driven by an urgent need for stability. Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-American billionaire who owned OnlyFans, died of cancer last month at the age of 43, leaving the future of one of Britain’s most profitable privately held businesses suddenly uncertain.
The choice of Architect Capital is not arbitrary. The firm has deep expertise in financial services, which aligns neatly with OnlyFans’ ambitions to offer banking products to its creators, many of whom have long struggled to access basic financial services because of the nature of their work.
The numbers behind OnlyFans are, by any measure, staggering. The platform posted revenues of $1.4bn in the year to 30th November 2024, with a pre-tax profit of $684m, up four per cent on the prior year. Payments to creators totalled $7.2bn over the same period, a rise of nearly ten per cent. Radvinsky personally collected $701m in dividends from the business in 2024 alone, on top of more than $1bn in such payments he had already received. The platform, run through its parent company Felix International, hosts 4.6m creator accounts, with performers keeping 80 per cent of subscription proceeds and the platform pocketing the remaining 20 per cent. It has 377m fan accounts in total.
The current minority stake talks represent a notable scaling back of ambitions. In January, OnlyFans was reported to be in discussions with Architect about selling a majority stake of 60 per cent. Before that, the company had explored a sale to a consortium led by Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. Neither deal materialised.
OnlyFans has built an enormously lucrative business on content that mainstream finance has long refused to touch. Now, with its owner gone and a $3bn valuation on the table, it is looking for the kind of respectable institutional backing that might finally persuade the banks to take its calls.
