Brittany Coleman’s son Kaden had just turned 10 when youth football coaches started pressing envelopes with thousands of dollars into her hand. They wanted Kaden to play for their club teams in Maryland, in New Jersey and across the mid-Atlantic.

Coleman always refused. Payments for top players, an open secret in youth sports, weren’t allowed, and she didn’t want to tarnish her son.

But as Kaden has grown to become one of the best eighth-grade football players in the country, there is now a legal, and potentially far more lucrative, way for him to profit from his talent.

Just as college athletes can now be paid for their athletic talent through so-called name, image and likeness, or NIL, deals — which compensate players for the use of their image in commercials and other promotional mat

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