The Train Ride That Turned Into Cris Collinsworth's $6 Million Investment

A call from the Giants, then a bigger one from Cincinnati

The first real validation came in 2009, when Jon Berger, the New York Giants' senior director of football information, reached out through the site's basic contact form. Hornsby later called it stunning, because at the time the NFL itself did not release player-participation data until after the season ended. The Giants became Pro Football Focus's first paying client. Three years later Hornsby quit his consulting job entirely, took an 80 percent pay cut, and started flying to NFL cities to pitch coaches and front offices directly. I can't think of many hobbies that ask for that kind of faith.

Collinsworth found the site around the same time, hunting for faster, deeper team-by-team prep for NBC broadcasts reaching roughly 21 million viewers. When he first called Hornsby, the English accent on the other end briefly made him suspect a prank. He tested the operation the only way a working analyst knows how: by comparing its grades against his own film study from a 2013 game. The two barely disagreed, and when they did, Collinsworth said, about half the time Pro Football Focus turned out to be right and he was wrong.

He bought a majority stake for $6 million in the summer of 2014. Hornsby packed up his wife and two sons, plus two dogs, and moved the whole operation from England to Cincinnati, close to Collinsworth's own home. By January 2015, barely a year later, Pro Football Focus was working with 13 of the NFL's 32 teams and employing about 80 people scattered from California to Northern Ireland. A hobby that started with a magazine on a train was now a business NFL front offices actually depended on.

What the founding story leaves out

Growth kept compounding after that. Silver Lake, the private equity firm, bought a minority stake in September 2021 for a reported $50 million, valuing the company at roughly $160 million. Five years later, in March 2026, a sports-technology company called Teamworks acquired Pro Football Focus's enterprise data business, the arm that serves NFL and college teams directly, in a deal reported between $130 million and $140 million, down from a peak valuation near $223 million. The consumer side, the fantasy and betting tools fans actually use, stayed with Collinsworth. Hornsby himself is a smaller part of the story today; he stepped back from day-to-day leadership over internal disagreements and later left the company he had built by hand on that English train.

None of that changes the shape of the original story. A man with no connection to American football got obsessed with its numbers anyway, built something by hand for a decade with nobody watching, and ended up supplying data to every team in the league. I find that more interesting than the dollar figures attached to it, though the dollar figures are, admittedly, a lot of fun to read.