Here are six things we’re discussing to start the week ⚽🎾…

What I’m Wondering 📺: Grand Slam tennis is back on ESPN networks, which means a new streaming schema. Jacob’s pretty sure the first stuff he watched on ESPN+ after its 2018 launch was that summer’s grass-court action. This year, ESPN+ doesn’t have any Wimbledon coverage; instead, every match is on ESPN Unlimited (in addition to daily coverage on ESPN/ESPN2 and some matches on ABC). Here’s our best attempt at tracking the evolution over the last two years (h/t Canva):

Predictably, folks had two very different reactions.

A. “I was pleasantly surprised in preparing for my Wimbledon experience to find that I already had ESPN Unlimited as part of my cable subscription.”
B. “@espn Once again your greed will consume you.”

ESPN+ is sticking around, home to smaller events, 30 for 30s, etc. But ESPN Unlimited is clearly the company’s favored child. It’s right there in the name. Everything else must be limited.

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Story We’re Jealous Of 🎾: We had a 30-minute call at Sportico last week brainstorming story ideas for Serena Williams’ return to singles tennis at Wimbledon. Much has already been made about her GLP-1 endorsement, and her many superlative business records both on the court and off it. We wish we’d come up with this idea, cross-posted by Jessica Schiffer’s Hard Court and Ben Rothenberg’s Bounces1, asking why one of Serena’s longest-running partners was suspiciously quiet about her return.

Hard Court

Amid buzz around Serena Williams’ return, why was Wilson quiet?

This post is a collaboration between Hard Court and Bounces at the intersection of two of our respective interests: tennis sponsorships and Serena Williams’ return to professional tennis…

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3 days ago · 34 likes · 3 comments · Jessica Schiffer and Ben Rothenberg

Story That We Love ❤️: This Twitter thread from an American woman, who went to a World Cup watch party in Oakland for Cape Verde, and ended up meeting someone from her past2. There’s a lot of (legitimate) skepticism about the World Cup, but we can still enjoy the great aspects too.

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Story We’re Following 🎽: Speaking of Cape Verde, the team’s Cinderella run at this World Cup has sparked a fascinating battle over licensing rights. The Blue Sharks currently play in jerseys made by Capelli, an American company that signed a four-year deal with the federation earlier this year, but its prior partner, an Austrian company called Tempo, is advertising across social media taking pre-orders for the Cape Verde jerseys that the team wore last year. Capelli has sent Tempo a cease-and-desist, and Tempo is almost certainly acting outside its rights here, but unlicensed merch (even brazen examples like this) is a game of Whac-A-Mole that will likely never end.

Non-Sportico Story of the Week ⚽: The defending World Cup champions have picked up right where they left off—Argentina won all three group stage matches by a combined score of 8-1 and Lionel Messi has already scored six goals. But simmering underneath the team’s incredible success is a youth soccer culture rife with exploitation. According to a recent ESPN investigation, “thousands of vulnerable children—unpaid, separated from their families, warehoused in unregulated dorms—face, at one extreme, sexual predation, but also extortion, hunger and neglect.” Kudos to Steve Fainaru for this incredible piece, which should be required reading for anyone enjoying the World Cup.

Sportico Story of the Week 🏀: The NBA is likely just a few weeks away from starting to announce the groups that will own teams in its new European league. Teams in 12 different cities are expected to sell for hundreds of millions—some may top $1 billion—and will begin play in NBA Europe in 2027. This week Eben and Scott broke down the economic plan for the new league, including how it will share revenue, how it will distribute the billions in franchise sales, and what teams will be allowed to sell by themselves.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with some extra humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about a title that’s part gift, part curse.

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((Update: HE WON!))

If you’re a casual tennis fan, you may not know much about Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, the current world No. 25 and one-time Grand Slam quarterfinalist. But he takes up a disproportionate amount of brain space among our office’s tennis fans.

That’s because Fokina has yet to win an ATP singles title.

Okay, what’s the big deal? Lots of players have never won titles. Well, despite never winning a title, Fokina has earned $11.7 million in prize money over the course of his career.

He’s played in 148 tournaments. He hasn’t won any of them. And he’s pocketed eight figures in prize money from those events.

The next most prize money from a player who hasn’t won a title is $7.3 million from fellow countryman Jaume Munar—just over 60% of Foki’s haul. There’s only one other player on tour who’s made at least $10 million and hasn’t won multiple titles.

Fokina is, like, really good at tennis. He has a 4-4 career record versus Taylor Fritz (10 titles), a 3-4 record versus Alex de Minaur (11 titles), and a 3-4 record versus Casper Ruud (14 titles and three Grand Slam finals appearances). He just hasn’t been able to get over the hump himself.

It’s hard to win an ATP title, but it’s not THAT hard. More than 20 players have already done it in 2026, and we’re only halfway through the calendar year. Many ATP 250s only require four wins for players who get a first round bye, and draws sometimes contain only one or no top 10 players. Kamil Majchrzak, who has never finished a season ranked in the top 50, just won one at ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

Among active men’s players, Fokina’s $11.7 million in prize money sits between Alexander Bublik and Ugo Humbert. Bublik has nine career singles titles. Humbert has seven!

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In Fokina’s defense, he did make four finals in 2025. He just lost all of them. During each one, our office was collectively on what we now call “Fokina Watch.”

We bring all of this to your attention today because Fokina is on the precipice of ending “Fokina Watch” once and for all. With a come from behind win over Fabian Maroszan today, he advanced to the finals of Mallorca, a grass event that contained only one other top 30 player after Frances Tiafoe withdrew. He will play American Ethan Quinn1 in the final, and he’ll likely be a decent favorite. If he can’t win this one, we’re starting to think it might never happen.

Asked after the semifinal match about how he’d approach yet anther chance at a title, Fokina paused, took a breath, and chose his words carefully.

“I’m very excited,” he said. “I will try my best tomorrow.”

His chances look good, but this is far from the closest Fokina has gotten to a championship.

Leading 6-3, 1-6, 5-2 in the 2025 Delray Beach Open final, Fokina ripped a forehand down the line on match point that would have been a championship-clinching winner had it not landed out by less than an inch. He then squandered a second match point before eventually losing 5-7 in the third set to Miomir Kecmanovic.

A few months later, Fokina found himself in a similar spot in the 2025 Mubadala Citi DC Open final against De Minaur, attacking with a forehand up the line on match point. This time, his shot went in, but his opponent hit a no-look defensive lob that just landed on the sideline. De Minaur eventually won the point, one of three match points he saved, and beat Fokina in a third-set tiebreaker.

Prior to the trophy ceremony following the match, De Minaur was seen sitting next to Fokina consoling him after yet another brutal loss. Here’s that heartwarming video, via the Tennis Channel 👇

“I know [Fokina] is probably thinking about trying to win that first title just to get that monkey off his back, but what he’s doing is so much better than winning that title, essentially,” De Minaur told Sportico at the 2025 U.S. Open. “He’s putting up results that are pretty impressive, he’s a top 20 player, he’s a force to be reckoned with … whether he has a title or not doesn’t really change that.”

I’m not sure Fokina would agree, although he didn’t really engage with the topic when I asked him about it last fall. He’s generally soft-spoken in interviews. He’s apparently an animal lover. His fiery personality and roller-coaster of emotions on the court provide a stark contrast.

More than five years after he first cracked the ATP top 50, Fokina’s Sisyphean journey could end on Saturday. If not, he’ll still have $11.7 million reasons to be happy about his career2. Either way, we’ll be watching.

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Eben’s 🔥 Take: VAMOS FOKI! I love the idea of tennis having a “richest loser”—the person who has won the most money without having any tournament titles—but I’m ready for it to be someone else.

By the way, every time I talk to someone about Fokina, they ask the same question: ‘Why doesn’t he just enter a really bad tournament and win that?’ And the truth is that he has tried. This Mallorca event is an ATP 250, the lowest tier on the main men’s Tour. It’s his fourth 250 of the calendar year; last year he entered six of them.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

The World Cup is in full swing. Here are six sports business(ish) items that have stood out so far ⚽…

What I’m Wondering 🏅: In the build-up to this summer’s World Cup, President Donald Trump seemed to be everywhere. Receiving FIFA’s inaugural Peace Prize. Hosting Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at the White House. Threatening to pull matches from Boston. Commenting on the price of tickets.

Then the games started, and he’s… gone quiet?

Trump has made himself a presence at plenty of sporting events, from the Super Bowl to the NBA Finals. And he’s expected to be on-hand for the World Cup final. But despite being active on Truth Social over the last week, he hasn’t posted about a pair of strong U.S. performances. The Athletic has a good dive this morning on what’s going on inside the White House (including, naturally, some confusing social media behavior from governmental agencies1).

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What I Want 🇺🇸: A better name for the U.S. men’s national team.

The Americans are getting everyone’s hopes up through two matches, with their odds of winning a first World Cup nearly doubling (though they’re still an extreme longshot at ~3%).

If we’re going to keep talking about them through multiple knockout rounds, we can’t keep calling them USMNT. It looks bad in print and is even more annoying to say in conversation.

Other countries have great nicknames: Samurai Blue, The Three Lions, White Wolves etc. etc. etc. Off the top of my head,2 here are five better names we should be calling the U.S. side:

5 - The American Dream. This was Ben Mathis-Lilley’s suggestion back in 2014. Maybe just The Dream for short. Plays off the U.S.’s past basketball dream teams, obviously. I like it.

4 - The Yanks. Some foreigners seem to use this for us already. It’s fine, if a bit close to that baseball team from the Bronx for my liking.

3 - Stars and Stripes. Here’s the most common alternative to USMNT I’ve seen, and Nike is playing into it with this summer’s kit design. But it’s still a bit of a mouthful.

2 - Uncles Sam. If we’re not always winning on the pitch, we can at least be grammatically correct.

1 - Rock Stars. This is the one, I think. You get to keep the stars iconography, while also referencing America’s cultural power3. Jamaica are known as the Reggae Boyz, so musical influence has been proven to work. Let’s rock! 👨‍🎤🎸

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What I’m Loving ⚽: The World Cup!

There was plenty of doom and gloom heading into the competition, but I’m feeling good about my prediction that we’d look back on this event as a success.

In particular, FIFA deserves credit for the quality of play. Goals are up 📈, time-wasting is down 📉. The “hydration” breaks suck, but if that’s the cost of getting games that consistently deliver the excitement we’ve seen so far (and always start on time), I’ll take it.

What I Hate 😡: Ok, hate is a strong word for what I’m about to complain about, but if Club Sportico exists for one reason, it’s for me to complain about broadcast minutiae.

In recent tournaments, the “wipe” transition that carries viewers from replays back to live action has featured the tournament’s logo, which is generally a nod to a host country’s local iconography. 2022’s was particularly impressive, I thought, with video “emerging” from a twisty version of FIFA’s trophy.

This year, however, we just get a golden FIFA logo over and over and over again. Here’s how the wipes have evolved over the last 20 years. As always, my apologies if this impacts your World Cup viewing experience.

The Group Stage’s Biggest Winner 💰: Before the World Cup, Argentinian influencer “El Scarso” picked the “least-known” player in the tournament to support. At the time, New Zealand defender Tim Payne had under 5,000 followers on Instagram, playing on the World Cup’s lowest-ranked team. Payne embraced the spotlight, and now, in addition to 5.8 million IG followers, he’s got a one-year deal with Paraguay’s Olimpia, which just won its domestic league. His announcement has more than a million views on X.4

What I’m Listening To 🎧: I’ve enjoyed hearing British podcasters break down the World Cup—both on and off the pitch—from their perspective, in particular on The Athletic’s Tifo Football Podcast and Netflix’s The Rest Is Football.

Three other soccer-focused podcasts have risen in the top 10 on Apple’s list of top sports shows. I’ll be fascinated to see how well these podcasts can retain their audiences over the summer and beyond. But I already believe that the improved ability to watch European soccer year-round and consume content about the games online will make it a lot easier to become—and remain—a fan of the game than it was the last time the U.S. hosted the World Cup.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with some extra humor and opinion. Today we’re putting your 🐂💩 detector to the test.

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Despite numerous changes to the social platform known as Twitter when the last World Cup was held—the introduction of an algorithmic, interest-based timeline; the influx of vertical video; the debut of Grok; the verification system’s overhaul; the surge in AI-created content; the return of previously banned accounts and the emigration of dissatisfied users to new alternatives like Bluesky and Threads—Elon Musk’s “everything app” continues to drive sports conversation. Sports Twitter lives on, if in a somewhat undead form.

While TikTok and Instagram drove trends during recent Olympic Games, it’s X that feels best suited for the present moment. The platform’s auto-translate features have allowed us to enjoy memes from around the world.

And X still offers the some of the quickest, deepest connections between unknown fans and celebrities, while other platforms increasingly feel like one-to-many distribution systems programmed by professional account managers.

But it’s not all sunshine☀️ and lollipops 🍭 in Elon’s “digital town square.” Anyone who has spent time on the site has also been subjected to spammy content, AI-created misinformation, marketing ploys, and other shameless bids for attention (or worse). Slop comes in many forms.

During the World Cup, the combination has created a real-time online literacy test. Now it’s time to see how you do!

Club Sportico has gathered some of the most viral World Cup content from the tournament’s first week. Some of it is authentically heartwarming. Some of it isn’t. We’re curious to see how you score each post, then stick around for our take.

Club Sportico’s World Cup Slop Test

1. Freddy from Germany

2. Japanese fan discovers Mexican restaurant

3. Japanese fan discovers Texas Roadhouse

4. Three Lions celebrate English win

5. Swedish fan survives Golden Corral

6. BBC pundit finds waddling Mexico supporter

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OUR RULINGS

Before we get to our takes, a word of encouragement if that was a struggle: It shouldn’t be this hard to tell real from shill online.

“We want people to be more discerning, not blanket skeptical, nor blanket gullible,” Purdue University assistant professor Daniel Schiff recently told me. “But it's an incredibly difficult burden to ask individuals to be technical forensics experts or professional fact checkers, especially when the moderation strategies for fact checking, watermarking, or labeling are so piecemeal.”

1. Freddy from Germany

Freddy from Germany has been the undisputed breakout star of the World Cup so far, on or off the pitch. And while we were among the initially skeptical, the New Orleans Saints staff verified his traveler bonafides when he visited their practice facility. He later got to talk to astronauts on the International Space Station.

Brands are now clamoring to get on board but Freddy seems to be largely holding them off, though he might be playing up his naivety for clicks.

Our Ruling: 100% Authentic ☺️1

2. Japanese fan discovers Mexican food

The Atlantic’s Will Oremus chatted with this account’s creator, who said “that the aim of the stories is comedy, not ‘realism, journalism, or persuasion.’” We find it a bit disingenuous—a fabricated anecdote if not entirely AI-created.

Our Ruling: 100% Inauthentic 🤢

BTW, a related video of an Italian person discovering refills also feels like classic engagement bait. The Azzurri aren’t even in the Wold Cup!

3. Japanese fan discovers Texas Roadhouse

Now this one seems legit. The poster later uploaded images from Japan’s match against the Netherlands.2

The chain has since leaned into the trend, inviting Freddy to dine at one of its locations as @texasroadhouse started posting on X for the first time in over a year.

Our Ruling: 100% Authentic 🍴 (and you can’t blame a brand for trying to join in on the fun)

4. Three Lions celebrate English win

So many English fans are partying across the U.S.; we didn’t need to see AI-generated animals instead. The middle lion doesn’t even eat the part of the cookie he dipped 😔

Our Ruling: 100% Inauthentic 🦁

Need a palette cleanser? Here’s what seems to be the world’s biggest fan of Fort Worth (but also a professional travel content creator 🙃) .3

5. Swedish fan survives Golden Corral

Maybe one of the trickier questions on the test. As Oremus wisely pointed out, this isn’t Elsa Thora’s first time in the spotlight…

With attention turning to the pitch, Elsa later went for the oldest engagement trick in the book: activating the In-N-Out debate

Our Ruling: Slop-ish 🤷

6. BBC pundit finds waddling Mexico supporter

Stranger than anything AI could’ve produced. It had to be real. Meet Merlin.

Our Ruling: 100% Authentic 🦆

Did we miss your favorite content from the World Cup so far? Share it in the comments! Or ask our experts to evaluate how real other viral posts are…4

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

The World Cup is underway and the Knicks are NBA Champs. Here are some things we’re talking about on Monday…

Non-Sportico Story Of the Week 🏀: I loved this essay—love letter, really—written by my friend Matt Flegenheimer about the Knicks celebrations across New York City on Saturday night. Matt is a lifelong Knicks fans and on Sunday morning we asked him whether he remembered writing it.

What I Don’t Understand 😵‍💫: The UFC event on the White House lawn on Sunday was a bizarre spectacle for myriad reasons, ranging from dramatic and patriotic to absurd and grotesque. But by far the weirdest part was a since-deleted tweet from former UFC champion and broadcast analyst Daniel Cormier, that appears to show DMs from Eric Trump asking which matches are fixed. Here’s a screenshot 👇

Trump has denied sending these DMs and called them fake. Cormier told TMZ that he was “hacked or something” but has offered very little else in terms of explanation. I’m not buying that convenient excuse, but I also have no faith that the powers that be in UFC or the U.S. Government will do anything to find out.

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Sportico Story of the Week 🎭: My colleague Sara wrote a great column on Monday about the increased blend of social media content and advertising. You may have read this viral (and terrifying) Vulture story from a few weeks back that posited that “90% of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise.” Sara gives the topic a sports focus, starting with Nike and expanding into other viral content that might not be as genuine and organic as it looks.

What I Loved 🎥: So while we at Club Sportico contend that most internet advertising sucks, occasionally it rocks. Here are two examples, one from Fanatics and one from ‘47, about Knicks fans.

What I (Also) Loved 👗: I am very very very skeptical about all these viral accounts claiming to be Europeans learning about American culture (read Sara’s story above!). But I’m choosing to believe that these incredible videos of Scottish fans in Boston are genuine. Here’s the Tartan Army on the march, hyping a local police officer, playing bagpipes at their Airbnb, and enjoying Boston’s one famous slide.

And here, via BBC, the group taking over Fenway Park 👇

What I Loved The Most 🧢: Thanks to all of you who came by our NYC studio last Thursday for our live hang with Backyard Sports and Substack. The night had some great moments, including a full account of the real reason your favorite childhood video game is coming back. It involves a private investigator, Reddit stalking, and of course, Taylor Swift.

But I’ll never forget Jacob putting on the Pablo Sanchez costume and hitting the New York streets on a 99-degree day.

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with some extra humor and opinion. Today we’re asking: Do you believe that we will win?

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Soccer romantics love to say that the hopes of an entire nation ride on its national team during the World Cup. Those people, I contend, haven’t spent much time in America.

But while the U.S. men’s national team (USMNT) might not have the cultural heft of Les Bleus in France, the Black Stars in Ghana or Seleção in Brazil, the squad opens play Friday against Paraguay carrying a unique financial pressure, one larger than almost any other team in the world.

That’s because the entire multibillion-dollar enterprise of soccer in America is increasingly looking toward the USMNT, which has struggled over the past year, to solve a problem they didn’t expect to have in June 2026. The men’s World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world, and yet many local fans need something to pull attention away from visa problems, ticket prices, transportation fears, empty seats, and the Trump-FIFA bromance.1 The USMNT is their best hope.

U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino was asked this week about connecting with casual U.S. sports fans. He spoke first about playing with passion and building an emotional connection with Americans. Then he shifted to the real issue. “But we need to win,” he added. “The important thing is to win.”

Soccer has occupied a strange place in American sports since the U.S. last hosted this event in 1994. It’s tremendously popular as a participation sport—second only to basketball among team activities2—and it has a very loyal following among many Americans, particularly younger ones.

Contrary to what the talking heads say, this is very much a soccer country. And yet everyone associated with the sport in the U.S. believes there is much broader appeal (and a much bigger business opportunity) simmering just below the surface, waiting to explode if given the right spark.

Enter the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup. For the past decade, many of those people have spoken optimistically about this moment, with 78 of the event’s 104 games being held across eleven different U.S. cities. It’s been baked into the thesis for basically everyone who recently bought into Major League Soccer. It’s launched investment funds and new media companies; hospitality businesses and real estate development.

But the run-up to this event has been rough. The tight relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino has turned off many fans.3 Others balked at the sky-high ticket prices. In New York, there’s been far more talk about visa issues and public transportation concerns than there has been about the soccer itself. The six-week tournament kicked off Thursday to tepid U.S. buzz.

The eyes of the nation might not be on USMNT, but the eyes of the U.S. soccer industry sure are.

Consider MLS. There are 45 MLS players in the World Cup, and only eight of them are on the USMNT, but the league is banking on a surge of new interest in soccer across the country. That only happens if the World Cup’s group stage resonates with casual fans.

“We’re working with our teams’ chief business officers on a weekly basis, talking about the countdown to the World Cup and how we can be sure that everybody knows we’re here,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said recently on our Sportico Sports Business television show. “How do we capture the momentum of the world’s largest event, and on the day it’s over say, ‘Thanks world, we’ll take it from here.’”

(For what it’s worth, while I’m not convinced there’s a business boom coming for MLS on the back of this World Cup, it’s definitely true that the league has already reaped a business boom from the anticipation of the event. MLS valuations have grown 220% in the eight years since North America was awarded hosting honors. Expansion fees to join the league have jumped from $70 million to $500 million.)

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Others across the U.S. soccer landscape are in a similar place. Youth sports may be the hottest investment sector in U.S. sports, and soccer is a juggernaut. About 2.5 million kids in America play soccer, a wide swath that covers town rec leagues all the way through elite academies and high school programs. Many expect that number to grow on the back of a successful World Cup, particularly if young Americans are inspired by the USMNT.

It’s true for media companies, too. Fox very notoriously received a hefty discount to broadcast this World Cup, paying less than $500 million for rights likely worth 3x that much4, but there’s no doubt that a good U.S. run would work wonders for ratings and advertising deliverables. The most-watched group stage match in American history was the USMNT win over Portugal in 2014. The next most-watched was USMNT vs. England in 2022. If you look deeper down the list, the trend is clear—the men’s team draws outsized group stage audiences when there’s reason for fans to tune in.

In hopes of stirring excitement, Fox recently ran a commercial that envisioned the team… winning the entire tournament!5

If you’re heavily reliant on the U.S. team’s success, there are myriad reasons for concern. The team made a big coaching splash last year with Pochettino but has been pretty mediocre in its tune-ups for this World Cup. The USMNT is winless in its last 10 matches against European nations, including blowout losses to Belgium (5-2) and Switzerland (4-0). By some metrics, the team has regressed over the past few World Cup cycles. The U.S. entered the 2006 World Cup as the No. 5 team in FIFA’s global rankings. It enters this event as the No. 17.

But there’s also good news. This is a bigger tournament, 48 teams instead of 32, and twice as many nations will advance to the knockout stage. As a host, the U.S. was automatically made a Pot 1 country, guaranteeing there wouldn’t be another Top 10 team in its group. The rest of the group is fine—Paraguay and Turkey are decent teams and Australia was the lowest-ranked team the U.S. could possibly have drawn from Pot 3.

All in all, it’s a remarkably easy group for a host nation ranked outside the Top 15. Barring an absolute disaster, this team will make the knockout stages. After that, anything can happen.

My head tells me the U.S. squad won’t play much longer than that point. But if you’re looking for optimism, watch this absolute screamer from Antonee Robinson 👇

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Jacob’s 🔥 Take: U.S. soccer saw a big bump from hosting the 1994 World Cup, but it was also a lot harder to follow other leagues back then. Surely Americans will fall in love with Robinson or Tim Weah this summer, but many others seem destined to become enamored with Spain’s Yamine Lamal or England’s Jude Bellingham. And between social media and streaming, it’ll be much easier to follow them back to their domestic leagues this fall.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

We’re getting ready for the World Cup—and our networking hang on Thursday in NYC! Don’t forget to RSVP!

🚨🚨 GOING YARD WITH BACKYARD BASEBALL 🚨🚨

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Eben’s Two World Cups Theory 📉 📈: I’ve been asked a lot recently about the relatively tepid vibes in the U.S surrounding the World Cup. Here’s how I’m thinking about it:

There are really two World Cups. The first is the 72 group stage games. There are a handful of good matchups over those three weeks, and there will be some upsets, but this first World Cup is going to be a little bit of a drag. There are so many teams, and so many games. There will be empty seats, and toward the end, real World Cup fatigue.

Then the second World Cup begins. The knockout stages will concentrate the talent and raise the stakes. By the time we get to England vs. France, or Brazil vs. Argentina, this tournament will be a sensation. The semifinals and finals will be the three biggest sporting events ever held.

What I’m Not Sure Whether to Laugh 😂 or Cry 😢 About: The heat. There have already been some great memes of Norwegian and English footballers adjusting to the U.S. summer.

And yet, the blistering sun is no joke. Temperatures could impact players and fans alike over the next few weeks. We’ve already seen heat shake up Roland-Garros. Hopefully the weather remains a laughing matter…

(If you want to read more about how players are biohacking to prepare for the conditions, we did a deep dive on the topic ahead of the 2024 Olympics.)

Non-Sportico Story of the Week 🌱: FIFA spent more than $5 million on grass research for this World Cup, creating 16 different pitches designed to perform everywhere from Guadalajara to Toronto. BBC put together a great breakdown of the challenges scientists faced—and the solutions they came up with, including mixing natural turf with artificial fibers.

HALFTIME ⚽: Here’s FIFA boss Gianni Infantino kicking a soccer ball.

A Ticket Update 🎟️: Expensive tickets have been the most enduring story of the run-up to the World Cup, and with games just a few days away, FIFA is still sitting on tens of thousands of unsold tickets. Here’s what one section looks like at publish time for the U.S. team’s first game against Paraguay in Los Angeles on June 12 (unsold seats in red).

We’re at the point now where FIFA has to do something. And as we’ve discussed before, there are a few levers to pull. The governing body can 1) drastically lower prices, 2) filter more and more tickets to secondary market brokers who unload inventory on the resale sites, or 3) quietly give tickets away to sponsors, charities or fans on the street. I’m expecting to see a little of all three, but with an emphasis on 2 and 3.

What I’m Worried About 😬: If you see a World Cup ticket offer that seems too good to be true, think twice before clicking through. The FBI is warning fans about scammers exploiting excitement—and naivete—around this summer’s festivities. AI tools only make realistic messages and websites easier to build. One recent report found 19,000 domains created since January with references to “FIFA.” Watch out!

Sportico Story of the Week 🏟️: There are sixteen cities across North America hosting the World Cup. On Monday our colleague Luke Cyphers wrote about a handful that aren’t. Do officials in Montreal, Chicago or Minneapolis have any regrets? Doesn’t seem like it!

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Let’s end on an exciting note. Here’s how Paraguay sent off its World Cup team last week 🎆:

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about colors 🎨.

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The San Antonio Spurs opened the NBA Finals at home with another glorious Fiesta night. Just as they’d done in previous rounds, fans wore the team’s 1990s “Fiesta” shades, divided into tangerine, fuchsia and turquoise sections of the arena, to create an awesome visual.

But, unlike in the first two rounds, the team itself was not dressed as colorfully. Despite being cheered on by a giant sherbet menu, the Spurs wore their traditional black instead of their Fiesta jerseys. This wasn’t a surprise—Sportico explained back in April that the NBA requires teams to wear their “primary uniforms” in the conference finals and Finals.

The league’s priorities, though, seemed contradictory to me. If the NBA wants a more classic look for the higher-profile later rounds, then why allow the Spurs to wear black at home, when home teams typically wore white for the league’s first 70 years?

I talked to Christopher Arena, the NBA’s SVP of on-court and brand partnerships, to get his perspective.

First, some background info. Before the 2017-18 season, Nike took over the NBA’s uniform business from Adidas. The company scrapped the whole concept of home/road jerseys and implemented a new naming system for uniforms:

• Association: a white jersey

• Icon: a dark jersey

• Statement: an alternate color jersey

• City Edition: changes annually, no color restrictions

• Classic: a throwback jersey

The first three—Association, Icon and Statement—are all considered part of the “core” and are fair game for the Conference Finals and Finals. The Knicks’ black jersey is their Statement, so they wore that against the Cavs in Game 2. The Spurs’ Fiesta uniform is their City Edition, however, so it’s off limits. I would argue the latter has more connective tissue with its team’s “core” identity than the former, but apparently the NBA’s policy is as much for practical reasons as it is about vibes.

“Classic Edition uniforms and City Edition uniforms are one-year uniforms… and so by the end of the season in May or June, in most cases, a retailer globally or domestically or even the team shop is probably sold out of that,” Arena said. “It becomes a harder fan experience to get caught up in this frenzy and then not be able to participate in it by buying a jersey.”

In this new era, the home team gets to choose its uniform, then the road team then chooses one that’s sufficiently contrasting.

That naturally led to a degradation, and later a complete abandonment, of the home whites tradition. In the 2017 playoffs, 91% of games featured a home team wearing white. That dropped to 51% the following year. By 2021, it was down to 13%, when teams like the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz decided to exclusively go with City Edition at home. That postseason, we saw more home teams wearing black with a strip of a fiery color gradient than wearing white.

Alternate jerseys began appearing more frequently on the league’s biggest stage. I actually didn’t mind Phoenix and Utah committing to one special uniform for an entire playoff run (wouldn’t mind seeing this for San Antonio with Fiesta at some point), but other teams in the early 2020s would swap their color schemes game-to-game, which created a visual mess.

The trend hit a particular low point in the 2024 Finals when the Dallas Mavericks wore black alternates for Game 1, followed by the Boston Celtics wearing their black alternates for Game 2, causing potential confusion for casual fans (I also think the Celtics’ black unis should be put in a cannon and fired into outer space, but that’s besides the point).

That’s when the league stepped in with its aforementioned late-round policy, which was a smart move.

This postseason, still, only 32% of games have featured home teams in white. Many fans, including several with millions of social media followers, have voiced a desire for that number to be up in the 90s… just like it was in the 90s.

The dilemma for the league, however, is that teams have now introduced so many alternate jerseys (up to four at a time, including one new one each year). Showcasing those jerseys to an away crowd makes no sense from a merchandise and marketing perspective.

“There’s something about world-building as a team hosts a game that they can tell a story wearing whichever uniform they’re wearing,” Arena said. “If in the early rounds, that’s about City Edition and Fiesta and doing t-shirt giveaways that paint the crowd, great. If that’s about a more traditional team like the Knicks and they just want to wear white at home, that’s great too.”

This approach has its drawbacks. I told Arena about watching games with my mom, who usually has to ask me which team is at home, because, in her defense, it’s not obvious! Take a look at Cavs vs. Pistons Game 3, with fans committed to wearing white T-shirts to support their team.

Just one problem. The opposing team was wearing white. Oops!

“With all due respect to your mom… it does take maybe 30 seconds to simply look at the court… and orient yourself as to where you are,” Arena said. “We don’t think it’s a major leap to orient yourself… fairly quickly.”

That’s fair. But there are other good arguments for home whites. Arena’s dad used to explain to him that it’s nice for fans to see all the different colors from visiting teams throughout the season. After all, the home team’s colors are already on the court, whereas the uniform is the only way for the away team’s colors to shine.

For me, it simply feels wrong to turn on a game and see the road team in white. Watching any tip-off reminds me of the joy from when I was a kid and my parents would let me stay up a little late to catch the first quarter. Perhaps even subconsciously, the visual cue of home whites and road colors hits different for me. Nostalgia is real!

But maybe it’s not a big deal. Sure, the Knicks wearing white in San Antonio on Wednesday night initially irked me. Admittedly, though, by the time Brunson hit an impossible fadeaway jumper over Devin Vassell and I knew I was about to witness my first ever Finals win as a sentient Knicks fan, my enjoyment of the game was not affected by the uniform colors.

And yet, my concern with the current era of jersey chaos is more long-term.

I have such a clear mental image of iconic NBA moments—take Michael Jordan’s game winner against the Jazz in 1998, for instance—because I don’t have to think about which uniforms were worn.

That’s not the case anymore. What color was Giannis Antetokounmpo wearing for his epic block on Deandre Ayton in the 2021 Finals? Couldn’t tell you. The Bucks wore a different jersey for every home game in that series!

Here’s a similar take from media personality Rob Perez on X:

“Every NBA game that’s played where the home team is not wearing white is a papercut to the sport’s tradition…

The sales spreadsheet may suggest that this new jersey strategy is working because so many people are buying them, but what they are sacrificing to achieve these short-term results is the legacy of the sport that made them so cool in the first place.”

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The league does recognize the importance of history—it’s one reason City Edition jerseys are no longer allowed late in the playoffs. The Toronto Raptors and Denver Nuggets clinched the 2019 and 2023 Finals, respectively, wearing alternates that debuted in those particular seasons and are no longer worn. The NBA understood that this wasn’t ideal.

“When you get to these big, call it trophy, t-shirt, hat moments… there’s something about seeing the teams in their core identities and fans connecting to that,” Arena said.

Don’t expect the home whites tradition to come back, but towards the end of our conversation, Arena seemed open to the idea of having some “dividing line” to distinguish certain games when teams would have to wear white at home.

“You could do just the Finals. You could do conference finals and Finals. You could do all the playoffs, including the play-in. You know, you could do Friday night games,” Arena said.

Arena did note that the Emirates NBA Cup actually does have its own tradition of sorts, with road teams always wearing white, so as not to clash with the Cup courts. I’m open to new traditions, as long as there’s some semblance of consistency!

There are far more important problems facing the NBA—tanking, integrity, and refereeing to name a few—but home whites for at least the Finals seems like an easy change, if fans pushed for it. Online complaints during the 2025 Finals essentially bullied the NBA into putting the giant image of the Larry O’Brien trophy back on the court this year for the first time since 2009, and it is absolutely glorious.

In the meantime, we’re about to get three straight games of home whites 🙂. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!

Sincerely,
A young man yelling at a cloud

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Eben’s 🔥 Take: I’d be curious to know whether a team wearing a specific jersey on the court actually impacts the sale of those jerseys off the court. My cursory understanding of jersey economics is that white jerseys are less and less popular in fan shops. If wearing a specific jersey is actually a sales driver, that might also help explain why teams are shifting away from wearing white in big games.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

🚨🚨 GOING YARD WITH BACKYARD BASEBALL 🚨🚨

We’re opening the Clubhouse again next week for our latest Club Sportico members hang in New York City. On Thursday, June 11, in our ground floor studio on 5th Avenue in Midtown, we’re partnering with Substack and Backyard Sports to provide a sneak peek at the upcoming launch of the newest version of Backyard Baseball.

Yes, that means Pablo Sanchez and Achmed Khan are back. As are MLB legends from the original games, plus new stars making their debut in the backyard.

There will be:

• A conversation with Lindsay Barnett, CEO of Backyard Baseball maker Playground Productions ⚾

• An opportunity to play the game on computers around the studio 🎮

• Pizza from one of New York’s best slice joints 🍕

• Trivia (with some giveaways) ⁉️

• More surprises! 😲

The event is free for paid Club Sportico subscribers and space is limited. Details below! And if you’re not a paying member of Club Sportico, now’s a great time to join us!

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The Stanley Cup Final starts Tuesday night. The NBA Finals tip-off a day later. Here are six things we’re discussing heading into the championship tilts…

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What I Learned 🤔: Online bullying... works? The Larry O’Brien trophy is making a stupendous return to center court of the NBA Finals this year, where it appeared from 2005 to 2009. I mean, just take a second to soak this in in all its glory.

The league got rid of the trophy on the court because players perceived decals on the court to be slippery or unsafe. But the NBA never came up with an alternative. So, for years, you could turn on the TV during the Finals and it would look just like a January Wednesday night on ESPN. During June last year, complaints on social media were so prevalent that the league basically downloaded a 720p clip art image of a trophy and digitally dumped it on the court to try to appease fans.

I asked the NBA SVP of on-court and brand partnerships Christopher Arena why the trophy came back this year, and he told me directly: "Listening to the fans. There was a groundswell to do it, and we listened."

The lesson here is: be louder and more negative on social media. It's time to rise up and complain about the fact that the Spurs aren't allowed to wear their Fiesta jerseys for the Finals. —Lev

What I Don’t Understand ☀️: The dominance of southern NHL teams continues. Regardless of who wins this title, it will be the sixth time in the past seven years that the Stanley Cup winner came from a warm U.S. city. Theories abound—Warmer weather is more attractive to players! There’s less pressure in non-traditional hockey markets! Florida and Nevada have no income tax, which helps in free agency! It’s just a coincidence!

I asked a version of this exact question to then-Florida Panthers exec Shawn Thornton last year on the podcast. This was his answer:

I’m not sure what to believe, to be honest. The Arizona Coyotes went 12 years with just one playoff appearance and then equaled that total in their second year in Utah. I think it’s just a small sample size? —Eben

What Surprised Me ⭐: The Knicks ($9.85 billion) are worth more than twice what the Spurs ($4.5B) are. But online? San Antonio actually holds an edge. As of this time last year, the Spurs had 16.5 million combined social followers, while NYK came in at 14.2M. Wemby has likely brought in even more international fans for SAS over the last 12 months.

On TikTok, their popular content could hardly be more different. Six of the Knicks’ top posts highlight Celebrity Row.

Unsurprisingly, the Spurs’ most popular clips focus on their on-court stars.

@spurs3 for 3 #sanantoniospurs #spurs #greenflags #victorwembanyama

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According to YouGov polling, the Spurs are tied with the Warriors and Lakers as the third-most popular NBA team. The Knicks are in 9th on that metric, with their strongest support coming from 31-to-40-year-olds (34% popularity). —Jacob

The Owner on the Hot Seat 💸: As crazy as this might sound, the billionaire owner of the Carolina Hurricanes is actually feeling some heat right now. In addition to his NHL team, Tom Dundon led a group that bought the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers earlier this year, and he has quickly drawn viral criticism for various cost-cutting methods. They’ve reportedly ranged from large layoffs, limiting the travel of some players, and having coaches check out of hotel rooms early to eliminate added fees. Some fans are calling him “El Cheapo.”

Dundon’s eight-year reign as an NHL owner has been remarkably consistent. The Hurricanes have made the playoffs every year, with four conference finals appearances, but they never made it to the Stanley Cup Final, let alone won. A championship would go a long way toward burnishing his reputation, but also give him an easy thing to point at as proof that he knows what he’s doing. —Eben

What Made Me Laugh 😂: There’s a strong case to be made that a Knickerbocker is a person from NYC as much as it is the article of clothing they’re named after. And yet, I’ll be thinking of this as the all-clothing matchup. May the best lower-body accessory win! —Jacob

What We’ll All Be Watching 📺: There’s been a lot of (reasonable) grousing of late about how complicated it is to watch sports these days. But for the Stanley Cup and NBA Finals, it’s as easy as ABC. Sports are basically taking over the broadcast network for the next fortnight, with games on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week. Expect to see a couple mentions of ESPN’s 2027 Super Bowl too…

With a long series, ABC should hope to broadcast the most-watched NBA Finals since 2019, at least. —Jacob

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about a radical proposal for New York. 🗽

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“Exceptions are made if you’re the greatest.” That’s a quote from an article in 1999 that I saw this past Monday, before the Knicks completed their sweep in the Eastern Conference Finals. That quote on a Knicks t-shirt would sell out. It was from the VP of public relations for the Knicks, the one who got to decide who sat in the most coveted seats in New York, and he was speaking about Muhammad Ali wanting to come to Game 4 at MSG. At the time, New York’s finest only had to fork over like $2,500 to sit on the hardwood during the Finals; now those seats are reselling for over $100,000.

The full snippet from the article is here:

Get-in prices at MSG are at an all-time high so I texted my friend—it’s his dad quoted in the article—to ask if his father could still get us tickets. Then the Knicks won and made it to the the Finals for the first time in 27 years. The timeline was about to erupt with Knicks content.

There’s immediately a flood of man-on-the-street Knicks fan videos: Sidetalk, videos from the watch parties outside the arena, and most recently the watch party at Radio City. (Side note, I need to hear more from Alex Monaco after that electric clip blessed my timeline). After the outdoor watch party crowd around MSG exceeded 6,000 people and caused a safety issue, NYPD said they would no longer support them but would look for alternative places to host fans. They added more barricades around the Garden to try and break up the crowds after Game 4, but it didn’t slow the fans too much.

NYPD arrested 6 people climbing on light posts, subway entrances and seemingly anything taller than Jalen Brunson. Last year, another friend of mine was among the Knicks faithful who took to elevated surfaces to celebrate the Knicks returning to the Eastern Conference Finals. He sent a great video standing above the crowd screaming GO NEW YORK GO NEW YORK GO at the top of his lungs. A lot of non-Knicks fans may think these antics are obnoxious, unnecessary and straight up annoying. They’re right, but they also just don’t get it.

I was sent another 1999 Knicks flashback on Memorial Day before Game 4 from the guy who was doing his best Spider-Man impression last year. It was of his dad, on the news reporting about the Knicks heading to the Finals in 1999. I tried to get the full clip but it may be lost to the archives. The point is that a lot of us Knicks fans on social media now are finally seeing what it’s like for the Knicks to be good. It’s the one unifying New York sports team, making it to the biggest stage at the world’s greatest arena. It’s a special excitement that requires special circumstances. After all, “Exceptions are made if you’re the greatest.”

The city needs to find ways to safely host fans looking to celebrate together, and the sports bars are overflowing. There are plenty of bars in New York that don’t have TV’s, so this week I endeavored to see how much it would cost to get Knicks finals games on everywhere. Since Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been outspoken in his support and fandom, maybe he’d be willing to foot the bill?

I’m not proposing that we get an 80-inch flat screen on a rolling stand in the middle of Carbone (unless…?). I don’t think the patrons who booked that 8 o’clock Wednesday night reservation six months ago want to hear Deuce chants while trying to enjoy their spicy rigatoni, but it would be a lot cooler if they did.

This is a breakdown of how much it would cost to stream the Knicks NBA Finals games at every bar or restaurant in Manhattan with an active on-premise beer, wine or liquor license. Disclaimer: The numbers used here are just estimates based on data from public NYS databases.

Using the NYS Liquor Authority Mapping Project (LAMP) online database, I was able to pull together a dataset of:

• 5,717 bars and restaurants

• Located on Manhattan island

• With ACTIVE on-premises beer, wine or liquor licenses

This sparked a great water-cooler order-of-magnitude conversation in the Sportico office, with a wide array of guesses about how many such venues exist in the city. A lot of people guessed 10,000+. The actual number, or as close as I could get from LAMP, is 5,717 places with active licenses (487 pending) that classify themselves as bars, restaurants, taverns/pubs or lounges/clubs. This is roughly how they plot onto a map of Manhattan1:

To continue the rough calculation, we’ll use an educated guess on what percentage of these locations are your typical sports bar, with multiple TVs and active streaming licenses.

Let’s say ⅓ of those dots on the maps could qualify as “sports bars.” The loose rubric for qualification here is just assuming that these places 1) have televisions and 2) have the ability and permission to stream sporting events through DirectTV For Business or other commercial cable packages. That leaves us with the remaining ⅔ as non-sports bars: cocktail bars, wine bars, lounges, restaurants, taquerias, dive bars and everything else.

We could imagine all of these places would have to start from scratch in terms of sports streaming, but there are likely a large number of locations that are somewhere in between meeting the requirements to stream the games. The Mayor’s office could buy them TVs.

Both of the No TV Options are the types of places that sparked this entire concept, so we’re going to assume every bar needs the full set up costing between $1,300 and $1,400. Every sports bar on Monday night was spilling out onto the street. All of the trendy cocktail bars, dive bars and wine bars were mostly empty though, save for a few regulars or anti-sports fans. It’s true it was a holiday weekend where most of New York City is out east or down the shore grilling hot dogs to kick off summer. It’s also worth mentioning that these types of places aren’t necessarily looking to fill their space with a crowd of Knicks fans packed wall to wall like sardines (which is what every sports bar is like starting an hour before tip-off). I am willing to bet, however, that all of these places do like money. With the cost of rent seemingly shutting down a bar or restaurant on every block on a monthly basis, I think owners might be interested in cashing in on the Knicks success. I mean, the last time the Knicks were in The Finals, [insert an early 2000’s thing that is no longer around here]2.

To try and sweeten up the “we wouldn’t want sports fans in here” crowd, I asked around to a few different sports bars across several neighborhoods in Manhattan to see what kind of money they’re making on game nights. All of which declined to comment, save for one, which told me just that they were “delighted the Knicks are in the Finals.” One bartender in the Upper West Side, a neighborhood not known for its rowdy night life, gave me a peek at the books.

“I’d do about $2,500 in sales on Friday night. When the Knicks are playing that goes up to around $3,500 -$4,000. Two bartenders, two servers here all producing similar numbers.”

Fortunately this was exactly what I was looking for, a nice confirmation bias. It doesn’t take a mathematician to crunch the numbers here. One solid night of ‘tending for Knicks fans could cover the set-up costs in this scenario.

All in, if the 3,773 non-sports bar establishments all needed brand new set-ups it would run up a tab of just over $5 million.

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I don’t think we need $5 million to pull this off, however. I just wanted to see how much it would cost. But a $500,000 discretionary fund that bars and restaurants could apply for up to $1,500 to set up watching the Knicks during the NBA Finals might be interesting to explore. With that fund, 10% of those TV-less bars could now host watch parties. If those places have a capacity of 75, that could be 25,000+ Knicks fans with somewhere to be other than in between 31st and 33rd street. That’s 4x as many people that sparked the NYPD watch party crackdown. It could save the overtime hours, paperwork and maybe help with the general chaos near the Garden.

Some of the cocktail bars that opt in might be worried about ruining the vibe they’ve curated, but they would definitely sell a few more $20 drinks and build some of that Knicks community that everyone loves. They could agree to donate some of the extra revenue to a charity of Mayor Mamdani’s choice as part of the application to get money from this fund.

It’s really a ‘if we build it, they will come’ situation for fans. The Radio City watch party during the Finals will be packed and if there’s another at Summer Stage I have no doubt the atmosphere will be similar. But how cool would it be if every bar in New York had the game on??

We can call it the “Knicks Everywhere” initiative and ask Spike Lee to help us with the commercial. Maybe James Dolan will put up $250K to split it with the city. We can make merch for all the bars that opt in to attract fans, maybe via Fanatics. If there’s some budget lying around to make this happen, there’s no shortage of Knicks fans who are loyal with their support that might love this plan and whoever executed it. Sometimes, exceptions have to be made if you’re the greatest.

Here are six things we’re discussing on this Tuesday morning…

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Sportico Story of the Week 🎾: Earlier this month, top-ranked women’s tennis player Aryna Sabalenka took the court at the Rome Open carrying a $3,650 Gucci handbag. What happened next seems up for debate. Sabalenka’s team said she had “written approval” from the WTA Tour to carry it; a WTA rep said players are not allowed to bring bags onto the court that “are not considered tennis equipment.” The incident is still under review.

Over the weekend our Sportico colleague Sara Germano dove into the increasing clash between fashion labels and tennis stars. The story has it all: the blurring line between marketing and performance, unequal treatment of male and female stars, and an athlete at the peak of her powers that traditional sports brands just don’t seem to value.

Non-Sportico Story of the Week 💰: Leo Messi is now a billionaire. While there’s not much new in this Bloomberg story announcing the 38-year-old as a rare athlete entrant into the ‘three commas club’, it starts with something I didn’t know.

Unlike other sports billionaires like Michael Jordan and Roger Federer, who hit the mark via investments and peripheral business deals, Messi did so largely from his soccer pay. As sports salaries continue to soar, we expect a lot more of this in the coming decade.

What I Was Wrong About 🥍: When I graduated from Princeton in 2010, I was convinced that the school’s once-dominant men’s lacrosse team had been passed by. The sport was spreading its geography and growing in popularity, and the richest schools in the country (like Michigan and Ohio State) were starting to take note. Princeton played in 19 of 21 NCAA tournaments from 1990-2011, then qualified for just one in the next 11 years.

Then everything flipped. The team got back to the NCAA tournament in 2022 and won its seventh national title over the weekend. I wrote a column on Tuesday about a second-order effect of the rapid push to pay college athletes, and why it spells optimism for smaller schools that care about niche sports.

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What Made Me Laugh 🏀 : Here are some good Knicks tweets.

An NBA Thing I Like 👕: Speaking of… regardless of which team meets the Knicks in the NBA finals, we’re going to have a clash between a t-shirt team (Spurs/Thunder) and a non-t-shirt team (Knicks). Both the Thunder and Spurs have been able to get their entire arenas to wear giveaway t-shirts to improve the environment. Jacob wrote about the Thunder shirts last year; it genuinely looks cool.

As for Knicks fans, they couldn’t care less. A very fun New York Times story over the weekend basically boils down to this: New Yorkers pick their clothing very intentionally, and there’s no way they’re spoiling that with an oversized blue cotton handout. Notice a difference?

Refer a friend

What I Loved ❤️: Kudos to the English Football League (EFL), which governs the three tiers of soccer below the Premier League, for actually punishing a team for cheating. In case you missed it, Southampton FC was one for the great stories in European soccer this season, until it was revealed that they’d spied on training from multiple opponents this season. The news broke with Southampton prepping to play in the Championship playoff, colloquially dubbed the “world’s richest game,” and the EFL moved quickly and harshly, eliminating them from possible promotion and docking them four points heading into next season.

I can’t imagine many fans—outside of the Southampton ones, of course—have issue here. It’s a lesson that should be learned by other leagues, particularly the Premier League, and the American ones that seem structured to protect owners, not punish them.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about two very different bosses 🎸 ⚽.

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Back in February, a few friends and I made plans to see Bruce Springsteen in concert in Pittsburgh. We put the May 19 date on the calendar, locked in housing, and quickly secured flights from New York. But we delayed perhaps the most important step—buying the actual concert tickets.

When we first looked, resale prices seemed unnecessarily high. Perhaps more notably, there were thousands of primary tickets still for sale at face value. We decided to wait.

Over the next few months we came close to buying multiple times, but at every check-in the underlying facts remained. Resale tickets felt expensive, and there were a ton of cheaper primary seats that remained unsold. And as the weeks went by, the face value for those tickets started to drop.

In April, we almost bought a block of primary tickets toward the back of the lower bowl for $509 each. On May 4th, when the face value dropped to $334, we discussed again. On May 12th, one week before the show, we almost bought slightly better seats for $267. Again, we passed. In the end, we bought tickets direct from the venue, on the morning of the concert, for $240.

I’ve been buying Bruce Springsteen tickets for 20 years, and it’s never been like this. For most of that stretch, I battled with thousands of other fans (and countless bots) to secure primary tickets in the seconds after they hit the market. If that failed, I scanned resale sites like StubHub or SeatGeek looking for deals. It was rare if a show didn’t sell out in minutes; it was inconceivable that there would be unsold primary tickets on the day of the event itself.

But ticketing is changing drastically. Instead of that massive ticket dump, premium concerts and sporting events now favor a slower, higher-priced approach. Initial on-sale prices are high, inventory is gradually released and the market adjusts over months, not days. Brokers’ arbitrage opportunities on the secondary market are diminished, and there are face value tickets available for much longer. Seven hours before Game 2 of the Knicks-Cavaliers Eastern Conference Finals on Thursday, for example, there were still hundreds of MSG tickets available at the Garden.

There are benefits and drawbacks here for fans. Tickets are initially priced at crazy numbers, making it expensive to plan ahead. This also means that a musical act or team’s most avid fans often end up being gouged the most. Sometimes, a venue will sell out even at those initial numbers, in which case, good luck1. In other instances, like that Springsteen show, prices come down to what they likely would have been in the older structure. The tickets we ultimately bought probably cost what they would have been listed for initially a decade ago—and we didn’t need four computers frantically refreshing at 9:01 AM to buy them.

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If you’ve read anything about the upcoming World Cup in North America, there’s a good chance you’ve read about the tickets. High prices have become the story of the tournament so far. And on its face, it appears FIFA is doing something similar to Bruce Springsteen. Despite more than 500 million (!) ticket requests earlier this year from around the world, there are scores of seats still unsold. Many people have pointed to those unsold tickets as proof that FIFA botched its strategy. The truth is that this is the strategy. FIFA’s main goal is to make as much money as possible; there’s very little extra consideration for access or affordability.

My guess is that the World Cup market and the Bruce Springsteen market will ultimately differ in one critical way. Over the past few months, The Boss’s tour dropped its prices. They were high at the start, but as tickets remained unsold, organizers adjusted. I would bet the tickets we eventually bought direct from the venue for $240 were once listed for more than double that total.

Some of that is a desire to ultimately fill the building, but some of it is also a nod to the fans and the optics of extractive pricing. Bruce wants his fans to care about his tours and wants a large portion of them to be able to see him live2. He might tour again in a few years, and he’ll want those same people to once again fill arenas and stadiums.

FIFA has no such impetus. It’s been 32 years since the World Cup was in the U.S. and it might be another three decades before it returns. Many people buying tickets are fans of a specific national team; none are fans of FIFA. It allows the governing body to be as avaricious as possible with its ticket prices. The long-term consequences for an event that’s held once every four years, in a completely different part of the globe, are relatively minor.

And despite what you may have read elsewhere, I’m yet to see evidence that FIFA is willing to actually lower primary prices to any matches. That could mean everything eventually sells for the initial price. I’m more inclined to believe that FIFA will find ways to unload unsold inventory more quietly, either into the secondary market or privately to partners and sponsors.

But don’t take it from me, take it from the organization itself. In a moment of deep irony, FIFA boss Gianni Infantino addressed the ticket controversy earlier this month at the Milken conference, where business titans often pay $75,000 for a badge. On stage at that event, he said that if the tickets were priced cheaper they would have just ended up on the secondary market at the current prices3.

“We are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world,” Infantino said, “so we have to apply market rates.”

Jacob’s ⚡ Take: Here’s my bull case for waiting to buy World Cup tickets: It’s true that FIFA has less incentive to appease its fans than a touring artist or domestic team might. But it also has less incentive to artificially keep the market inflated. Sports franchises often quietly move unsold tickets to sponsors or discounters so that ticket-buyers (and season-ticket holders in particular) don’t get annoyed that they spent more than they had to … or decide to skip the early sale period for future events. Those dynamics aren’t in play here. In the days leading up to a match, I wouldn’t be surprised to see FIFA take what it can get for unsold seats.

The bear case? There are a lot of people now waiting to see if prices drop—me (and probably you) included. That means they’re unlikely to come down by much…

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We also discussed World Cup ticketing on a recent Sporticast episode 🎙️👇

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about worst-case scenarios 😬.

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Over the weekend, former ESPN president John Skipper went viral for his take on the delicate tightrope act underway by the NFL in its newly launched media negotiations. Skipper’s argument, made on an episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, was that the world’s richest sports league could be in trouble if it becomes too reliant on Amazon and Netflix to pay up for its media rights, because those tech giants don’t need live sports as much as traditional networks do.

The bad-case outcome for all leagues, not just the NFL, is actually scarier than the “dangerous scenario” Skipper outlined. More than billions in media revenue are at risk in the transition to streaming. There’s a potential doom loop 🌀 awaiting sports who aren’t careful.

Here’s what could happen to your favorite pro league … and then what the NFL, specifically, is doing to avoid it. Let’s get speculating!

Six Potential Steps To Become Irrelevant 📉

1. Leagues need to expand their national TV income, particularly the MLB/NBA/NHL as they face declines at the local level. But existing legacy partners, besieged by online alternatives, can only pay so much. Fox Corp.’s market cap is $26 billion, making it 1/14th the size of Netflix. The rational response is to expand the number of distribution partners, especially today with digital players hungry for a cut of the action. MLB games now air on nine national networks/apps. Same with the WNBA.

2. Naturally, that’s going to turn off some fans. Many will jump through hoops to watch, but, if the expansions continue, more casual followers will either get annoyed by the rising costs of viewership or stop caring enough to check when and where events are on. New media partnerships beget new fans, though the question remains over how committed those neophytes turn out to be. There’s a growing convenience gap between sports fandom and other forms of entertainment that offer endless, free hours of distraction at the touch of a single button. Stretch fans too far and they will snap.

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3. However, leagues are not built to shrink. Player-owner labor peace is largely built on sharing a consistently growing financial pie. Teams are willing to lose money year-to-year as long as their franchise values rise. The Big Four leagues have shrunk once in the last 70 years. Opening the door for competitor leagues or losing games to CBA fights on top of theoretical viewership slides would only further threaten their already shaky standing.

4. So there’s only one option if fanbases shrink due to a fractured media deal: Fracture it further. Add more partners. Sell highlight rights. Pitch it to fans as increasing the number of ways the sport can be watched, even if it also increases the amount of confusion and frustration.

5. Of course, that’s only going to turn more fans off. And as sports shrink, you get a lot of arguments about why. It’s the players’ fault; or the owners’. It’s got something to do with politics, or something inherently wrong with the sports’ rules. Change them and more people complain. Most likely, there’s simply other things for people to watch—and the alternatives are easier to follow.

6. The gravity of the situation can’t be ignored forever. Slowly, then all at once, there are only diehards left. Eventually, they die too.

Look what happened to boxing. Or, outside of sports, what Marvel’s movie series is currently trying to come back from. Over-expansion comes with a cost. Rising prices make alternatives more compelling. Every scandal thereafter feels close to existential.

The NFL knows all this. Here’s what they’re doing to avoid any slippage. 📈

• The NFL has ingrained itself with the biggest streaming apps: YouTube, Netflix, Disney, Prime Video and Peacock. That keeps the league top-of-mind for people who turn to those services first when looking for entertainment. And there’s a chance that Prime/Netflix/YouTube do end up needing the NFL in a similar way to the current networks. Surely each would see a wave of cancellations if they lost pro football.

• At the same time, the league isn’t abandoning broadcast networks. (In part, this is due to the law that gave them a legal monopoly.) Every team’s local games are carried on over-the air networks. It’s not confusing—or expensive—for a Buccaneers fan in Tampa Bay to follow their team. For many people, it’s actually simpler than managing their other entertainment.

• In fact, the league is now partially propping up its long-time media partners. Earlier this year the NFL and ESPN closed a $3 billion tie-up that gave the latter ownership of NFL Network and gave the former a 10% stake in ESPN. The NFL was instrumental in ESPN’s rise through the 1980s and 1990s and that deal (and the relationship it locked in place) likely helps ensure the league will continue to have at least one viable negotiating partner to play against the tech giants.

• Like other leagues, the NFL has also found one potential growth area: international fans. It’s slow-going in certain places, but there’s a clear investment in growing the game globally, including with flag football. That has the potential to make the league’s rights valuable to streamers looking to expand in far-flung markets—and give teams new lines of revenue to make up for any potential domestic shrinkage, a playbook already underway for major European soccer leagues that have reached saturation in their home countries.

Yes, it is increasingly complicated to follow the NFL. Yes, there are more alternatives out there now… and new ones every day. But amidst all that chaos—new apps and channels and leagues and creators—if the NFL can remain easy-to-find for fans and an increasingly rare guaranteed source of attention for media companies, football won’t need to worry about doom.

It’ll be too busy growing even bigger.

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we do our own NFL power rankings…

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In April 2016, the Seattle Seahawks decided to have a little fun with what was then typically a pretty vanilla moment in the NFL offseason: the day the league released its full schedule.

Instead of just publishing a list of games, the club created a playful video in the style of the short baking tutorials that were popular on social media. The 100-second film featured 16 cupcakes, each with ingredients specific to an opponent on the schedule—buffalo sauce for the Bills; clam chowder for the Patriots; etc.

And with that, an NFL tradition was born. Over the next half decade, more and more teams worked to one-up each other with their schedule release videos. Now it’s all 32. The schedule release day has become one of the most important days of the year for people who work in an NFL team’s social media, marketing or ticket sales departments.

Some teams spend months—and tens of thousands of dollars—to craft their final product. When it goes well, it can go mega-viral. When it goes poorly, it becomes an internet laughingstock (or requires an apology, evidently!).

Like we did last year, we watched all 32 videos from this year’s drop, and all four of us rated them from 0-10. What follows is Club Sportico’s power rankings, from worst to best. Click on any team name to watch.

32. Arizona Cardinals — Club Sportico rating: 2.73

A lot of thought seemingly went into this, but I’m not sure anyone stopped to ask, Why? (JF)

If you feature mascots, it’s basically impossible to get anything less than a 8 from me. I gave this a 3.9 (ENW)

As of 9:30 a.m. ET this has 883 likes on Twitter… the next lowest team has 2.6K (LA)

31. San Francisco 49ers — Club Sportico rating: 2.83

Cool intro, then everything is downhill (JF)

30. Jacksonville Jaguars — Club Sportico rating: 3

I assume the haircut is fake. I hope the haircut is fake. It appears the haircut is not fake. (Edit: It is!) But does it actually matter? (ENW)

29. Cincinnati Bengals — Club Sportico rating: 3.25

This is basically the only video of the 32 that uses game highlights. Sadly there’s not much more to it (ENW)

28. Houston Texans — Club Sportico rating: 3.63

I feel like “not uncomfortable to watch” should be a pretty low bar to clear for these videos. This one does not clear it (LA)

He’s oddly compelling (ENW)

27. Los Angeles Rams — Club Sportico rating: 3.75

Shockingly polite, compared to the competition (JF)

26. New York Jets — Club Sportico rating: 3.93

The Jets tend to lean toward videos that mimic viral social genres. This one is instantly recognizable, but with some fun team-specific flair (ENW)

25. Cleveland Browns — Club Sportico rating: 4

The Browns like to make these weird. It has the nostalgia aspect, but otherwise doesn’t strike me (pun intended) as all that compelling (ENW)

24. Detroit Lions — Club Sportico rating: 4.13

This was never going to land on the podium, but I’ve got tremendous respect for a video that actually feels aligned with the team’s identity. Detroit would rather win in December than May (JF)

FOOTBALL GUY (ENW)

To my two colleagues who gave this a 6: That’s a worse vote than that one writer that didn’t believe Ichiro was a Hall of Famer (also ENW)

23. Baltimore Ravens — Club Sportico rating: 4.13

I think I got too excited when I saw the theme was ‘Wedding Crashers.’ Happy for the couple, but otherwise, meh (ENW)

Doing a nice thing does not a good video make (JF)

22. Green Bay Packers — Club Sportico rating: 4.28

Claymation has always freaked me out, but also I just did not enjoy this video (MP)

I wrote in my notes: “Has nothing to do with the schedule; occasionally horrifying” (LA)

21. New England Patriots — Club Sportico rating: 4.3

It’s too simple, but I smiled the whole time. It satisfies the Novy-Williams Rule: If the players are having fun, fans will too (ENW)

20. Washington Commanders — Club Sportico rating: 4.38

PFP (Points for Production). More creative than I expected out of the nation’s capital (MP)

19. Minnesota Vikings — Club Sportico rating: 4.48

I think this one went over my head. Is Minnesota known for fine dining or something? (MP)

I expected jokes about the Vrabel-Russini romance. I did not expect this (ENW)

18. Seattle Seahawks — Club Sportico rating: 4.5

Ya, the Super Bowl went to their head (JF)

17. Pittsburgh Steelers — Club Sportico rating: 4.5

I don’t know enough inside Pittsburgh humor to fully love this, but I know enough to appreciate it (ENW)

16. Tampa Bay Buccaneers — Club Sportico rating: 4.53

If 8-9 was a video.... (JF)

15. New Orleans Saints — Club Sportico rating: 4.58

Local celebrities and a few good jokes are enough to land this in the middle of the pack (JF)

14. Carolina Panthers — Club Sportico rating: 4.88

Every schedule release video should come with a warning. That’s a great sign. But it still got a little stale (JF)

HELL YEAH (ENW)

13. Miami Dolphins — Club Sportico rating: 5.2

Stephen Ross is one of the few owners to appear in videos this year. But not in the role you expect (ENW)

One of a few vids this year that seemed to forget they were supposed to be schedule reveals until the final frames (JF)

12. Philadelphia Eagles — Club Sportico rating: 5.48

Happy for you, or sorry that that happened. Not reading that essay. But seriously, why is it 13 minutes? I guess they’re cool guys, not sure. I do not like the Eagles (MP)

Saquon complaining about Philly’s short weeks and long trips was worth the watch (JF)

11. Las Vegas Raiders — Club Sportico rating: 5.6

They should cast Kirk Cousins in more movies (LA)

10. Denver Broncos — Club Sportico rating: 5.65

A solid, run of the mill schedule release video that entertains for three minutes and is pretty much unmemorable three minutes later (LA)

9. Chicago Bears — Club Sportico rating: 5.93

Bob Ross deserves all the love. After all, football is art.

8. Buffalo Bills — Club Sportico rating: 6.08

The NFL’s version of “More Cowbell.” I could see “Giant Chrysalis” becoming a thing in Buffalo for years to come (ENW)

The Bills’ identity seems to be, “we’re weird.” Great! (JF)

7. Kansas City Chiefs — Club Sportico rating: 6.13

I kept expecting this to get boring and somehow it never did (LA)

6. Indianapolis Colts — Club Sportico rating: 6.48

As someone who watches random Simpsons clips on YouTube at 1 a.m. when I can’t sleep, inject this into my veins (LA)

“MMMMmmm Sauce Gardner” (ENW)

And now, our Top 5…

5. New York Giants — Club Sportico rating: 6.78

If it weren’t for Jameis, this would’ve been a wet blanket of a video out of an org I expect nothing more from at this point. But Jameis is gonna Jameis (MP)

4. Atlanta Falcons — Club Sportico rating: 6.83

I’m sure this plays well as individual clips, but I’m looking for a bit more cohesiveness in my schedule release video (JF)

Nostalgia sweet spot for those of prime SportsCenter age. Jump right to 3:11 for the best bit (ENW)

3. Tennessee Titans — Club Sportico rating: 7.38

Doesn’t capture the magic of the first on-the-street video, but the Myles Garrett joke may have been the single biggest laugh of all 32 teams (LA)

2. Dallas Cowboys (There’s a second one too)— Club Sportico rating: 7.53

As much as I wanted to like this one less than the Eagles, I laughed four (4) times (MP)

I think the “second one,” which is also the shorter one, is funnier. You can learn a lot about a person by how they charade cheese being grated (ENW)

1. Los Angeles Chargers — Club Sportico rating: 7.98

We’re getting to the point with Chargers schedule release videos that I wonder if they should actually divert some of these resources towards their football team (LA)

Personally, I might pay $50-60K just to sit in the room and watch this come to life. I imagine it’s like watching Jordan from the bench, being Tiger’s caddy or seeing Gruden break down QB tape. (MP)

The internet agrees!

Our final grades are below. Let us know your favorite (and what we missed) in the comments!

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Here are six things we’re discussing on this Tuesday morning…

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What I’m Wondering 🤔: Is now a bad time to buy the Seahawks? The market for the Super Bowl champs is “soft,” a team owner told ESPN last week. There are some unique factors at play here, including the fact that current owner Jody Allen has a directive to sell the team as part of her late brother’s will, and the issue that only so many humans can pony up the billions required to buy a majority stake of an NFL team these days. But maybe there’s also some hesitancy given that Seattle is at the top of the league competitively and the only direction for them to go is down. The new owner will be tasked with retaining talent and keeping fans happy, while taking over a franchise that was 17th in revenue by Sportico’s last count.

During Super Bowl week, there was talk of a playoff run boosting the team’s value. However, I could see a wannabe-owner lining up instead to be the person who brings the NBA back to Seattle.

What I’m Following ⛹️‍♀️: The WNBA season started this weekend, and with it, a new round of complaints about how hard it is to watch sports on TV these days. The league’s nationally televised games are split up between CBS, ABC, ESPN, NBC, Peacock, Prime Video, Ion, USA Network and NBA TV.

There are also still ~150 games on WNBA League Pass, which makes it a pretty good buy at $40, but my Threads algorithm was overrun with fans confused about what that subscription got them. Or maybe they were just ginning up some engagement bait…

Richard Deitsch asked WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert about the fractured landscape for Sports Business Journal.

“The WNBA is not unique in this battle, right?,” she said. “Obviously the challenge is making sure fans can find our games when they want to.” Weekend 1 indicated there’s still work to do.

What I’m Working On ⚾: Meanwhile in MLB, the Padres and Cardinals played on four networks over four days this weekend—ESPN, Apple TV, Fox, and their local channels. There needs to be a name for this. I love naming things unnecessarily, but have struggled to come up with a sure-fire winner. A Stream Slam? A tic-tap-toe? Help me out here!

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What I Was Right About 👀: I was so glad to hear many of you comment about how homeplate ads impact your viewing experience (and hope I didn’t inadvertently up that number with last week’s email). Meanwhile in tennis…

Refer a friend

What I Love ❤️: Shoutout to Sickos Committee for doing the real work, looking at each MLB team’s stadium policies to determine how many would likely allow fans to bring a gallon of spaghetti into the ballpark.

One More Thing I Was Right About 📺: In January, I wrote about Netflix’s sports podcast play as a bid for daytime attention. Its battle with YouTube to better serve viewers in quiet moments throughout their routines continues—and now Prime Video is getting into the action too, with Oprah, the longtime queen of daytime television. My first thought when I saw the news? I wonder if this means we’re going to get an Oprah-hosted Thursday Night Football altcast!

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about un-missable advertisements 🙈. (Don’t forget to vote at the end of this post!)

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Reader Advisory: There’s a chance this article will significantly impact your MLB viewing experience. If you don’t notice the ads that are increasingly popping up behind home plates (and on pitching mounds) across the majors, close this tab and go back to watching baseball in bliss. Once you start tracking such things, you might not be able to un-see the changes. On the other hand, if you already find yourself constantly taking note of glowing backstops, well then welcome. This post is for you.

I knew that MLB backstops have changed in recent years. I just didn’t know by how much.

Look at Camden Yards, which brought retro aesthetics to MLB parks after opening in 1992. Here’s what the Baltimore backstop looked like in 2016.

10 years later, it’s retained much of its beauty—just with a few more ads.

There have been more significant changes at St. Louis’ Busch Stadium.

Ad and camera placements seem to be made in conjunction these days, opening up commercial real estate that stretches from behind the pitcher well into the stands.1

When home plate ads were first being considered in the 1990s, then-Yankees owner George Steinbrenner reportedly pushed back. “He thought it was a slippery path to a bad place,” former Detroit Tigers exec Len Perna told SBJ in 2022.

30+ years on, this is how far we’ve slid.

Club Sportico has compiled images from 2016 and 2026 for each MLB stadium. New York does have ads behind the dish, though it hasn’t changed them much over the last decade. Other teams have been more aggressive.

You can slide your way around all 30 ballparks here.

Teams/networks now also digitally insert their own ads on top of existing placements for away games, which can lead to even more distraction.

Watching NESN’s coverage of a recent Red Sox game in Toronto via MLB.TV, I was mystified to see the ball disappear mid-pitch through a digitally-placed FanDuel ad. Did they really need the third logo?2

I can’t blame franchises for their decorating decisions. Outside of the biggest markets, TV money is increasingly imperiled. Faster games further cut down on advertising opportunities. The Yanks and Dodgers don’t have to scrounge for every sponsorship buck, but the Guardians and Pirates have more reason to. And the backstop is a veritable piggy bank. Home plate signage generated $1.9 billion in sponsor media value in 2024, according to Relo Metrics.

Everyone anticipates major changes for baseball next year, with a new CBA and potential salary cap on the table. I don’t expect the sport’s leaders to pause in the middle of all of that to address matters of design. Advertising has steadily encroached across sports since the COVID-19 pandemic gave leagues extra reason to capitalize where they could, and the sponsorship genie isn’t being shoved back in the bottle anytime soon. It’s worth noting that the digital replacement tech has gotten better, at least to my eye. Though that might just lead teams to push the envelope even further.

The one new MLB stadium in our sample offers a glimmer of hope…

Arlington, Tex.’s Globe Life Field opened in 2020 with the typical backstop replaced by sunken suites. There are still plenty of ads on-screen, and the box crowd doesn’t offer the same enthusiasm as packed stands, but I can’t complain. At least there are live, human faces behind the batter, rather than a billboard.

Eben’s ⚡ Take: Given that many of these billboards are digital and considering how virtually every streaming service now offers expensive ad-free and cheaper ad-supported tiers, I wonder how far we are from that reality as sports fans. Want to watch the Orioles with the classic brick background? Pay up for RSN Premium™️! Otherwise, prepare to watch the team like they’re playing in Times Square. ~Sigh~

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

2

Here’s an even harder find-the-ball challenge.

Here are six things we’re discussing on this Monday morning…

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Celebrity Investor of the Week 🧑‍🎤: Wrexham fans will need to wait at least another year for their Premier League moment, but English soccer delivered a different celebrity-owner celebration over the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, English soccer club Ipswich Town secured promotion to the Premier League—just the second time in the past 25 years that the Tractor Boys1 will play in the sport’s most competitive circuit. In the locker room after the game, four-time Grammy winner (and Suffolk native) Ed Sheeran joined players to sing his hit “The A Team.” The video is any sports fan’s dream 👇

Sheeran was on tour in Miami the last time Ipswich secured an EPL spot, which I’m sure makes this moment extra sweet. But he’s not just a celebrity fan. He has financially supported the club for years, paying to be Ipswich’s main front-of-jersey-sponsor for three seasons from 2021 to 2024 as the team climbed to the top of the English soccer pyramid. In 2024, he also bought 1.4% of the club. Promotion to the EPL, particularly this close to its last relegation, could easily be worth $100+ million for the team.

Marketing Genius of the Week 🏡: Speaking of lower-level soccer, a striker in the Canadian Premier League made the most of his moment over the weekend. After scoring a goal, Tomasz Skublak pulled his business card out of his sock and held it up for the camera while miming the “call me!” gesture. Terrell Owens, move over!

The minimum salary in the Canadian Premier League is about $23,000 USD. If any of you need a real estate agent in Toronto, please give this man a ring.

Wishful Thinking of the Week 🎫: After his team’s shocking first-round upset over the Celtics on Saturday night, which set up a second-round I-95 showdown with the rival Knicks, Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid had a message for fans.

Good luck! The 76ers are also restricting official ticket sales to fill orders only for buyers whose billing address is inside the Philadelphia area. This has become common in the NBA and NHL and it rarely works, because—news flash!—even local fans like to buy and flip tickets for cash.

Refer a friend

Sportico Story of the Week 🛢️: The Edmonton Oilers’ 50/50 lottery2 has gained almost mythical status in major North American sports. While many teams sell ~$10,000 worth of tickets per game to their raffles, the Oilers raffles are orders of magnitude bigger. That’s thanks to a 2020 COVID-era decision to sell tickets online, in addition to in-arena. Last year’s total sales were $64 million (C$87.5 million).

In a profile of the 50/50’s growth, our colleague Justin Birnbaum also wrote last week about a third destination for a lot of that money. About 28% of sales in fiscal 2025 went to a company called Win50 that handles operations of the lottery, and Win50 is controlled by the same group that owns the Edmonton Oilers. More here.

Non-Sportico Story of the Week ⚽: I’ve spoken extensively about why I believe the upcoming World Cup will not be the commercial bonanza that many in U.S. soccer believed. Last week the Wall Street Journal profiled a number of homeowners, some who spent years—and thousands of dollars—preparing their residences for an Airbnb windfall that has yet to materialize. The anecdotes throughout are telling, but here’s one example:

Stunning Video of the Week ❌: At the 76^th FIFA Congress last week, global soccer boss Gianni Infantino tried to get representatives from the Israeli and Palestinian delegation to pose for a photo together. Instead, Palestine Football Association president Jibril Rajoub told the crowd “We are suffering!” and walked off the stage.

Infantino, like his FIFA predecessors before him, loves to speak about soccer’s ability to bridge the most contentious divisions. This staged photo attempt came right after a speech in which he suggested the two groups “work together for the children.” But his hollow approach to diplomacy—he gave President Trump a new FIFA “Peace Prize” a mere weeks before Trump started an international conflict in Iran—has tested the limit of that already-dubious claim. I’m hoping he retires that rhetoric entirely.

Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with humor and opinion. Today we’re talking about horses 🏇, hats 👒and roses 🌹.

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How did the Kentucky Derby become the Kentucky Derby? That story starts with explorers Lewis and Clark. Or at least the myth does.

Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., grandson of William Clark and named for Clark’s traveling partner,1 helped create Churchill Downs in 1875, using England’s Epsom Downs as inspiration. The first Kentucky Derby was held that May, though it’d be another half-century before the race achieved lasting fame thanks to an obsessed marketer, a loose grip on tradition, and a bit of betting-related luck.

Today, sports strive to become spectacle. A game only grabs so much attention. Events are what break through. To see where leagues are headed, then, it’s worth studying how a horse race came to draw 150,000 people in Louisville and 20 million viewers on NBC year after year.

The Derby was created with the intention of being important, according to Kentucky Derby Museum senior director of curatorial education Chris Goodlett. The Civil War had just decimated the horse breeding industry and there was a need to get people interested in racing again. There were ups and downs through the race’s first few decades, but always a consistent effort to get elites— women included—to the track. An emphasis on formal attire helped the race stand out from the beginning.

In the early 1900s, progressive-era reformers from California to New York banned gambling, shifting the sport’s epicenter and shrinking the number of operating racetracks in the U.S./Canada from 355 in 1897 to 31 in 1908. In 1915, a filly won the Kentucky Derby for the first time. Maybe more importantly, Regret was owned by prominent New York businessmen Harry Payne Whitney.2

“I do not care if she never wins another race, nor if she never starts in another race, she has won the greatest race in America, and I am satisfied,” he said afterwards.

Matt Winn, Churchill Downs’ leader from 1902 until his death in 1949, had convinced Whitney to bring his horse to Kentucky and later said of that running: “the Derby was thus made an American institution.” But Winn’s marketing efforts played a big role too.

Many of the techniques he employed are still popular today. Holding concerts at the track. Woo’ing influencers, in his case the famous sportswriters of the day. Boasting about attendance figures that couldn’t easily be verified. Winn also served as a human mascot for Kentucky culture as a slightly exotic, tradition-tinted land. “It was a Disney-fied version of the idea of the Old South,” said James Nicholson, who wrote a book on how the Kentucky Derby became what it is.

Before there was Colonel Sanders, there was Colonel Winn.

He’s responsible for many of the Derby’s most famous traditions, from the playing of “My Old Kentucky Home” to the souvenir mint julep glasses to the garland of roses and gold trophy given to each Derby champ. Winn kept the race alive through war, prohibition, depression, and more war, creating a place that could simultaneously be for long-shot lovers and power-brokers. Churchill Downs celebrated the past without ever getting stuck in the mud. It was only a matter of time before it became iconic.

“All Winn talked about was Derby all the time,” Goodlett said. “It was always Derby, Derby, Derby, Derby, and ways to push the Derby.”3

Shortly after he died, TV took over evangelizing Churchill Downs. While some tracks were wary of televising events, for fear fans would stay home, the Derby leaned in. CBS carried its first race in 1952.

In 1975, ABC won the rights to air the event by promising more cameras, more commentators, and more coverage. Many were dubious when the network devoted 90 minutes to the event. On Saturday, NBC will be live from Louisville for five hours.

By the ‘80s, the Derby stood alone. “There are very few sports that the American public follows so little, but becomes so interested in for one race,” TV host Jim McKay said at the time.

Gaudy, whimsical outfits emerged around the same time. Social media has only boosted the trend. Outrageous hats and fascinators are a fairly modern obsession, seemingly driven more by hysteria around Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s 2011 royal wedding than any ties to horse racing’s distant past.

The result now is a truly odd mix of tradition and TikTokers, a sport’s pinnacle competition set amid a debaucherous circus. But one suspects Colonel Winn would approve.

“After 100-whatever years, it kind of becomes its own thing,” Nicholson said. “You can spend all day at the Derby just looking at people’s ridiculous hats and somebody with a critical eye would say, What is this? Nobody dresses like this…. But then it just becomes what one does.”

Each year, Churchill Downs briefly becomes the center of both the sporting universe and the cultural milieu, for reasons that remain somewhat incomprehensible. Marketing certainly helped. But in time, it looks more like magic.

Eben’s ⚡ Take: I went to the Masters this year for the first time, and was floored by how much the event, its participants, its media partners and its fans patrons all fully embrace the tradition. That tournament and the Kentucky Derby are in a very exclusive group of sporting events (or venues, like Wrigley Field) that seem to have kept their old-time charm amid generations of changes to how we consume and enjoy sports.

Will that list grow longer over time, or shorter? A few years ago, I would have said shorter. Now I think the opposite. People crave nostalgia, even if it nods to a time they didn’t personally experience. And if that involves dressing like a southern belle, drinking a very specific mint cocktail and learning the basics of parimutuel wagering, well that’s even better.

To that end, after the Masters we debated on the podcast whether modern sports teams could have cellphone-free sections. Am I crazy here?

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Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.

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