Rich Paul’s Klutch Sports Is Expanding Its Reach To Europe With New Soccer Representation Deal | Essence

Rich Paul is taking his empire across the pond.

His company Klutch Sports and UTA Sports are reportedly adding a number of top European soccer players to their portfolio.

Per reports, UTA has acquired ROOF (Representatives Of Outstanding Footballers), and aim to represent some of the world’s top player across Europe’s “Big Five” leagues — English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, French Ligue 1, and German Bundesliga.

“When you have an opportunity to get into the most popular sport in the world with the top sports soccer representation agency in the world, you take it, and so that’s sort of the starting point for us,” UTA Sports Andrew Thau head told The Hollywood Reporter.

“One thing we always talked about was, how do we want to represent across the ecosystem of sport? And that was always through a global lens. And it’s hard to be global without global football. It’s just the sport that transcends throughout our world,” Paul told the outlet. “So when you talk about the capabilities that we have, the resources that we have, the expertise that we have, and in addition to that, now with ROOF, the representation that we have and at the level that we have it.”

Klutch founder and co-head of UTA Sports Rich Paul added: “It wasn’t just only about the players, it wasn’t just only about the agents, it was about the company as a collective, and through our diligence, through our conversations, through our evaluation, what we learned was we were aligned in so many different areas that it just made the most sense. We want them to remain who they’ve been. That’s not changing. I think we will become enhancers to strategy. They know the game best. We’ll learn more as it pertains to the game and to the inner workings of the business, and then I think we’ll be able to collectively build out an even better strategy going forward, holistically, as it pertains to the players and and to the other opportunities within the sport.”

Rich founded Klutch in 2012 in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, where he went on to represent LeBron James and Jalen Hurts among many other talents. In 2019, KLUTCH Sports joined forces with United Talent Agency (UTA).