Five Yorkshire brands. Five college football players. We’re a long way from Miami up here.
NIL changed everything. Name, Image, Likeness. Three words that turned college football players into brands overnight.
In America, that means energy drinks, car dealerships, fast food chains and six figure deals before a player has taken a snap.
By 2025, some of the top college quarterbacks were already securing NIL deals worth millions, with booster-backed collectives driving the market at the biggest programmes
In Yorkshire, it would mean something very different.
And that is where this gets interesting.
Top recruits now arrive at university with agents. Transfer portal decisions hinge on collective deals. A top tier quarterback at a major programme can earn more from brand partnerships than most people earn in a decade of actual work.
For context, if you are reading this from the other side of the Atlantic: Yorkshire is a county in the north of England. It is large, proud, and deeply unimpressed by things that are trying too hard. The weather is reliable only in the sense that it is reliably poor. The people are friendly and direct. The tea is excellent. It produces, per head of population, more opinions per square mile than anywhere else in Britain, and the residents consider this a point of pride rather than a problem.
But I have been thinking about what NIL would look like if it arrived here. Not Miami. Not Columbus or Tuscaloosa or Ann Arbor. Yorkshire. What brands would come calling? What would the deals look like? And which college football players would be the right fit for a promotional campaign built around a theme park in North Yorkshire that also has a zoo?
I have given this an unreasonable amount of thought. Here is where I landed.
Yorkshire Tea
The Player: An Offensive Lineman
Yorkshire Tea is the number one selling tea brand in the United Kingdom. It is not flashy. It does not have a complicated origin story or a lifestyle angle. It makes a proper brew. That is the entire proposition and it is an extraordinarily good one.
The offensive lineman is the Yorkshire Tea of college football. Nobody is building a highlight reel around him. Nobody is putting him on the cover of anything. He turns up, does the unglamorous work that makes everything else possible, and gets quietly excellent at it over four or five years while the quarterback takes all the credit.
The campaign writes itself. “Proper job.” That is it. That is the tagline. An offensive lineman the size of a small outbuilding, sat in a Yorkshire kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug, looking directly at the camera. No music. No voiceover. Just him, the tea, and the implicit understanding that some things do not need explaining.
Yorkshire Tea does not need a wide receiver. Yorkshire Tea needs someone who understands that the work matters more than the recognition. The offensive lineman gets that. He has always understood that. He has been getting that since the first day of his freshman year while everyone else was watching the quarterback warm up.
This is the NIL deal that makes the most sense in the entire piece. I am not being ironic. I genuinely think it would work.
In fact, it might be the most honest NIL deal in college football.
No hype. No nonsense. Just a proper job.
Morrisons
The Player: The Kicker
Morrisons is a perfectly good supermarket. It is not Waitrose. It is not trying to be Waitrose. It knows what it is, it does what it does, and on a Wednesday afternoon when you need your shopping it is absolutely there for you without any fuss whatsoever.
The kicker is the Morrisons of the college football squad. He is not in the team photo in the same way everyone else is in the team photo. Nobody at the training facility is particularly excited to see him until the game is tied with three seconds left and suddenly everyone is very, very glad he exists. He is reliable in a way that is only appreciated at the precise moment it is needed.
The deal would involve the kicker doing a Morrisons “More Card” promotion. Loyalty points. Special offers. The kind of campaign that requires him to stand in the cereal aisle looking purposeful. He would be great at this. Kickers have an ability to appear calm in situations where calmness seems slightly unreasonable. That translates perfectly to supermarket advertising.
Nobody dreams about the kicker until the moment he wins the game. Morrisons lives in exactly the same space
Jet2
The Player: A Wide Receiver
Jet2 is the airline of choice for a significant portion of the British population who want to get somewhere warm as quickly and cheaply as possible and do not want to think too hard about the journey. Jet2 goes to Magaluf. Jet2 goes to Ayia Napa. Jet2 goes to Tenerife in February when the weather in Leeds is doing what the weather in Leeds does in February. It flies out of Leeds Bradford Airport, which is a perfectly functional regional airport that has never once been described as glamorous by anyone who has used it.
The wide receiver has never been to Leeds Bradford Airport. He is about to go to Leeds Bradford Airport. He is going to have thoughts about Leeds Bradford Airport that he will share with his teammates, and those thoughts will be accurate, and Jet2 is going to put them in an advert anyway because that is exactly the kind of honest, unpretentious energy the brand runs on.
The campaign would involve him standing on the runway in full kit, helmet under one arm, boarding pass in the other, grinning at the camera. The tagline: “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday.. except a one handed catch in the end zone.”
Terry’s Chocolate Orange
The Player: The Quarterback
Terry’s Chocolate Orange was invented in York in 1932. It is one of the most recognisable confectionery products in Britain. It comes in a distinctive round shape that you are required to tap firmly before it separates into segments, and there is a whole ritual around opening one that British people take more seriously than they will generally admit to.
The quarterback was always going to get this one. The Chocolate Orange is built entirely around the premise that everything revolves around it. You tap it. You unwrap it carefully. You make an event of the reveal. The segments only work because of how the whole thing is constructed at the centre. Sound familiar?
The campaign would be a Christmas special, because the Chocolate Orange is fundamentally a Christmas product regardless of what time of year you are eating one. The quarterback in a festive setting, looking slightly too pleased with himself, delivering the line: “It’s not Terry’s. It’s mine.” He says this while holding the Chocolate Orange in the way he holds the ball at the line of scrimmage. The audience understands. The audience has always understood. The quarterback has always known they understood.
Flamingo Land
The Player: The Five-Star Recruit
Flamingo Land is a theme park and zoo located near Malton in North Yorkshire. It has rollercoasters. It has a resort. It has, at last count, over one thousand animals including flamingos, obviously, but also giraffes, lions, and a Nile hippopotamus called Aurora who was named after the northern lights that lit up the Yorkshire sky the week she arrived.
It is also, and I say this with genuine affection, not the first place you think of when you think of the glamorous end of world theme parks or the NIL marketplace.
The five-star recruit is the most coveted player in his position group in the country. He has been on the front page of every recruiting service since his sophomore year of high school. His commitment announcement had a production budget. His official visit highlights were edited. He arrives at university as the single most hyped incoming player at his position in the nation.
He has just signed a NIL deal with Flamingo Land.
The deal covers three personal appearances at the park, a co-branded merchandise line featuring his number alongside the Flamingo Land logo, and a series of social media posts in which he is photographed with Aurora the hippopotamus. In one of the posts he is holding an ice cream. In another he is on the Mumbo Jumbo rollercoaster with his hands in the air. In the third he is standing at the entrance in full kit, helmet on, giving a thumbs up next to a fibreglass flamingo.
The caption on that last one reads: “Big things happen in Yorkshire. Come find out why.”
Somewhere in Texas, a booster read this post, sighed, and quietly added another zero to the next offer. Probably while wondering how on earth he was competing with a theme park in North Yorkshire.
The Last Word from Across the Pond
NIL arrived in college football and changed the sport in ways that are still being worked out. Players earn real money now. Programmes compete for recruits partly on the basis of what earning potential they can offer. The marketplace is enormous, and it is only getting bigger.
None of that is coming to Yorkshire. Not really. I know that. You know that. Flamingo Land is not going to outbid a collective backed by Texas oil money for a five-star defensive end. Yorkshire Tea is not going to compete with a global energy drink brand for the attention of a top ten quarterback prospect.
But the thought experiment matters, because it gets at something true about the sport.
NIL works when brands understand exactly who they are and who they are speaking to. Yorkshire Tea understands its audience. Morrisons understands its audience. Flamingo Land, in its own slightly chaotic way, absolutely understands its audience.
College football works the same way. The programmes that win long term are not the ones chasing identity. They are the ones building everything around it.
Miami has always known exactly what it is. The U is not a slogan. It is a culture, a history, and a standard that has been there since the 1980s and is not going anywhere.
And if this piece proves anything, it is that Yorkshire understands that too.
Different scale. Different stakes. Same idea.
Know who you are. Build around it. Let everything else follow.
This article is the first of our The U, But British Series.
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