page_title: David Falk
section_title: Building wealth for clients and himself
hierarchical_section_title: David Falk / Influence and inspiration / Building wealth for clients and himself
caption_attribution_description: English: Chicago Bulls. Michael Jordan 1987-88
context_page_description: David B. Falk is an American sports agent who primarily works with basketball players in the National Basketball Association. Falk began his career representing professional tennis players for Donald Dell's ProServ and is best known for representing sports icon Michael Jordan for the entirety of Jordan's career. Besides Jordan, Falk has represented more than 100 other NBA players, and is generally considered to be the most influential player agent the NBA has seen. During the peak years of Falk's career in the 1990s, he was often considered the second-most powerful person in the NBA behind Commissioner David Stern, and in 2000 he had at least one client on all but two NBA teams. He was listed among the "100 Most Powerful People in Sports" for 12 straight years from 1990 to 2001 by The Sporting News, and was also named one of the Top 50 Marketers in the United States by Advertising Age in 1995.
  Falk negotiated the then-highest contracts in NBA history for Patrick Ewing and Danny Ferry.
context_section_description: As early as 1992, even before his departure from ProServ, other NBA agents had begun acknowledging that Falk generally negotiated the contracts that defined the market for the year, and set the standard by which other agents were judged.  By the end of the 1995 NBA lockout, Falk controlled enough top players that he was seen as "dictat(ing) the structure and the economics of the entire league," so much so that during one six-day period in the summer of 1996, he negotiated six contracts—for Jordan, Alonzo Mourning, Juwan Howard, Kenny Anderson, Dikembe Mutombo and Lee Mayberry—worth more than $335 million.  Since Falk usually earned 4% of player contracts, which is the maximum amount allowed by the Players' Union, he made roughly $13 million for these 6 deals alone.  He was so successful at negotiating contracts that in 1998, just before he sold FAME to SFX Entertainment, the contracts of Falk's players totaled just under $800 million.
  Falk also earned as much as 20% of player endorsement deals and off-court income, and with Michael Jordan's endorsement deals alone soaring to over $40 million annually in the mid-90s, Falk counted his yearly income in the tens of millions.   He also negotiated notable shoe endorsements for James Worthy, Boomer Esiason (the first NFL player to endorse the Reebok Pump) and Allen Iverson.
  Falk was not well-liked around the league, with even NBA executives acknowledging that they felt he held a disproportionate amount of power.  As the negotiator behind four of the five largest contracts in team sports history and the pre-eminent agent in the NBA, Falk was a contributor to the spike in player salaries that saw the average NBA contract rise from $330,000 in 1984, the year Jordan was signed, to $4.5 million in 2001, when he stepped down as Chairman of SFX Sports Group.  Falk himself scoffed at the venom that was frequently directed his way:
  There's always something to criticize -- I have too much power or too many clients. I scoff at that. Think about it: If you lived on a block with $300,000 houses and you sold yours for $2.5 million, your neighbors would thank you. But in my business they don't. That used to make me angry. Now I'm just amused.
caption: Michael Jordan going for a slam dunk. Falk helped to make the NBA a star-centered league.
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