The Under Armour NOligarchy Profile
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Under Armour scores 62.57 out of 100 on the NOligarchy scale — a middling figure that masks a striking internal contradiction: a company that has spent nothing on federal lobbying yet has handed shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars while paying its median worker a wage that would not cover rent in most American cities.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
97.7
Wealth Extraction
35.0
Playing by the Rules
22.3
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.
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Political Access Grade: 97.72/100. Under Armour filed zero federal lobbying disclosures and operated no Political Action Committee (PAC) during the period covered. That near-perfect score reflects a company that chose to stay out of influence spending — though it did place two former government insiders among its registered lobbyist contacts.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 34.66/100. This low score reflects the gulf between what executives pocket and what workers take home — a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 948:1 — combined with a steady stream of stock buybacks that channeled cash to shareholders rather than to the workforce.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 22.31/100. Two regulatory penalties totaling $572,107 — one of them a six-figure insurance violation — place Under Armour among the worst in its sector on enforcement actions. For a company this size, that compliance record is a warning sign.
Under Armour ranks 16th out of 22 companies among companies sharing its federal industry classification, Sporting Goods, Hobby, and Musical Instrument Retailers. The sector average NOligarchy score is 68.3; Under Armour’s 62.57 trails that benchmark by more than 5 points, making it one of the more notable accountability laggards among its classified peers.
The Bottom Line: A Company That Skips Washington but Doesn’t Skip the Buybacks
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the eight quarters covered in this profile — Under Armour revealed a company with a split personality. It chose to spend nothing to purchase political access in Washington, a discipline that most corporations its size abandon almost immediately. But that restraint did not extend to how it treated the people building and selling its products. The company poured $165 million into buying back its own stock across the two most recent reported fiscal years while its median worker earned just $12,232 a year. Its CEO, by contrast, pocketed compensation equivalent to what 948 of those workers earn combined. The regulatory record adds a further layer: two enforcement actions, including a $559,107 insurance penalty, signal that rule-following is not a consistent priority.
Connected Insiders, Zero Dollars Spent
Under Armour spent nothing on federal lobbying and operated no PAC during Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database shows zero lobbying dollars filed. No external lobbying firms were retained. No issue areas were registered. No bills were cited in any disclosure.
The zero-spend picture is not quite the whole story, however. Among the 14 registered lobbyist contacts associated with Under Armour, two carry significant prior government experience. Jeffrey Strunk served as Deputy Floor Director and Floor Assistant under Speaker John Boehner and as a Legislative Assistant to Boehner’s office and to Representative Pat Tiberi. Marc Gerson held the post of House Ways and Means Committee Majority Tax Counsel — the committee that writes federal tax law. Both individuals now appear in Under Armour’s lobbyist roster. Their presence signals that the company has positioned itself to move quickly if it ever chooses to engage Washington, even if it has not yet pulled that lever.
Executives did make small personal political contributions — a combined $150 recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — a figure so small it registers as statistical noise rather than political intent.
For a company with nearly $5 billion in annual revenue competing in markets shaped by tariffs on imported goods, labor regulations, and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advertising standards, the absence of active lobbying spending remains genuinely unusual. Most apparel and sporting goods brands of comparable scale maintain funded operations focused on trade policy, import duties, and textile sourcing rules — areas where a single regulatory change can move margins by several points. Under Armour’s silence on those fronts is a deliberate choice, even if the talent sitting in reserve suggests it could reverse course quickly.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over the Workforce
The starkest number in Under Armour’s public filings is not a revenue figure or a fine. It is the median worker’s annual earnings: $12,232. That is the compensation the company itself disclosed in its proxy statement for the typical member of its 14,400-person workforce.
Against that backdrop, the CEO’s pay tells a different story. The CEO pay ratio is 948:1, according to the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s total compensation in the most recent reported fiscal year was about $11.6 million. That is not a rounding difference between executive and worker pay — it is a chasm. For every dollar earned by the median Under Armour worker, the CEO collected $948.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 14K employees
Spent on buybacks
$165.0M
directed to shareholders
÷ 14K
workers
Per-worker raise
$11,458
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 47% annual raise on the median worker's $12,232 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
The Shareholder Payout: Alongside that pay structure, Under Armour executed a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — totaling $165 million across fiscal years 2024 and 2025: $75 million in fiscal year 2024 and $90 million in fiscal year 2025, per the SEC 10-K. This cash went to investors, primarily the wealthiest 10% of Americans who own 93% of all stocks.
The Missed Raise: The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 14,400 workers a $11,458.33 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $5,729.16 annual raise the company chose not to give.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 14,400
Your share of the buyback
+$11,458
Per biweekly paycheck
+$220.35
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $165 million.
Spread across Under Armour's 14,400 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $11,458 per worker — about $220 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
The Dividend Factor: Under Armour paid no dividends during this period, according to the SEC 10-K. The company abandoned traditional investor payouts entirely, concentrating all shareholder returns into buybacks — a more targeted mechanism for lifting per-share price that disproportionately rewards insiders and large institutional holders who can time their exits. Dividends go to every shareholder proportionally; buybacks reward the ones best positioned to sell at the inflated price.
Executive Bonuses: By reducing the total number of shares in circulation, buybacks automatically increase Earnings Per Share (EPS) — a key metric tied to executive performance bonuses — without any improvement in underlying business performance. With a 948:1 pay ratio, the CEO is among the direct beneficiaries of that mechanism. The executives who approved the buybacks are the same executives whose incentive packages are triggered by the per-share numbers those buybacks inflate.
Fines Treated as a Business Expense
Under Armour accumulated two regulatory penalties between 2024 and 2025, totaling $572,107 — a relatively small dollar sum for a company generating nearly $5 billion in annual revenue, but a record that places it fourth-highest among the 22 companies tracked in its sector over the two-year period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026.
Regulatory Violations by Year
$572K · 2 cases
$13K
2024
1 case
$559K
2025
1 case
The Pattern: The dominant offense category by dollar value was insurance violations. A single case in this category accounts for $559,107 of the total fine bill — 98% of Under Armour’s entire penalty exposure. That concentration in one case type points to a compliance gap in how the company managed its insurance obligations, not a scattered set of unrelated missteps.
The Big Case: In 2025, Maryland’s insurance regulator — the Maryland Insurance Administration — issued Under Armour a $559,107 penalty for an insurance violation. The details of the underlying conduct are recorded in the public enforcement docket. The remaining $13,000 came from California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District in 2024 for an air pollution violation — a separate compliance failure involving environmental standards.
Taken together, the two cases — one financial regulatory breach, one environmental — show a company that encountered enforcement action on two distinct fronts within a single span. For a brand that markets itself on athletic discipline and precision, the regulatory record suggests those standards are applied unevenly off the field.
No public subsidy data was recorded for Under Armour during this period, so no government grant or tax credit offset is available to contrast against the penalty record.