The Academy Sports and Outdoors NOligarchy Profile
T
R
U
S
T
E
D
Academy Sports and Outdoors scores 75.26 out of 100 on the NOligarchy index — a number elevated by a clean political footprint and a near-spotless regulatory record, but anchored down by a wealth extraction machine running at full tilt. The company earns a perfect mark for staying out of Washington entirely, and its one federal fine is a rounding error by any measure. What pulls the score toward the middle is what happens inside the balance sheet: hundreds of millions handed to shareholders while the median worker earns less than $23,000 a year.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
100.0
Wealth Extraction
28.2
Playing by the Rules
92.3
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
•
Political Access Grade: 100/100. Academy Sports and Outdoors filed no federal lobbying disclosures and operated no corporate Political Action Committee (PAC) during the tracking period. Its political footprint is completely absent.
•
Wealth Extraction Grade: 28.01/100. A CEO-to-worker pay gap of more than 400-to-one and over half a billion dollars in stock buybacks across the two most recent reported fiscal years paint a stark picture of who this company’s financial decisions serve.
•
Playing by the Rules Grade: 92.28/100. A single Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fine of $6,914 in 2024 is the entirety of Academy Sports and Outdoors’ regulatory penalty record for the tracked period — a thin docket that reflects well on compliance, even if the fine itself raises questions about deterrence.
Academy Sports and Outdoors ranks 12th out of 22 companies among companies sharing its federal industry classification, the Sporting goods, hobby, and musical instrument retailers sector. The sector average NOligarchy score is 68.3, meaning Academy sits above the typical peer on overall accountability — driven primarily by its zero political spending and minimal penalty record, even as its wealth extraction score pulls in the opposite direction.
The Bottom Line: A Half-Billion-Dollar Windfall for Shareholders While Workers Earn $22,584 a Year
Academy Sports and Outdoors pulled in $6.05 billion in annual revenue. In fiscal years 2024 and 2025, the company poured roughly $564 million into buying back its own stock — a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — while the median Academy employee took home just $22,584 a year, a salary so low it sits below the federal poverty line for a family of three. The company’s chief executive collected compensation equivalent to 443 times that figure. There are no federal lobbying filings and no corporate PAC, and its regulatory penalty record during this period is nearly bare — but the choices Academy makes inside its own balance sheet tell a clear story about whose interests come first.
No Footprint in Washington
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the full eight-quarter, two-year tracking period — Academy Sports and Outdoors spent exactly zero dollars on federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filing database shows no registered activity, and no PAC contributions from the company are on record.
No former government officials were hired as in-house lobbyists, and no outside lobbying firms were retained. For a $6 billion retailer in a sector where competitors routinely spend six figures or more on influence, this absence is notable.
The company cited no specific bills or issue areas in any LDA filing — because it filed none. That means there is no public record of which federal rules Academy Sports and Outdoors wants changed, which regulators it considers obstacles, or which legislative outcomes it considers worth paying to influence. For accountability purposes, that silence cuts both ways: the company is not buying access, but it is also not obligated to disclose its preferences.
EXHIBIT — THE RESERVED SEAT
$0 in lobbying · $0 in PAC money
Academy Sports and Outdoors filed no federal lobbying and ran no corporate PAC in this window — the reserved seat at the witness table sits empty.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over the Workforce
Here is the core tension inside Academy Sports and Outdoors’ finances: while the median worker earned $22,584 in fiscal year 2025 — less than $11 an hour for a full-time schedule — the company channeled hundreds of millions of dollars toward enriching shareholders and its most senior executives.
The CEO pay ratio tells part of the story. According to the company’s own SEC DEF 14A, the CEO pay ratio is 443:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid. In practical terms: for every dollar the person running a cash register or managing a stockroom earned, the chief executive collected $443. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $10 million, against a median employee figure of $22,584.
The buyback numbers are substantial. According to SEC 10-K filings, Academy Sports and Outdoors spent $198.98 million buying back its own stock in fiscal year 2025 and $364.91 million in fiscal year 2024 — a combined $563.89 million across those two years. Each of these purchases was a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — a mechanism that concentrates gains in the hands of the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of the stock market.
Alongside buybacks, the company paid out dividends — $34.66 million in fiscal year 2025 and $31.46 million in fiscal year 2024, totaling roughly $66 million over those two years. These are traditional investor payouts and a far smaller line item than the buyback program.
Academy Sports and Outdoors does not publicly disclose its total employee headcount, so a precise per-worker calculation cannot be made from the available data. What can be said plainly: $563.89 million diverted to buybacks in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 is money that was not spent on raising paychecks. For a workforce paid a median of $22,584 a year — earnings that leave full-time workers struggling to cover rent, groceries, and childcare in most American cities — the scale of what was handed to shareholders instead is not a rounding error. It is a policy choice.
Academy Sports and Outdoors paid both dividends and conducted buybacks simultaneously, which means the choice was not between rewarding investors and rewarding workers. The company was already paying out $34 million a year to traditional dividend holders. It then chose, on top of that, to funnel nearly $365 million more into buybacks in a single fiscal year. Those are two separate decisions, both made in favor of capital owners, neither of which required abandoning worker pay improvements.
The buyback program does not merely reward outside shareholders — it directly benefits the executives who approved it. By reducing the number of shares in circulation, buybacks automatically lift Earnings Per Share (EPS), a metric that sits at the center of most executive bonus formulas. With a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 443:1, the incentive structure is transparent: the executives signing off on hundreds of millions in repurchases are the same people whose performance bonuses rise when those repurchases push EPS higher.
A Workplace Safety Fine That Shouldn’t Be a Footnote
Academy Sports and Outdoors has one violation on the public record within the two-year period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — a single 2024 OSHA citation totaling $6,914. The offense category is a workplace safety or health violation.
One case does not constitute a pattern of lawlessness. But it does establish that Academy Sports and Outdoors failed to meet federal workplace safety standards at least once during this period — and that the infraction was serious enough to generate a formal federal enforcement action. Among the 22 companies tracked in the Sporting goods, hobby, and musical instrument retailers sector, Academy Sports and Outdoors ranks 8th in penalty total — placing it in the better half of the field on compliance.
For a business generating over $6 billion in annual sales, a $6,914 fine is the equivalent of a rounding error — roughly 0.0001% of annual revenue.
This is the median American household.
Two earners, a kid, a dog, $80,610 a year — the exact middle of the country (U.S. Census).
NOTICE OF PENALTY — HOUSEHOLD SCALE
ISSUED TO
the median U.S. household
BASIS
0.0001% of annual income
$0.09
the same share of income that $6,914 in penalties takes of the company’s revenue
Academy Sports and Outdoors's $6,914 in regulatory penalties is 0.0001% of its revenue — for a median household, the same bite as a $0.09 ticket.
That arithmetic raises an obvious accountability question: when the cost of a safety citation is this small relative to earnings, does the penalty function as a genuine deterrent? To put it directly: Academy Sports and Outdoors spent more than $81,500 on stock buybacks for every single dollar it paid in federal fines during this period. The penalty was real. The deterrent math is not.
No public subsidy data is recorded for Academy Sports and Outdoors during this period, so no subsidy contrast is available.