Despite an impressive 51 years in the sports industry representing the crème de la crème of athletes, Leigh Steinberg’s career as an agent and philanthropist is far from over.
Steinberg’s approach to athlete management, which includes negotiations for top-tier athletes such as 64 first-round NFL Draft picks in just the first eight years of his career, elite MLB players and Olympic athletes, has remained strategic in both hustle and heart for decades.
The inspiration for “Jerry Maguire” signs athletes who dream of both reaching Hall of Fame status and embedding philanthropy into the minds of their loyal fan base.
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“Whether it’s setting up a charitable fund at their high school, a similar thing at their colleges, charitable foundations at the professional level where they take some issue they’d like to address and set up a foundation,” Steinberg told Fox News Digital, “all with the concept of an athlete as a role model.”
Steinberg highlighted NFL superstar and client Patrick Mahomes’ initiative, 15 and the Mahomies Foundation, as an example of what is possible when elite athletes use their names to raise awareness and funds for a cause.
Mahomes’ foundation, established in 2019, is dedicated to improving the lives of at-risk and underserved youths. Most recently, the foundation revealed the expansion of scholarships in childhood education and reported in 2024 that youth volunteers contributed $2.6 million in service hours through the organization.
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“I’ve been very involved with restating what an agent’s responsibility is,” Steinberg said. “I think part of it is to care for a player’s health.”
Beyond working with athletes to choose a foundational focus, Steinberg clocks time daily as chair of the Leigh Steinberg Foundation, which aims to educate and raise information about the risks of athletic concussions and fund prophylactic treatment of concussions and healing the concussed brain.
“In a sport like football, which is a traffic accident in every play and concussion is an ugly specter, I’ve tried to be proactive over the years,” Steinberg told Fox News Digital. “I had a crisis of conscience back in the 1980s because I was representing half of the starting quarterbacks in the NFL. They kept getting hit in the head, and we would go to doctors and ask how many is too many? When should they contemplate retirement? And they had no answers, and so I started holding concussion conferences back in 1994.”
Since its inception, Steinberg said the foundation has worked with treatment clinics IQMIND and NESTRE to identify two new breakthrough technologies, transcranial magnetic stimulation and neurofeedback, which heal a concussed brain through the theory of neuroplasticity.
“We also try to provide treatment for underserved communities that don’t necessarily have a way to deal with brain health,” Steinberg said. “So we’ll be looking to bring treatment to a number of people who wouldn’t otherwise have it.”
In just one week, Steinberg says the foundation raised $500,000, which, in part, will be allocated to host seminars and spread awareness to parents with children in athletics.
Among the voices behind the foundation’s public service announcement and educational campaigns are former NFL quarterback Warren Moon, former defensive end Bruce Smith and former linebacker Ray Lewis. Steinberg hopes to welcome female soccer players to the team of messengers in the future.
“There’s hope out there and people need to know they can get treatment,” Steinberg said.
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