Naomi Osaka and her agent Stuart Duguid are leaving IMG to launch their own sports representation firm, taking one of tennis's most commercially valuable athletes off the roster of the world's largest talent agency. The move was announced Monday with no transition timeline disclosed. Duguid has represented Osaka since 2019, when she held the world No. 1 ranking and had already won two majors.
The new agency will handle Osaka's endorsement portfolio, which includes Nike, Louis Vuitton, Sweetgreen, and her own skincare line Kinlò. Osaka earned an estimated $15 million in prize money and $55 million in off-court income in 2023, making her the highest-paid female athlete that year despite limited tour participation following the birth of her daughter in July. The agency structure remains undisclosed—ownership split, capitalization, whether it will sign other athletes. Duguid declined to comment on staffing or office location.
The departure marks the second major IMG defection in tennis this year. Carlos Alcaraz's agent Albert Molina left in February to join Roc Nation Sports, taking the 21-year-old Spaniard with him. IMG, owned by Endeavor, represents roughly 900 athletes across all sports and generated $1.9 billion in revenue in 2023 from its talent and events divisions combined. Osaka's exit does not materially impact that figure, but it removes a marquee name from pitch decks at a time when athlete-owned agencies are gaining traction. LeBron James's Klutch Sports now represents 56 NBA players. Alexis Ohanian's 776 Management signed 22 athletes in its first 18 months.
What matters here is the test case. Osaka's brand deals skew toward long-term equity positions rather than flat endorsement fees—she owns stakes in Bodyarmor, Hyperice, andAtielier Jonak, a French accessories brand. Managing that portfolio requires corporate development work, not just negotiating appearance rates. If the Osaka-Duguid firm can execute liquidity events or follow-on raises in those portfolio companies, it validates a new model: the athlete as principal, the agent as operating partner, the agency as family office. If it cannot, the experiment confirms that scale still matters—that IMG's 40-person marketing team and its access to Endeavor's WME film division and UFC broadcast inventory are worth the commission percentage.
Osaka has played 17 matches in the past 18 months and is currently ranked No. 50 in the world. Her next scheduled tournament is the Australian Open in January, where she won titles in 2019 and 2021. Sponsors have not adjusted deal terms during her maternity leave or subsequent injury absences, which suggests the brand value is decoupled from ranking points. That durability is rare in tennis, where endorsement contracts typically include performance clauses tied to top-20 rankings or semifinal runs at majors.
Watch for the agency's first external hire. If Duguid brings on a former Nike or LVMH executive, the play is brand-building. If he hires a venture partner or someone from Creative Artists Agency's venture arm, the play is portfolio management. Also watch whether the firm takes on a second athlete client in the next 12 months. If it does, this is a traditional agency with a flagship client who owns equity. If it does not, this is Osaka Inc. with Duguid as president, which is a different business entirely.
IMG has not announced a replacement agent for Osaka. The firm's tennis division is run by Max Eisenbud, who built Maria Sharapova into a $300 million career earnings athlete before her retirement in 2020. His next move will clarify whether IMG views this as a talent retention problem or a structural inevitability.
The takeaway
Osaka and Duguid are testing whether a single-athlete agency can manage equity-heavy endorsement portfolios better than a legacy firm at scale.
tennisimgagencyosakaendorsementsathlete ownership
Brand your brand — for real
70,000 products · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · imprinted since 1997
Two hundred brands. Eight months on the desk. $0.003 an impression.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — imprinting on real authorized stock for Nike, YETI, Patagonia, The North Face, Carhartt, Stanley, Peter Millar, TUMI, Montblanc, Moleskine, Waterford, and 190 more. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign: The Stash Edge, Markets Edge, Sports Edge, Voyage Edge, Black's Edge, House Edge, the Article Engine, Ramen, and Fending.
$0.003per impression · vs ~$0.007 digital CPM
8 monthson the desk · vs 0.8s for a digital ad
200+authorized brands · Nike · YETI · Patagonia
9 deskspublishing daily · since 1997
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.