This article is part of Bísness School, a series that highlights one of the fastest-growing groups of entrepreneurs in the United States, Latinos. You can hear or watch the full conversation with Guillermo Zamarripa below.
Guillermo Zamarripa knew he wanted to be involved in the world of soccer since he was a child.
“I don't come from any family background in terms of professional soccer players or anything.” Zamarripa said. “It was just what you do. You know, growing up in Mexico, I wanted to be a professional footballer. And yeah, my entire childhood, I think, revolved around that.”
Zamarripa, who grew up in Tampico, a city in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, started his soccer career playing in the second division league in Mexico when he was a teenager. But soon he realized that he didn’t have what it took to make it to the country’s top league.
Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.
“I had some level of, let's say, professional football experience, but I was not good enough to play first division in Mexico. [Still] I made a conscious decision to use soccer to be able to get a scholarship.”
Encouraged by his family to obtain a bachelor's degree, Zamarripa used his soccer experience to get a scholarship from the New York Institute of Technology, which helped him secure a corporate job in New York and eventually launch his first management company, CMAS, in 2010.
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
“I really started getting this curiosity of, you know, being an entrepreneur,” Zamarripa said.
With CMAS, Zamarripa helped other athletes do what he did: use their athletic talents to land collegiate scholarships in the U.S. One of those players was Charlyn Corral, a Mexican striker who currently plays for the Mexican national team and Liga MX’s Pachuca.
Working with Corral helped Zamarripa launch CMAS, but it also let him see first-hand the challenges of working in women's sports.
“There wasn't any commercial angle,” Zamarripa said. “There wasn't any sponsorship. It was easier to get a sponsorship for a [male] third-division player in Mexico than it was to get a sponsorship for national team players on the women's side.”
According to online sports contract database Spotrac, in 2014, the National Women’s Soccer League minimum salary for a player in the United States was $6,842 a year. In Mexico, the country where Corral was born, the minimum salary for a female soccer player was $500 Mexican pesos a month in 2017, equivalent to almost $25, according to ESPN Deportes.
Zamarripa wanted to change that.
In 2014, Zamarripa and his co-founder and former roommate at New York Tech, Oscar Gonzalez, launched TMJ, a sports agency dedicated exclusively to women’s soccer. Their first contract went to Corral, who signed with the Finnish team Merilappi United that year. Her contract included a base salary of $500 a month and a bicycle.
“The bicycle [would] allow her to go from her home to the training facilities in Finland,” Zamarripa said. “It's hard to put into words how difficult it was back in those days to just do anything in the women's game.”
Despite frequent criticism from peers due to the lack of financial growth for almost eight years, Zamarripa persisted.
“We just believed we were leading the sport,” he said. “We believed that at some point we were going to be able to explode and scale up and the world would see how unjust it had been with women athletes.”
Until it finally happened.
In 2020, TMJ started seeing a series of breakthroughs in the industry. Client Deyna Castellanos’ contract with Nike Global marked the first for a Hispanic women’s soccer player in the brand’s history. In 2021, the company says it registered 20% growth in revenue, followed by 83% in 2022. The revenue came from representation, consulting and commercial contracts, according to the company.
Today, TMJ has presence in 29 leagues across 21 countries, signed the most expensive player in women’s football history (Racheal Kundananji) for over $2 million in 2024 and has generated $30 million through management.
Guillermo Zamarripa spoke to NBC's Bísness School about why he decided to carve a career in an industry that was generating little revenue at the time. The answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Bísness School: What does TMJ stand for?
Guillermo Zamarripa: TMJ stands for The Marketing Jersey. So the concept, the name really came from this realization that we wanted to be more than just representation. So we wanted to build a commercial angle and a marketing angle for the athletes that we work with.
BS: What did people say when you told them you were launching an agency dedicated to women’s soccer?
GZ: “Don't waste your time. Women's football is garbage." “Don't invest any resources into helping women's athletes.” I mean, that was a concern [that] probably lasted for like seven, eight years since 2014. Now, that has changed drastically. But in the beginning I didn't find anybody within my support system or, you know, around me that would actually support what I was doing, which is investing in the women's game when at that point, nobody was doing it.
BS: You've said before that you have big hopes for the next 50 years of women's soccer. In a dream world, where will women's soccer be in 2074?
GZ: Hopefully closer to what men earn. I still think that it's going to take a while. There's no doubt we understand the values on the men's side and the parameters and the decision makers that are involved. I think it's going to take a while, but I could definitely see that gap getting closer. And that's all we can hope for right now. I think there are different parameters that we see on a day-to-day [basis]. Women's soccer players can now make a decision [between having] a full-time job or just being a professional athlete.
Watch the full conversation with Guillermo Zamarripa to learn how he and his co-founder Oscar Gonzalez bootstrapped the first seven years of TMJ and what he sees as the future of women's soccer in the United States.
