At some point during an hours-long tour of the Dolphins’ stadium in 2011, a 12-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy from Brooklyn decided that, one day, he was going to take over the world. The NFL world.
Ness Mugrabi walked through the locker room, onto the field, all through the team’s game day operations and sat in owner Stephen Ross’ office chair. He witnessed how things work around an NFL team, and he was hooked.
After a bad Dolphins loss earlier that season, Mugrabi retreated to his bedroom and cried. Then, he called the Dolphins and asked to speak to coach Tony Sparano. He wanted to offer him words of encouragement after an 0-6 start.
“That phone call,” Mugrabi said, “jump-started my career.”
After many attempts to reach Sparano, he got through. The team rewarded him with sideline passes to that week’s Dolphins-Giants game at MetLife Stadium. Then, he flew to Miami and got the grand tour. That’s where everything clicked, where a 12-year-old boy figured out what he was going to do for a living: He was going to work in the NFL, either as a general manager — or an agent.
Now he’s achieved that dream. In 2021, at age 22, Mugrabi passed his certification exam and became a licensed NFL agent, the youngest in the league. His client list is constantly growing, as is his reputation around the league, a rising star in a field full of old-timers. He’s doing all of that while living at home, with his parents and three siblings — he’s moving out soon — and working out of a garage with Joe, his younger brother who is already a prominent player marketing agent, too.
And every Friday at nightfall, Mugrabi turns off his phone. As a practicing Orthodox Jew, Mugrabi can’t work on Shabbat — the Jewish day of rest — so his phone goes in a drawer until Saturday afternoon. “He works 24/6,” said Rafi Mugrabi, his father.
Mugrabi’s immigrant parents — from Colombia and Israel — knew nothing about football, but loved watching Mugrabi pursue his passion. He’d watch the games on Sunday, write his own mock drafts, study college prospects, track free agency and write down the contracts players signed. He read up on the league’s general managers — and “read every single book on an agent you can find,” he said. At 16, he convinced his father to fly him to Indianapolis for the NFL combine.
Soon, he was interning for David Canter, one of the NFL’s most prominent agents. At 17, he was listening in on contract negotiations with general managers. Some GMs — like the Seahawks’ John Schneider, Bills’ Brandon Beane, Dolphins’ Chris Grier and Panthers’ Scott Fitterer — have known Mugrabi since he was a teenager.
At 18, he was promoted to vice president of Canter’s homegrown agency, DEC Management. At 19, when Canter went on a three-week vacation — with limited cell service — he left Mugrabi to run most of the day-to-day operations of his company. “There was never one of those 19 or 20 days where I was nervous,” Canter said. When Canter’s company was acquired by GSE Worldwide in 2021, he insisted Mugrabi be brought along with him, or he’d kill the deal.
Mugrabi works in a field where availability and attentiveness are paramount, and he’s unavailable for an entire day, sometimes more depending on the holiday. But it hasn’t impacted his ability to make a name for himself in a field that isn’t very welcoming to newcomers.
“For me, being Orthodox is where I find my passion. I’m a man of my faith,” Mugrabi said. “I think it’s literally from God that nothing crazy happens on Saturdays.”
He makes up for it the rest of the week. Clients tell stories of Mugrabi responding to 3 a.m. texts within five minutes. He helps clients with day-to-day tasks in their lives, like shipping Cody Barton’s car to Virginia for Commanders minicamp. Mugrabi is close with Cowboys star Demarcus Lawrence and his family, with whom he talks constantly. He played a crucial role in negotiating Cameron Sutton’s $33 million deal with the Lions this offseason, DeMarcus Walker’s $21 million deal with the Bears and the $50 million contract Xavien Howard signed with the Dolphins last year. He flew across the country to convince USC’s Tuli Tuipulotu, the FBS sack leader last year, to sign with him.
His client list is long, especially counting all the clients he shares as a partner with Canter, and growing. Other notable clients include Asante Samuel Jr., Leonard Fournette, Greg Rousseau and recent draftees Sydney Brown, Chase Brown, Clark Phillips III and Jayden Reed. (ESPN reported last month that the NFLPA was investigating Canter for allegedly trying to incentivize teams to select players he represents during the 2023 NFL Draft. Canter’s lawyer disputed the allegations and Mugrabi was not cited as part of the NFLPA investigation.)

From left: Asante Samuel Jr., David Canter, Ness Mugrabi and Cody Barton.
“I can say this wholeheartedly: There has never been anyone, ever — and please quote me on this — as passionate, hungry, aggressive and competent as Ness Mugrabi,” Canter said. “And that’s in the entirety of this business. I’m not talking about people that I’ve worked with. I’m talking about agents that I’ve known for 20 years, front-office executives, personnel directors, pro staff, college staff.
“This young man is obsessed with greatness.”
Rafi met Mugrabi’s mother, Maya, in 1997, when she was visiting Brazil from Tel Aviv. They were engaged three weeks later, and within three months, they married. After a few months living in São Paulo, they moved to Midwood in Brooklyn, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. That made the “culture shock,” Maya said, of Rafi leaving his family in Brazil much easier. He found work in wholesale clothing retail, which he still does now.
Ness was born a year later, in July 1998. He’s now the oldest of four. From an early age, Ness already had the agent gene — he was always convincing his siblings to do things. The family had a playground in the backyard. One day, a 10-year-old Ness and Joe, 8, jumped off the slide, and convinced his 5-year-old sister to do the same. She listened.
“I’ve got a way of convincing people,” Ness said. It didn’t go well — she shattered her arm in the jump, he said.
When he was in the sixth grade, Mugrabi convinced his brother to use some of their allowance money to buy NFL jerseys online from China for about $40, and then turn around and sell them for $80. All told, Mugrabi estimates they made “a couple thousand dollars” in sales, and he used some of it to buy a new iPad.
By then, Mugrabi had become a diehard fan of the Dolphins (the first team he watched on television), obsessed with football. His parents knew nothing about it. “It was like another language to me,” his dad said. In 2011, when Mugrabi was 12, his father brought the family to their first game at MetLife Stadium, a Monday night game between the Dolphins and Jets. They sat in the very last row, the nosebleeds, and his father, instead of watching, pulled out a yellow highlighter and work papers, as Mugrabi marveled at everything happening on the field below. He was heartbroken when Jets star Darrelle Revis returned an interception 100 yards for a touchdown.
The next week, the Dolphins played the Broncos in Miami and Mugrabi watched it on TV. After the Dolphins went up 15-0, the Broncos — led by Tim Tebow — came back and won 18-15 in overtime, the start of TebowMania. It was Miami’s sixth straight loss to start the season, and Mugrabi was devastated. He found a 1-800 number for the Dolphins’ stadium online, and when no one answered his call, he left a message, asking to speak with Sparano.
“I wanted to give him some inspiration and words of hope,” Mugrabi said. “I was just saying: I hope you don’t get fired. I hope you guys get it back together.”
He called a few more times, persistent. He needed to talk to Sparano.
Exasperated, a Dolphins receptionist went to Reginald Sperling, the Dolphins’ guest services director, and told him: “There’s a kid that keeps calling, saying he wants to talk to Coach, and I don’t know what to tell him. He’s called so many times.”
So, Sperling told her to transfer the next call to his office. Sure enough, Mugrabi called again, sneaking away to the bathroom in the middle of a school day to try again.
“I remember it was mid-morning and this little voice goes: ‘Hi, my name is Ness. I just wanted to talk to Coach for a minute,’” Sperling said. He told Mugrabi: Well, the Dolphins are practicing right now, so he can’t take your call. Mugrabi’s response: “Well, listen, I’m just calling because I want to tell him to keep his head up. These are challenging times, he’s getting beat up and I just want to tell him he has support.”
Sperling called him back after school, when he was with his parents, and invited the family to the Dolphins’ game that week, at MetLife, against the Giants. He greeted them at the gate with field passes on Sunday. He met players and coaches — Sparano included — and got a signed football. He met Ross too, and they sat with the billionaire owner in his suite.
Sperling became his mentor and later that season, Mugrabi visited him at Sun Life (now known as Hard Rock) Stadium, where he got a tour of the facility and learned how things worked. That’s when he started daydreaming about his future.
“He was just a very young, humble and kind young boy, who had a dream,” Sperling said. “It’s funny … during the first couple of times meeting him, I was like: ‘Ness, one day you’re going to be working in the NFL.’”
Mugrabi is pictured above at right with his brother Joe and Sparano.
When a 16-year-old Mugrabi begged his father to fly with him to Indianapolis, it didn’t take too much convincing — even if his dad had no idea what the “NFL combine” was or why his son wanted to be there. He saw his son’s passion, and that’s all he needed.
“I told Ness, if it’s something you love, we have nothing to lose, only to gain,” his dad said.
“He just let me follow my dreams,” Mugrabi said.
In Indy, Mugrabi walked up to everyone notable that he recognized — he studied what GMs, coaches, agents, personnel directors and scouts looked like — and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Ness Mugrabi, I’m 16 years old, I’m just here at the combine trying to meet people and build a name for myself in the business.”
Later in the week, when most of the NFL crowd had already cleared out, Mugrabi and his father had a late dinner at a (mostly empty) Italian restaurant. When they were seated, Mugrabi spotted an agent he admired — he had some notable Dolphins clients — at the table next to them. Mugrabi walked over and asked: “Are you David Canter? I’m a huge fan. I know all about you and know all of your clients.”
Canter was … skeptical. “I thought that somebody had put him up to it, that it was one of my friends, like a general manager or reporter, and that he’d be pointing at me from the window, laughing,” Canter said. “I’m a sports agent. I’m not famous. That’s not humble pie — I don’t ever expect to be recognized.”
Mugrabi asked for advice about breaking into the business. Impressed, Canter instructed him to reach out after the combine. Quickly, a back-and-forth turned into a working relationship. Now, Canter calls Mugrabi his “co-pilot” and says his three-man operation — which also includes Brian McIntyre, Canter’s director of analytics and contract research — wouldn’t be as successful without him. At first, though, Mugrabi was just an intern “helping get free product for guys,” Mugrabi said. In the first couple of years, Canter let Mugrabi listen in on negotiations with general managers. Canter also educated him on the importance of treating their clients as family.

David Canter, right, says: “There has never been anyone, ever — and please quote me on this — as passionate, hungry, aggressive and competent as Ness Mugrabi.”
He took that to heart. When Tuipulotu was in New York for an appearance on “Good Morning Football,” he stayed at Mugrabi’s house for the night. Mugrabi showed him around town, the first-ever trip to New York for a kid from California.
“That’s the type of person he is. If I need something, he’s there,” said Tuipulotu, drafted by the Chargers. Browns offensive lineman Michael Dunn (whose wife, Marissa, is a podcast producer for The Athletic) has been to barbecues with Mugrabi’s family. And Mugrabi has been on vacation with Barton and Samuel, too. Many of Mugrabi’s clients attended his recent wedding in Brooklyn, and most of them know his mother as well as they know him.
“He cares so much. He’s always there, no matter what for whatever it is,” Barton said. “We don’t just work together — we’re friends.”
Tuipulotu called him “genuine.” Dunn called Mugrabi “mature” and “intellectual” to the point that he often forgets how young he is — that, until a year ago, he was younger than most of the NFL Draft prospects he was representing.
“His work ethic and how he really just grinded to get to where he was from such a young age, it’s really a remarkable story,” Dunn said.
Throughout his rise, he was going to school, working first to earn a bachelor’s degree in person from LIU Brooklyn, and a master’s degree online through Texas A&M. He’d do his agency work until 1 or 2 in the morning, finish his homework for a couple of hours — “That was my free time,” he said — and then sleep until 6 a.m. He got both degrees, and then was officially certified as an agent in 2021. He saved the e-mail he received about passing that exam, and the message he forwarded along with it to his father:
“Thank you, God.”
Mugrabi doesn’t sleep much, but he does rest on Shabbat. He needs it. Every Friday morning, he picks up flowers for his grandmothers, mother and wife, Lauren. At sundown, he puts his phone away. His family prays together, eats — Mugrabi always has the same meal, simple: breaded chicken and bread — and together they catch up, for hours, often past midnight.
“I love every minute of it,” he said.
His mother calls it “the best night of the week.”
That recharge, he said, is crucial. His clients all understand and respect him for sticking with it, even as his agent profile has increased and his responsibilities have become more vital to the operation of Canter’s agency.
Canter, also Jewish, marvels at Mugrabi’s commitment to his faith.
“He has had hundreds of excuses to not be a practicing Orthodox Jew, to use an excuse to say: ‘Just this one time, it’s just too important, I got to skip Shabbos.’ He never, ever, ever, ever, has taken the easy way out. He has never not kept kosher. He never has just crossed into the gray zone once. And that’s the greatest compliment of the man that Ness has become that I can give.”
For Mugrabi, it’s not a difficult calculus.
“My faith is my faith, and it honestly helps me,” Mugrabi said. “That’s what makes me what I am. Shutting my mind off for 24 hours is such a blessing to me — that I’m able to work my f—ing ass off during the week, then Friday to Saturday, it gives me the time to communicate with my family, to be around everybody, to tell stories and get that time I don’t get on a random Tuesday night because I’m on the phone all the time.
“For me, I love my faith. I love the way it challenges me as a person — spiritually, physically, mentally … there’s boundaries in everything. That’s what being Jewish is to me. Sure, you can’t do certain things — and sometimes they’re things you want to do — but at the end of the day, there’s boundaries and ways you have to live your life and what you have to do to be a good Jew — it starts with being a good person.
“That’s how I try to live my life.”
Shortly after Mugrabi was hired by Canter, he called Sperling and excitedly told him: Oh my God, you’re never going to believe this. We just signed a Dolphins player!
“He was so, so excited,” Sperling said. “He was like: You see, it really does come full circle.”
After Howard signed his big deal with the Dolphins last year, Mugrabi had the chance to speak with Ross.
The Dolphins owner remembered him, years later, the little kid who called Tony Sparano.
(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic. All photos courtesy of Ness Mugrabi)