It's well known nowadays that millions of dollars are flowing to college football players. Now that players are allowed to do endorsements through name, image, and likeness deals, playing for a big college can mean big bucks. But did you know that millions of dollars are now flowing into high school football, too? High school football is this kind of beloved and cherished institution in our country and we have a lot of warm feelings about it, like Friday night lights and all that. That's our colleague Harriet Ryan. She's an investigative reporter based in Los Angeles, where high school football is a very big deal. Southern California is a completely different beast. The competitive level, the number of D1 prospects, it rivals Florida or Georgia or Texas. Studies come from all over the country to have their kids play in Orange County or LA. And for a long time, Harriet's been hearing rumors that high school players there were getting paid under the table. There's a lot of great high school football teams here and I always got this, well everybody knows it's dirty, but I've never seen it proven and when I started working on this story and I started seeing the amounts, I was very surprised. At its most elite levels, there is a very ugly side to it that basically turns the best players into commodities that can just be sold around like their assets. What I was hearing from agents and other people, they said, look, when you're giving teenagers vast amounts of money, a lot of bad stuff happens. Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, January 16th. Coming up on the show, Inside the Black Market for High School Football Players. This episode is brought to you by Vantor. Security and compliance done wrong is a headache. Done right? You build trust and grow faster. That's Vantor. For startups, Vantor acts as your first security hire, using AI to get you compliant fast. For enterprises, it's your AI-powered hub for compliance, risk and automating workflows. From startups like Cursor to enterprises like Snowflake, top companies choose Vantor. Do security and compliance right. Get started today at Vantor.com. This story is about a young man in Philip Bell III, whose situation came to light in court following a tense custody battle. Our colleague Harry was able to piece together Bell's story via court records and interviews with friends, relatives and others who knew his family. Bell himself didn't comment for this story. Bell was a wide receiver and he grew up in the Sacramento area. Bell's parents divorced when he was a baby and he was raised with help from his grandparents. Pretty early on, it was clear that Bell was going to be a football phenom. Here's a clip from a highlight reel. Bell was so good, he got his first D1 college scholarship offer when he was in eighth grade. He's an amazing player and one of his coaches, he's one of his youth coaches said, no matter who goes up with Philip in the end zone to get a ball, Philip comes down with a ball. You can double team him, he will still come down with a ball. Here's Bell in a day in the life video from YouTube. By the time he was in high school, Bell got on the radar of scouts in Southern California. But not just scouts from colleges. Bell got on the radar of high school scouts, otherwise known as street agents. They sort of prowl parts of California and I'm sure other states looking for outsized talent that they can turn around and essentially sell to a booster at a school or a parent at a school. They make the deal, they make the connection. So there's some booster at a high school that'll pay someone for introductions to talented high school players that they may not have heard about. Yeah. When I talked to a youth coach in Sacramento who said, look, I get calls from people from Southern California who are like, I'm looking for two wide receivers. I'm looking for an O-line guy and they're willing to pay $20,000 and they have a lead on a job or $50,000 and you get a house. He said the deals are structured. Sometimes this is like for all the rest of high school and sometimes it's just this season, we'll see how things go. The street agents don't work for the schools. They typically represent depocketed alumni or parents who want to see their kids play with talented players. Through these agents, players and their families can get paid tens of thousands of dollars and some are even offered rent money, cars and jobs. Is this legal? It's against interstclassic rules in every state. You can't pay a player to play, but it doesn't violate any criminal laws that I know of, but it does violate the rules of sports. The cops aren't going to show up, but you might get kicked off the team or something like that. But who is anybody out there enforcing that though? Every state has like an association or a federation that's supposed to do this, but California interstclassic federation, it's not the FBI. They don't have hundreds of agents. They're not going to subpoena your bank records. But for some families, the risk of their kid gets kicked off the team is worth taking. The money is just too good. As Phillip Bell's high school career was kicking off, his mother, Samantha Barnes, was dealing with money issues. She'd recently married a man who, according to court records, had no full-time job, unpaid child support bills and depended on her for living expenses. So when Bell got an offer to a school in LA, Barnes took it. She was telling people, like, look, we're getting a deal down here, we're getting the equivalent of $15,000 a month, and this is like a deal I can't resist. Bell and his mother were also put up in a mansion that was formerly occupied by the rapper Soulja Boy. They got help on the lease from a parent whose son was the quarterback on Bell's team. According to Harriet's reporting, Barnes started telling her friends, quote, my son is going to be a millionaire. In the past, players couldn't become millionaires unless they made it to the NFL. But thanks to name, image, and likeness deals that are illegal in college and allow players to sign endorsement deals, players can become millionaires much sooner. And that money also flows to the people around the player, their families and their agents. You have agents who formerly represented NFL players who are now watching middle school practice. Middle school practice? Yeah. I mean, there's like, you know, there's travel teams and football, and you know, these are under 13 kids. I mean, the thing is, if you can identify talent at a young age and get in, even if that kid can do nothing for you financially, by the time they're in college, they're going to be able to do a lot for you financially. And you want to build that relationship as soon as you can. I mean, I think the agents would also say, like, we're trying to get in there because if we're not in there, they're going to be getting bad advice from people that don't know what they're doing. But people are trying to form relationships with younger and younger athletes. It's sort of like all the money is just seeping down lower and lower. Like college resisted it for a long time, but now it's there with these NAL deals. And now it's just seeping even further one one layer down to high schools. I think that's right. By the end of Bell's sophomore year, his mother didn't appear to be satisfied with the amount of money her son was making. And she started shopping Bell around to different schools to see if she could get a better offer. Eventually, Bell's mother crossed paths with someone named Brett Stuy, who's known around the L.A. football scene as the money man. Brett Stuy owns fast food restaurants. He lives in L.A. He owns a tire shop. He made a lot of money and he loves sports and betting on sports. And he just got really involved in supporting high school football. And he just said that, like, look, it's not illegal. It violates inter-scholastic rules for the kids, but it's not illegal. And I enjoy it. I enjoyed building a team. I enjoyed the competitive element to it. And he said that, you know, over a series of years, he paid millions of dollars to hundreds of families. Some of those kids he played, they're now adults playing in an NFL. According to Stuy, Bell's mother told a coach that she wanted a house and an allowance of $72,000 a year, which was too much even for money man. For his junior year, Bell ended up transferring to Mission Viejo, a school in Orange County without the help of Money Man. But playing for high school teams isn't the only way for players like Bell to make money. Bell started playing in an elite seven on seven football league called OT7. OT7 is a no tackle football league focused on passing and catching. It's backed by Jeff Bezos and private equity firms. Bell played on a team called Trillion Boys. It is the unstoppable flashy Trillion Boys going head to head against a high In OT7, players are permitted to make endorsement deals, but pay for plays forbidden. However, according to court testimony, Bell was paid $400 to $700 per game, but his stepfather allegedly kept the money. In a statement, one manager from OT7's parent company said that teams that don't follow the rules are quote, in direct violation of their agreements with us and don't belong in OT7. According to Harrius, Bell's mother told the coach that she wanted to make money and, in Harrius reporting, all this football didn't leave much time for Bell to study and his grades started to suffer. Up in Sacramento, Bell's grandparents and fathers started to worry. Phillip had always been like an A and B student according to his dad and court records, and he got to LA and he was failing all of his classes and there are text messages he sends to his grandma and where he's just like, oh my gosh, like I'm failing everything. She's like, look, we're going to get you a tutor. We can get a relative to tutor you and, you know, let me come get you this weekend and he's like, I got to go on seven seven tournament. Like, his life just became about football. He just kept telling relatives that he really wanted to come home, that he was really unhappy, that, you know, he felt like he couldn't leave because his mother had so much financially on the line with him being there, but he desperately wanted to leave. After he sent all these panicked and upset messages to his relatives in Northern California, unannounced, five of them from both sides of the family drove down and went to his school. And when he saw them outside, he said, you guys are going to get me in trouble. And they went to a restaurant and they talked and he just said, like, I can't go back with you. I can't go back with you. And he had a lot of concerns about the amount of money his mom was making. He was concerned about her health. She had diabetes. You don't want to work too much. You know, he said she was having trouble and he just, you know, said he was going to stay down there. Eventually, his father sued for full custody and he wanted to bring Bell back to Sacramento. His father and his grandparents were worried about the mental and physical state of his mother. And from interviews and court records, I can tell you that they had really deep concerns about what kind of state of his mother was. She had really deep concerns about what kind of state of mind she was in and her situation. She had bad money problems and they believed she was using drugs and they were concerned about that. Bell's mother said those allegations were false and she told the judge that her son wouldn't be where he was without her. She noted that 37 colleges had offered him scholarships. Ultimately, the court ruled in favor of Bell's father. Bell should return to Sacramento, but also ruled that Bell could finish out his junior football season in Mission Viejo. But Bell never went back to Sacramento. Money in the black market shattered his family. That's next. When the tax year ends on the 5th of April, valuable tax allowances may be lost simply because people left things too late. Thankfully, Vanguard is here to help you make well considered decisions, not rushed ones. Their tax year end hub is full of clear guidance, helpful tools and timely reminders to help you understand your allowances and give your investments the best chance to grow. Search Vanguard Investor to learn more when investing your capital is at risk. Tax rules apply. Could AI help you do more of what you love? Workday is the next gen ERP powered by AI that actually knows your business. We help you handle the have to do's so you can focus on the can't wait to do's. It's a new workday. By his junior year, Phillip Bell had become a hot prospect in the Southern California football scene. In 2023, he helped Mission Viejo win the state championship. Bell caught two touchdowns in that game. But his mother and stepfather's money trouble persisted. So what happened is in the spring of his junior year, his family is living in an apartment near school and they're not paying their rent and they haven't paid in a long time. And so their landlord keeps asking for the money and they're not paying. And finally, the landlord just locks the doors like they can't get in. You're done. So on that day when the landlord locked the doors, word goes out through the football community in Southern California, Phillip Bell's senior years for sale. When Brett Stuy, LA's money man, got word, he decided to put in an offer. Money man says, like, look, I can come up with $24,000 a year for his senior season, but that's it. And so he's about to do that deal. And then he realizes that it's just not going to look good. The school that he's buying kids for at that point is a poor-ish public school in LA, like not in a good area. And he's like, how am I going to explain that the star player is spending his senior year playing for this team? So he's like, I'm not going to do it. Money man was out. As Bell was still being shopped to boosters, according to text reviewed by the journal, he embarked on a series of college visits. Over the summer, Bell and his mom, Samantha Barnes, went to visit colleges where he could make big money playing football. They toured the University of Washington, Penn State and Ohio State in a text to her friend after the Washington visit. Barnes said, quote, good news. They offered P 350 K in University of Washington spokesman declined to comment. Later that summer, Bell's mother and stepfather went on a trip to Las Vegas. According to a police report, Barnes drank heavily and used cocaine. She was diabetic. She took insulin and she was found dead in her bed with a lot of cocaine system and with the conditions caused by a lack of insulin. A coroner ruled her death in accident caused by diabetic ketoacidosis, a condition resulting from a lack of insulin with acute cocaine toxicity as another significant condition. After Barnes died, Bell's father wanted to bring his son back to Northern California. So he visited Bell's high school and mission Viejo. His father tries to find him at football practice and runs into the coach. And which the dad is just like, his mom just died. His, he needs therapy. His head is all over the place. I just want to talk to him. This is not natural. And the coach essentially says like, I cannot force him to talk to you. You know, it's, it's his decision kind of. Why didn't he want to talk to his dad? And also didn't his dad win that court case? It said he had to go back and live with him. Well, yeah, I mean, it's unclear why the court order wasn't enforced, but I've been told that it was a bruising custody hearing proceedings for his mother. And she was furious with how her family had, had handled things and it sided with, you know, her ex-husband. And she said, I forbid you from ever talking to those people again. And he was very close with his mother. And so, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's very clear that if you just look at pictures of them, I mean, she loved him a lot and was so proud of him. And I'm sure I wanted that so best for him in her way. In a statement, Bell's father said, quote, decisions were made about my son's life, his schooling and his future without my consent or involvement. Adding, quote, my family has been torn apart by adults who should have protected us. And now I'm left trying to pick up the pieces. His grandmother added that they wanted him to be, quote, safe, loved, thriving and surrounded by people who truly have his best interests at heart. Bell's father and grandparents also sued Mission Viejo's school district, which has denied wrongdoing. The case is ongoing. Bell's stepfather, Isaiah Sandoval, didn't respond to requests for comment. In a letter to a judge in one of the court cases, Sandoval wrote, I love Phillip with all of me and would do anything under the sun for him. So what happened to Phillip Bell for his senior year? I mean, he was this message went out that his senior year was for sale. After his mother died, it appears that he was taken off the market. You know, he I'd seen messages with people talking about like his senior year up until she died and then not talking about it anymore. He ended up moving in with a family that he knew from down there. In 2024, Bell started the senior season at Mission Viejo as one of the top wide receivers in the country. And it was time for him to make a decision about where to go to college. I'll be taking my next step on my journey to the Ohio State University. The Ohio State University, one of the best football programs in the country. On a signing day, Bell announced his decision on a national sports network. He was on a boat sitting in front of an illustration of his mother, who on her back had the wings of an angel. I'm just continuing to know her because she wanted me to keep going. Keep going. So that's how I'm going to keep doing. Someone I talked to was like deeply enmeshed in this world. When I told him I was writing about Phillip Bell, he just kind of shrugged and I was like, what? And he goes, there's thousands of Phillip Bells. I mean, the only reason we know about it is because there was this rift in the family and because his mother died. So I don't know, that made me really sad. I mean, it just, it also just makes me think about how, you know, the college was one thing with all the money that was circulating, but even there, there's still adults with the monies that sloshing around high school. These are minors and there are parents who hopefully have their best interests, but also can get like drawn into the lure of money and let's like a whole different factor and like, you know, they're kids that are dealing with this stuff and they don't really know how to navigate it themselves. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, anytime there's a lot of money, a lot of things can go wrong. I think that, you know, as you said earlier, the money is just kind of dripping down to lower and lower levels. And yeah, at the end of the day, a college student, in most cases, is an adult and they're responsible for their decisions, but you can't really a 14 year old, a 15 year old. I mean, they're not. With all the agents and the hype and the money for some of the people Harriet spoke to youth football is no longer just a game. I was listening to I was a football coach was speaking to a group I was with recently and and he just said, like, make sure you're you love football. If you don't love football, you're not going to be able to do this. And I thought that's such like a weird thing to say, but it was clear that. You know, it's become about a lot more than just loving football. That's all for today. Friday, January 16th. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, P.A. Gadkari, Isabella Jopal, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwam, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez, Espanosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singy, Jivica Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis and me, Ryan Knudsen. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wily. Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapok, So Wily, Griffin Tanner and Epidemic Sound. Fact checking this week by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.
