Thanks To A Frustrated NFL Nerd In England, Cris Collinsworth Has Made A Huge Side Fortune That Has Nothing To Do With TV Broadcasting | Celebrity Net Worth

If you have watched an NFL game on Sunday night at any point over the last two decades, you know Cris Collinsworth. The former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver has become one of the most recognizable voices in American sports, spending most fall weekends sitting in a broadcast booth explaining football to tens of millions of viewers.

And he has been extremely well compensated for it. Collinsworth currently earns $12.5 million per year as the lead analyst for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” Before NBC, he spent years working for Fox and HBO, and over the course of his broadcasting career, he has won 17 Sports Emmy Awards and called more than 500 NFL games.

And while earning $12.5 million per year watching and talking about football with your guys friends would be the ultimate dream job for basically any man on earth, it’s not actually Cris’ only source of wealth. In fact, he’s made an absolutely enormous fortune from something that has nothing to do with broadcasting. And it all started with a British football fanatic working out of a small apartment in England who was very frustrated by the quality of NFL statistics…

A Football Nerd In England

Back in 2004, an Englishman named Neil Hornsby had become frustrated by how little meaningful information existed about the individual performances of football players. And I know what you’re assuming. If Neil is an Englishman, “football” must have been soccer players. But no! Neil was obsessed with the NFL, and he was frustrated by the lack of quality data available. A box score could tell him how many yards a quarterback threw for or how many tackles a linebacker recorded, but it couldn’t tell him whether an offensive lineman had quietly dominated his opponent all afternoon or whether a defensive back had played so well that the quarterback simply stopped throwing in his direction.

Hornsby had become obsessed with American football after discovering the NFL on British television in the 1980s. By the 1990s, he was spending his free time compiling football statistics into a computer, and eventually he started doing something even more ambitious: watching games and attempting to grade the performance of every player on every play.

By 2006, what had started as a personal obsession was becoming too big for one person. Hornsby recruited a small collection of fellow NFL fanatics, many of whom he met through online message boards, and began building a website around the enormous amount of information they were collecting. He called the company Pro Football Focus.

The site officially launched in 2007. At first, almost nobody cared. Hornsby later recalled that it was attracting as few as 80 page views per week. He was still running a business consulting company in England and funding his strange NFL hobby out of his own pocket.

But the database kept growing, and eventually someone very important noticed.

In 2009, Hornsby received a message through the website’s contact form from Jon Berger, an executive with the New York Giants. Hornsby assumed one of his friends was playing a prank on him.

It wasn’t a prank.

The Giants became PFF’s first NFL customer. Other teams soon followed, and over the next several years, Hornsby’s side project began transforming into a legitimate football-data business. By 2014, PFF had 13 NFL teams paying for its information.

And right around then, the company caught the attention of Cris Collinsworth.

Cris Finds PFF

Collinsworth came across PFF because he was looking for a better way to prepare for broadcasts. As an NFL analyst, he needed to understand much more than what happened during the handful of games he personally watched each weekend. He wanted to know which offensive linemen were struggling, which cornerbacks were playing well and how individual players around the league were performing even when the traditional box score told him very little.

PFF had already done much of that work for him. Collinsworth subscribed to the service and eventually connected with Hornsby, although he has said he initially wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this mysterious football operation in England.

Once he started asking Hornsby questions, that skepticism disappeared. Collinsworth realized PFF had developed a level of football analysis that could be useful to far more people than television broadcasters. NFL teams, college programs, scouts, agents, fantasy players and eventually gamblers and ordinary fans could all use the same information.

So Collinsworth decided not merely to subscribe to the service. He decided to buy it.

The $6 Million Investment

In 2014, Collinsworth paid $6 million to acquire a majority interest in Pro Football Focus.

That was not an insignificant investment, even for someone who had already enjoyed a successful NFL career and spent more than two decades working in television. And PFF was hardly an obvious technology unicorn at the time. Its basic business involved employing lots of people to watch enormous amounts of football and painstakingly chart what happened on every play.

Under Collinsworth’s ownership, PFF expanded rapidly. Operations moved to Cincinnati, the company hired more analysts, and its products became increasingly sophisticated. NFL franchises subscribed to the data. College programs joined them. Networks began incorporating PFF statistics into broadcasts, while fantasy football players and fans became familiar with the company’s player grades.

Eventually, all 32 NFL teams became customers.

PFF had gone from an obscure analytics service founded in England to a company embedded throughout professional football.

Then The Big Money Arrived

The clearest indication of how valuable Collinsworth’s investment had become arrived in September 2021, when private equity giant Silver Lake invested $50 million in Pro Football Focus. The transaction valued PFF at $160 million.

Seven years earlier, Collinsworth had spent $6 million to acquire majority control. Now the entire company was worth more than 26 times that amount.

And the story still wasn’t over.

PFF Gets Split In Two

After the Silver Lake investment, PFF pushed further into fantasy football, betting, consumer subscriptions and other growth areas. The company also went through layoffs, executive turnover and strategic changes as technology transformed the sports-data industry.

One part of PFF remained especially valuable: its enterprise business. Years of proprietary football data had become deeply integrated into the way professional and college teams evaluated players, prepared for opponents and made personnel decisions.

In March 2026, sports technology company Teamworks acquired that portion of PFF. Financial terms were not publicly disclosed, though the transaction was worth nine figures.

More interestingly, Collinsworth didn’t simply take a check and walk away. He and PFF’s other investors received equity in Teamworks, and Collinsworth became an adviser to the company.

Teamworks also did not buy everything. PFF’s consumer-facing business remained independent, continuing to offer fantasy products, draft analysis, player rankings, betting tools and subscriptions directly to fans.

So Collinsworth effectively emerged from the deal with exposure to two different businesses: the remaining PFF consumer operation and a new ownership stake in Teamworks.

Then Teamworks Hit A $1.5 Billion Valuation

The timing was extraordinary. Teamworks announced the PFF acquisition on March 30, 2026. Less than one month later, the company announced a major new investment led by private equity firm Hg that valued Teamworks at more than $1.5 billion.

We don’t know what percentage of Teamworks Collinsworth received in the PFF transaction, so there’s no responsible way to put an exact dollar value on his stake. We also don’t know precisely what percentage of the remaining PFF consumer business he owns.

But the broad financial arc is pretty remarkable.

Collinsworth put $6 million into PFF in 2014. By 2021, the company was valued at $160 million. Five years later, part of the business was exchanged for equity in a company valued above $1.5 billion, while another part remained independently owned.

That’s a much more interesting path to wealth than simply collecting a television salary.

That’s a much more interesting path to wealth than simply collecting a television salary. Collinsworth still has what is arguably one of the greatest jobs in the world, earning $12.5 million a year to watch and talk about football. But the $6 million bet he made on PFF has turned into an entirely separate fortune.

And to think, the whole thing started because an NFL nerd in England was frustrated by box scores.