Greg Genske has spent more than two decades at the crossroads of professional sports, law and business, building a career that runs from courtroom litigation to some of the biggest contract negotiations in baseball. Today he serves as Co-CEO of VaynerSports, an agency whose reach now extends across baseball, football, esports and action sports, representing hundreds of professional athletes.
From the Courtroom to the Clubhouse
Genske’s path into sports representation began in law rather than athletics. He earned a B.S. in Business Administration from Pepperdine University before completing his J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Early in his career, he worked as a trial attorney at leading national law firms, where he also negotiated multimillion-dollar transactions for emerging-growth companies and Fortune 500 clients — experience that would later shape his approach to high-stakes athlete negotiations.
He moved into professional sports representation in the mid-2000s, eventually becoming a certified Major League Baseball Players Association agent. Over the years, his client roster has included Hall of Famers, All-Stars and first-round draft picks, and by his own account he has represented hundreds of athletes across his career.
Building a Reputation at the Negotiating Table
Genske’s standing in the industry has been driven largely by the scale of the deals he has helped secure. According to UC Berkeley Law, where he now teaches, Genske has negotiated more than $4 billion in player contracts over the course of his career. Sports Business Journal documented that by 2009, Genske and his partners had already negotiated close to $1 billion in playing contracts — a body of work that helped cement his early reputation in baseball and led to his inclusion that same year in the publication’s Forty Under 40 list.
Before joining VaynerSports, Genske held senior leadership roles at other prominent agencies, including a stint as Executive Director and President of Baseball at The Legacy Agency. In 2019, he launched his own venture, the GEM Agency, in partnership with Hicks Equity Partners, the private equity arm of the Hicks family. That agency merged with Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerSports in 2020, a deal that created VaynerBaseball and installed Genske as its CEO, overseeing the firm’s baseball representation business. He has since expanded into the role of Co-CEO of VaynerSports overall, with oversight extending to the agency’s baseball, football, action sports and esports representation activities — a firm that now represents roughly 360 professional athletes.
A Second Career in the Classroom
Alongside his agency work, Genske has taught at UC Berkeley Law since 2015, leading courses on sports law, athlete representation and negotiation. The pairing of practitioner and professor gives his teaching an unusually current edge — his classes draw directly on live negotiations and current events in the sports industry rather than relying solely on case studies.
A Philosophy Beyond the Numbers
Despite a career defined in headlines by billion-dollar figures, Genske has been consistent in describing what he believes actually makes a representation career work. He has said that successful athlete representation requires discipline, sound advice, a clear grasp of legal and ethical obligations, and — above everything else — earning a client’s trust.
That emphasis helps explain the arc of his career: from trial law, to baseball agent, to agency executive, to entrepreneur, to law professor. Genske’s experience now spans several distinct eras of the sports representation business, giving him a vantage point that extends well beyond any single contract or season.
