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 reverse hedge.

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It happened less than three days ago and I already feel there’s nothing new to say about the Los Angeles Lakers sale. Many people—some informed, some not—rushed to try to explain a story that is not yet actually explainable.

The details are undoubtably juicy. Seller Mark Walter is the target of federal investigations. Buyer Joshua Kushner is a tech billionaire and Trump family adjacent. The $12.5 billion sticker is the highest price ever paid for a sports team, eclipsing the $10 billion that Walter paid for the Lakers just eight months ago. There are fun tax implications, conspiracy theories and dubious records. Kushner will likely be the youngest control owner in the NBA; Walter will be the league’s shortest-tenured owner.

And at some point we’ll have answers on how much of that intrigue is actually relevant. Will Walter fire sale the Dodgers and his Chelsea stake? Is he laying the groundwork to go to Trump for help? How are Kushner and Bob Iger, who have a combined net worth of about $6 billion, going to finance this deal? We’ll get answers to all those questions, but they won’t come today.

For now, here’s one thing I do know:

Sports ownership is changing rapidly. Kushner is an early example of what will likely be a whole new class of billionaire buyers, and there’s an underlying cynicism to their interest.

Sports team sales tend to reflect what’s happening in the broader economy. During the dot-com boom, many of those newly-minted millionaires found their way to sports (Ted Leonsis, Mark Cuban, Paul Allen, Henry Samueli and John Moores). That gave way to the real estate boom, and those buyers followed (Stephen Ross, Stan Kroenke, Jimmy Haslam, the Lerners, the Wilfs). More recently, it’s been the finance, private equity and hedge fund titans (Josh Harris, Wes Edens, Marc Lasry, Tony Ressler, David Tepper, Tom Gores, the list goes on and on).

If your favorite team was sold in the past decade, you likely welcomed a new owner from this more cutthroat world of deal-making and operational efficiency. And that’s happened most broadly in the NBA, where 20 different teams have been sold since 2010. (Compare that to nine in MLB, seven in the NFL.) Those owners have helped the NBA push the envelope in many good ways—in our industry, it’s widely regarded as the most forward-thinking and progressive of the major leagues—but they’ve also arrived with a cost.

Just look at the most recent team sales in the NBA, which have been a jumbled collection of messy deals, controversy and fairly ruthless operations. Since 2023:

- Mat Ishbia bought the Suns—Stock in Ishbia’s mortgage company, UWM, has fallen 80% in the past five years, and some believe that’s due to a risky wager that helped fund his NBA dream.

- Miriam Adelson bought the Mavericks—The casino magnate traded a generational talent and is currently at war with both former owner Mark Cuban and Dallas’ hockey team.

- Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall bought the Hornets—The team hasn’t been to the playoffs in a decade.1

- Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore bought the Timberwolves—The deal took four years to close, spawned an ugly legal battle, and forced the NBA to reassess what types of sales it allows.

- Mark Walter bought the Lakers—Lost LeBron James before his first full season in charge, then abruptly sold.

- William Chisholm bought the Celtics—Another deal with a creative, stepped financing structure. Chisholm’s group quickly traded away a generational star as a cost-cutting move.

Into that recent history steps Kushner, the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared and leader of Thrive, a series of multibillion-dollar investment vehicles that have been early movers in the next shift in the global economy: AI. Thrive’s early bets on OpenAI, SpaceX and Anduril have not only proved fabulously lucrative, but they’ve positioned Kushner in the circles of new-age tech oligarchs like Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey. Kushner recently spun out Thrive Holdings and raised $2 billion to help push AI into new industries. OpenAI was part of that raise, meaning Thrive has invested in OpenAI and OpenAI has also backed Thrive. SpaceX recently announced a $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI company already in the Thrive portfolio.

Thrive’s fingerprints are all over the relatively small number of companies that are rapidly pushing AI forward2, moving with more confidence and speed than many of us would probably want. According to them, very few Americans are ready for the tectonic shifts that are coming over the next decade.

Having witnessed those changes up close, Kushner is now looking toward sports. He launched his Thrive Eternal fund earlier this year to back cultural institutions that are likely insulated—if not made even more valuable—from the havoc coming from AI. In April the fund did its first deal, buying a stake of the San Francisco Giants. The Lakers purchase is also coming, at least in part, via Thrive Eternal.

Here’s what Kushner wrote to Thrive’s investors about the strategy earlier this week:

“Most of our time is spent thinking about the first-order consequences of AI. What becomes more efficient? What becomes cheaper? What becomes automated? What new products become possible? But there will also be second- and third-order consequences. In a world of abundant intelligence, certain scarce human experiences may matter more. In a world of fragmented distribution, trusted institutions may matter more. In a world where content and software become easier to create, assets rooted in identity, culture, community, history, and physical experience may become more valuable.”

The letter doesn’t directly mention the Lakers, but that’s what he’s talking about. Kushner believes sports provides an economic opportunity expressly because it’s relatively insulated by the potential volatility and upheaval that’s coming from the bulk of his portfolio.

If that sounds like a hedge, think again. AI billionaires are already betting on that disruption. As long as the new tech revolution doesn’t herald an extinction event—a possibility, in Altman’s own words—the backers of the big AI unicorns seem pretty confident that they’ll ride the disruption to untold riches. And in that scenario, sports teams actually also grow more valuable for their unique attributes. It’s not a hedge; Kushner is doubling down.

“The objective is not to buy, optimize, and sell,” he wrote about Eternal’s aim. “We intentionally chose a permanent capital structure because the assets we want to own deserve a time horizon measured in decades.”

There aren’t many Joshua Kushners at the helm of major U.S. sports teams, but that will change in the coming years. OpenAI’s looming trillion-dollar IPO will not only shower Kushner with additional wealth, it will mint a new class of AI billionaires. SpaceX, now an AI company, already did that. Anthropic might be close behind.

Even the NFL, which has far fewer sales and gatekeeps its ownership ranks way more tightly, will be welcoming an AI absolutist owner later this year. Vinod Khosla and Josh Kushner certainly differ in their ideologies, but together they provide a glimpse into the change that’s coming for global sports.

“Profitability is an admission by a company that they have no place to invest that is better than giving the money back to shareholders,” Khosla posted on X last week.

It’s hard to imagine that quotation coming from any other owner in the notoriously profitable NFL. Then again, sports franchises and AI startups are very different businesses. And that might be exactly the problem.

Are sports fans ready for the AI billionaires? Let us know 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.

This is supposed to be one of the quietest stretches in the calendar. But in a year stuffed with sports, there’s a lot going on…

Sportico Story of the Week 📉: The meteoric rise of Kalshi, the biggest prediction market in the U.S., has by now reached millions of Americans. Many of them understand the basic way the business operates—it’s a marketplace that matches buyers and sellers, and takes a fee on the transactions.

Far fewer likely understand the other major pillar of Kalshi’s business. The company also has what’s called a market maker, a trading desk that bets against its customers on its own platform. Kalshi is far from alone in the set-up. DraftKings, Fanatics and Novig are among those with similar structure.

While these market makers do serve a valuable function—they provide liquidity on the platform, making the user experience more robust—its not hard to see the potential conflicts. If you recall the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, much of that fraud stemmed from the intertwined relationship between the company’s cryptocurrency exchange (FTX) and its affiliated trading arm (Alameda Research).

DraftKings CEO Jason Robins has been publicly optimistic about his company’s market maker. In February, he called the set-up a second “revenue engine” for its predictions platform. In a call with Sportico last week, he said the unit was already profitable, praised it as “super high margin,” and highlighted the opportunity to also do business on other people’s exchanges.

“That’s the interesting thing,” Robins said. “Imagine if we could go on another company's sportsbook and capture a piece of their customer economics. That’s sort of what you’re seeing here. We can go on any exchange and use the same exact capabilities—the pricing algorithm, the trading apparatus—to be able to make money. That gives us a piece of everybody’s pie, so to speak.”

Earlier this month the CFTC, which regulates prediction markets, proposed rules that would limit the upside of market makers participating on their own exchanges. In a long feature we published Friday, our colleague Dan Bernstein dove into the relationship between prediction market platforms and these affiliated trading arms. It’s worth a read if you’re curious about the other, less-discussed parts of these businesses.

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AI-pocalypse of the Week 🚲: Dutch cyclist Demi Vollering won her second Tour de France Femmes on Sunday, riding away from her main rival in the race’s final stage. Afterwards she posted a finish-line photo on her Instagram, finger pointing to her helmet, yellow jersey proudly displayed.

Users quickly noticed that the photo she posted had been touched up with AI. Normally we wouldn’t care, but in doing so, the sponsor logos got all jumbled. Here, via X user @lucxsronald, is a side-by-side. Look at the logos toward the bottom of the kit.

I have no clue if this was intentional or not, but I feel very confident that executives at those companies, and maybe even within her own team, were not happy.

Food of the Week 🎾: I’m willing to guarantee that the WTA tournament underway in Toronto was not originally planning to serve lumpia last week. But the Canadian Open began selling the fried spring rolls in a pop-up to serve the tidal wave of Filipino fans that flocked to see 21-year-old sensation Alex Eala. I often criticize sports teams and events for being too rigid in their thinking—this is a good example of the opposite!

By the way, we’ll likely have more to say on Eala in a later post. It’s still early of course, but we may be witnessing the meteoric rise of a sporting (and marketing) sensation.

Clown of the Week 🤡: Enes Kanter.

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Non-Sportico Story of the Week 🏒: The NHL’s highest-paid player is a 20-year-old who has been in the league for just two seasons. Macklin Celebrini’s new five-year, $94 million deal with the San Jose Sharks is the latest data point in a tectonic shift in how NHL teams approach their payrolls.

James Mirtle recently unpacked it all in a great explainer on The Athletic. The levers here include an increase in competitive offer sheets, new salary cap projections, looming media negotiations and savvier agents.

Tweet of the Week 💰: We’ve already documented the many different ways in which tech billionaire Vinod Khosla, the man purchasing the Seattle Seahawks, is ideologically different from basically every other NFL owner.

Well here’s an X post from the weekend 👇 Remember, the NFL is structured to virtually guarantee hundreds of millions in annual profit for many owners.

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 baking blame pies.

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Baseball fans around the country let out a collective groan last week when Tarik Skubal, the best pitcher available at the trade deadline, ended up going to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the sport’s best team.

Skubal is just the latest in an embarrassment of riches for the Dodgers, who have won the last two World Series titles and are heavy favorites to win a third. The team’s full functional payroll this year is $430 million, about $70 million more than the next closet team (Mets) and way more than double the median ($206 million).

The Dodgers’ luxury tax bill—paid as a result of its salary excesses—will alone top the entire payrolls for a dozen MLB teams.

The team’s off-field spending and on-field success have definitely sapped much of the sport’s parity. And that will be front-and-center as owners and players draw their battle lines in what figures to be an ugly labor fight. Owners want a salary cap to fix the current spending imbalance; players want other owners to spend more.

So who’s responsible for baseball’s current situation? The four of us took a stab at answering the question via everyone’s favorite edible accusation, blame pies!

EBEN’S PIE

I’m no baseball expert, but I know enough to know that the eventual price tag for three months of Tarik Skubal—$9.5 million and three mid-tier prospects—is something many MLB teams could afford. The fact that none matched the Dodgers’ offer is either collusion or resignation, but the distinction doesn’t really matter. Both indicate the real problem: that baseball’s other owners are responsible for feeding this ever-growing imbalance.

Los Angeles hoarding talent and World Series rings gives owners the perfect boogeyman to hold up as the reason the sport needs a salary cap. Never mind the fact that there are already plenty of ways MLB supports those very teams. For one, there’s vibrant revenue sharing, a system that the Dodgers alone will boost to the tune of $200 million this year. There are also three-game playoff series, which are highly volatile by design, and so many postseason slots that an 83-win team (!) snuck in last year.1

Owners claim an overwhelming amount of baseball fans want a salary cap, but they seem to be spending a whole lot of time and effort trying to convince a group that they simultaneously contend needs no convincing. At times this season MLB ran ads on MLB.tv, featuring man-on-the-street testimonials, newspaper clippings and data viz all advocating for change.

Breaking something then complaining about the environment in which it was broken is a deeply cynical (and delicate) sleight of hand. I’d say it requires a magician’s cape and wand, but since we’re talking about baseball here, maybe it just necessitates a hot dog costume.

JACOB’S PIE

The Dodgers still have a long way to go for a third straight World Series title, but Los Angeles has already succeeded in driving everyone else crazy. Let’s take a step back…

Dynasties are good for sports, but only when they feel earned on even terms. And yet, baseball has always featured structural inequality; five franchises have won more World Series (65) than the other 25 combined (56).

The collapse of regional sports networks has destroyed a key revenue source for mid-market clubs, but we’ve still seen the likes of the D’Backs and Orioles make free-agent splashes in the last two offseasons. The math is mixed on whether the current era is more uneven than past golden ages. And as Kurt recently explained, the Dodgers’ revenue-sharing exception is not as impactful as it might appear.

So, why the uproar now? The hidden culprit I see is the length of MLB’s summer seasons, for two reasons.

1 - It gives LA cause to stockpile ever more talent. Injuries and disappointing performances lent the Dodgers extra incentive to grab Tarik Skubal at the trade deadline. They’re already all-in right now, so what’s another $10 million and a few more prospects out the door?

2 - It’s early August, and after the trade market closed, what else do we have to talk about but the same old arguments about the Big, Bad Dodgers? Seven teams already have a 95+% chance of making the playoffs, and all anyone seems to care about these days are rings, rather than the journey to them. That’s guaranteed to lead to a couple teams spending big to give themselves the best odds in a highly random postseason, while the rest settle for mediocrity.2 The dog days of summer suddenly feel like whine weeks.

LEV’S PIE

There is a team that could, and should, do exactly what the Dodgers are doing. The team in the biggest market in the country 🗽, which is worth more than the Dodgers and makes roughly as much money as the Dodgers. The team that led MLB in payroll nearly every season from 1994 to 2013 💰 and became known as the “Evil Empire” 😈. The team with 27 World Series titles 🏆.

What happened to the New York Yankees of my childhood? The Yankees are not supposed to be merely good. They’re supposed to be the pinnacle of excellence. And they have rolled over and let the Dodgers take over the league. The Dodgers have a better farm system, they defer player compensation, they made the Skubal trade when anyone could’ve offered more, and they attract better free agents. The Dodgers even installed Japanese-style bidet toilets in their clubhouse to lure Roki Sasaki.

The 2024 Yankees-Dodgers World Series renewed a historic rivalry and “brought back” baseball, with the best TV ratings for a non-seven-game World Series since... 2009, the previous time the Yankees were in it. This could’ve been the rivalry of the 2020s, but the Yankees haven’t held up their end of the bargain. They’re currently losing their division to a team with 1/3 their payroll.

I’m also giving 10% blame to the Mets for lighting money on fire instead of getting their act together and posing a legitimate threat to the Dodgers in the NL. Then obviously you have to acknowledge the lack of a salary cap or a salary floor, which every other major sports league has, yada yada...

All I know is Aaron Judge would have hit 80 home runs this year if he had a Japanese toilet 🇯🇵🚽

MATT’S PIE

I would like to caveat this take with the fact that I think that ring chasing objectively isn’t an issue in baseball. It’s also damn near impossible to do in the sport given the complexity of roster construction, the number of at-bats per game, pitchers needing rest days, etc. Not even accounting for the “that’s baseball, Suzyn” effect, i.e. the complete and utter strangeness that is baseball on any given night. There isn’t really a Kevin Durant joining the Warriors comparison. Tariq Skubal joining the Dodgers (via trade) gives them *checks notes* 12 starters that could take the bump for any team in baseball right now. Sure, facing Skubal, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Snell, etc. more than once in a playoff series is pretty hard to beat, but last year the Blue Jays were inches away from winning Game 7 of the World Series.

What baseball needs is more guys like Mike Trout. Some say he’s the greatest baseball player of all time, I’ve only ever watched him play like 5 times (3 of those for USA baseball). He’s played in three (3) playoff games throughout his illustrious career, but his loyalty to the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles will never be questioned. Does this make him… a loser? Depends on your definition of the term. Trout will never be accused of being a ring chaser though. Guys like Skubal who got traded to LA? Sure they had no choice. I’m also sure they’re not mad about it. Probably gonna get a bag never before seen in Major League Baseball. Free agent signings, how can you be mad at a guy for making the most money ever and signing with the best organization in pro sports? You can’t. Still, it kinda sucks. In every other sport, once a team wins the championship (forget back to back), they usually lose 1-2 of their core guys so they can go somewhere else and be “the guy”. The Dodgers are immune to that, they just keep getting better and better and stars seemingly check their ego at LAX to contribute to the newest dynasty in pro sports.

Now, this may seem like I just talked myself into a “this is a salary cap issue”. My counterpoint to that would be: Juan Soto.

Who do you blame for baseball’s current situation? Let us know 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.

This is supposed to be one of the quietest stretches in the calendar. But in a year stuffed with sports, there’s a lot going on…

What I’m Watching 📺: Free stuff, like everybody else. Three of the top six streaming services in terms of TV watch time in May according to Nielsen1 are primarily free—YouTube, Roku Channel, and Tubi. And that’s before counting mobile behemoths TikTok and Instagram. Netflix is now discussing the possibility of launching a free tier in certain markets to keep up with demand.

But as eyeballs increasingly move to ad-supported, free apps—and stay there— premium live sporting events aren’t making the shift. Victory+ promised to build a free streaming home for sports, grabbing local rights for a handful of teams plus leaguewide NWSL and League One Volleyball deals. But now, it appears to be struggling to make the money work. Teams are instead opting for a paid streaming approach, primarily with DAZN.

There are some free options out there. Ion is available via Tubi. NWSL+ is keeping women’s soccer matches free after retreating from V+. The NFL’s Thursday Night Football streams on Twitch, and there’s always an antenna for viewing local networks.

But I’m keeping an eye on where this goes. Leagues risk losing audiences if they don’t put their best content in the places where fans spend time, yet they risk losing serious revenue if they sacrifice the rights fees that have basically built our modern sports economy.

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What I’m Annoyed By 😠: A relatively calm WNBA trade deadline was overshadowed this weekend by continued fallout from Sophie Cunningham’s comments about transgender athletes’ place in women’s sports, the backlash to those comments, the backlash to that backlash, and so on and so on and so on. Three straight Fever games have now been surrounded by rallies and debate.

The controversy has nothing to do with league policies or stances, and yet the W can’t help but constantly find itself in the middle of contentious conversations about what it means to be a woman in 2026. “For the past three years, the WNBA has hosted proxy wars for nearly every modern American anxiety, including race, gender and sexuality, DEI policies, and the pros and cons of liberal institutions,” Seerat Sohi wrote recently. “If there’s any league that has reason to believe that intangible influence can translate to tangible political change, it’s the WNBA. But it’s also why the league is just about always in a negative feedback loop longer than it needs to be.”

It’s great that people are talking about—and talking to—W stars. But it’d be even better if the debate-de-jour didn’t feel like all they were discussing.

What I Loved ⚾: The Women’s Pro Baseball League debuted on Saturday as the Los Angeles Queens beat the New York Heights, 10-8. I was glad to see the game get coverage on MLB.com, and even more enthused to see the WPBL’s mascot, Maybelle, which is based on 99-year-old pioneer player Maybelle Blair. More humanoid mascots, please!2

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Sportico Story of the Week 🎾: Alex Eala hasn’t won a Women’s Tennis Association title, yet she’s eighth among active women’s tennis players in Instagram followers. It’s time to get to know the 21-year-old Filipino star.

[🚨 Programming note: If you’re reading this on Monday AM, Eala is playing for her first WTA title in Washington this afternoon. She’ll be down a set to Jess Pegula when play resumes after Sunday’s weather delay.]

Non-Sportico Story of the Week 📜: I find it exceedingly difficult to figure out what actually matters when it comes to legal changes in the NCAA. There’s a whole class of players who might get another year of eligibility, starting immediately? More than 100 athletes just joined a unionization push? The SEC and Big Ten now support the Protect College Sports Act, which would grant the NCAA antitrust immunity on eligibility matters and change the way schools sell their media rights?

That last one seems like a biggie. Now the question is whether the Senate will have time to vote on the legislation before a looming monthlong recess (and the midterm races that follow), as Ross Dellenger recently explained.

What I Want To See More Of 🎽: J.J. Watt is winning me over as a seemingly bought-in Burnley owner. Or maybe it’s the Premier League club’s social team that’s gotten my attention. I enjoyed their recent behind-the-scenes video on the design of the team’s newest jersey.3 Now I’m hungry for even more sports content with a Say Yes to the Dress vibe.

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 what’s really going on with FIFA.

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In the middle of his pre-World Cup press conference, sitting in front of dozens of journalists itching to ask about France, Spain and Argentina, Gianni Infantino made a point to shout out the sport’s less celebrated teams.

“For me as FIFA president, it is important that we invest in all the countries where nobody wants to invest,” he said. “Who’s investing in South Sudan? Who’s investing in Sierra Leone? Who’s investing in Bhutan or in East Timor or in Vanuatu? Nobody. We do it.”

Thirty minutes later he hit the point again. “The income allows FIFA to invest in all of these countries where otherwise nobody would invest,” he said. “If nobody thinks of them, well we do. We do think of the majority that doesn’t speak, that doesn’t have a voice, that doesn’t have anything. In FIFA they have a vote.”

Despite what he may want you to believe, Infantino is no philanthropist, and his organization’s distributions are not altruism. Yes, the millions that FIFA gives annually to its poorest members have undoubtedly done some good in those countries, but they have also served an invaluable service to Infantino, keeping him for years as the most powerful person in the world’s most popular sport.

And now he’s testing the limits of that power.

FIFA is a collection of 211 member nations, and as Infantino said last month, its governance gives each of them an equal voice in major decisions. That means the Cook Islands and San Marino (combined population of 49,000 and no World Cup appearances) have the same voting power as Brazil and Germany (300 million people, nine World Cup titles).

That’s important context for understanding the story that rocked global soccer this week. FIFA on Tuesday announced its intention to sell a significant stake in its revenue-generating operations. The organization wants to create a new commercial entity, worth $20 billion, and sell a passive 21% equity stake in the business to outside investors. That would create a cash infusion of roughly $4 billion.

According to multiple reports, the private equity firm run by Joshua Kushner, brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, is in advanced talks to lead the funding. That obviously struck a chord with many around the world who were wary about Infantino’s cozy relationship with Trump leading up to the event and felt vindicated in those fears when the U.S. president inserted himself in Flo Balogun’s red card saga.

The backlash was swift, with criticism citing the plan, the process and the proposed investor. UEFA, the continental governing body for FIFA’s 53 European members, has said it will boycott en masse all FIFA events until the plan is dead and FIFA promises in writing to never revive it.1 CONCACAF, the governing body for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, held an emergency meeting on Thursday and then said its 41 members reject the proposal due to “deep concerns about the lack of due process surrounding the proposal, the artificially short deadline imposed, and the absence of any review or approval by the relevant FIFA governance bodies.” Other national and regional governing bodies offered slightly more equivocating concerns.

New U.K. prime minister Andy Burnham took to X to say that “The World Cup is not a product.” Then he called for Infantino’s job. Even Infantino’s predecessor, a man who resigned in 2015 amid a torrent of corruption accusations and investigations, spoke out against the proposal.

FIFA has responded with defiance.2 It has blended these talks with those surrounding the expansion of the men’s World Cup to 64 teams3, and is pushing forward with its plan to have members vote on the proposal by Sept. 19. That relatively arbitrary deadline has become another sticking point, with many members claiming that the whole process is being rushed without proper diligence and transparency.

To entice members, Infantino is doing exactly what you’d expect: dangling money. Under the old plan, members were set to receive $8 million in distributions in this upcoming four-year cycle. Should Infantino’s sell-off happen, that would jump to $20 million, plus an opportunity for another $20 million for special projects.

For the richest FIFA members, that difference might not move the needle. U.S. Soccer, for example, reported revenue of more than $455 million in just the last two years. But for all those smaller nations, the ones that hold the same vote as the U.S.—and would receive the same payout, regardless of World Cup participation—that money is a panacea.

And that’s what Infantino is banking on: enough of those countries seeing the prospect of $40 million, instead of $8 million, and voting to approve the selloff. This plan may reek to soccer executives in the U.S., England, Spain and Argentina, but they’re less relevant in Infantino’s calculation. There are more FIFA members with a population under 5 million (84) than members that have played in the World Cup since WWII (82). There are more FIFA members with a population under 50,000—equivalent to a medium-sized Manhattan neighborhood—than there are members that have won a World Cup.4

FIFA technically only needs the votes of every country smaller than Kyrgyzstan. Alternatively, if Infantino could secure a Yes from every country that has never played in a single men’s World Cup, this plan would pass in overwhelming fashion.

There have been open questions about whether Infantino intends to enrich himself directly as part of this deal. He says no—and that maybe be true, but it’s also irrelevant. The fear of what this investment does to global soccer isn’t about the 21% passive investment, it’s about what Infantino and his allies (including the Trump family) might do after buying all this goodwill.

This strategy has worked in the past. Read anything about the major FIFA corruption scandals of the past two decades, and the playbook is clear. Global soccer leaders have used financial aid and development grants to small nations to push through initiatives and cover up inappropriate business dealings. Until he pled guilty to racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering, former CONCACAF president Jeffrey Webb was one of the sport’s most powerful (and most feted) people because of his ability to whip up votes from small Caribbean nations like Montserrat, Barbados and Dominica.5

What’s different today is that many of the globe’s smallest countries appear to be joining their larger ones in protest—at least for now. UEFA’s most powerful nations may be the big ones, but it also has members like San Marino, Gibraltar, and Cyprus. CONCACAF similarly has all those small island nations.

We’ll see if they remain loyal to the broader message as the vote gets closer. That $40 million is an enticing proposition. Gianni Infantino is banking on it.

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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.

There’s never truly a break in the sports calendar, but this is about as quiet as it gets. The World Cup is over, NFL preseason hasn’t started yet, and tennis is in its post-Wimbledon lull. LeBron finally made his decision, meaning the biggest moves of the NBA offseason are now behind us. The WNBA is in its All-Star break.

The last time we did a non-sports issue of Club Sportico was the papal conclave in 2025, which actually turned out to have a stronger sports connection than we realized at the time, but The Odyssey has dominated the cultural conversation in the past two weeks. Its memes have been posted by some of the biggest sports social media accounts (my two favorites). Its director, Christopher Nolan, has been on every late night show and YouTube channel. So without further ado…

Here are six things we’re discussing about Christopher Nolan …

Frequent Collaborators 🤝: Nolan likes to work with the same actors across multiple films, famously casting Michael Caine in eight consecutive movies. Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway, the stars of The Odyssey, are each appearing in their third collaborations with Nolan, but those are actually the only members of the cast who previously appeared in multiple Nolan movies.

There are a lot of two-time Nolan actors in The Odyssey, however, including Robert Pattinson, Himesh Patel, Elliot Page, Benny Safdie, James Remar, and Andrew Howard. Travis Scott has also now written songs for Tenet and The Odyssey. It’ll be interesting to see who he brings back for future projects.

Runtimes ⏰: With the exception of Dunkirk, which came in at a tight hour and 46 minutes, Nolan’s movies have generally gotten longer over time. The Odyssey is 2 hours and 52 minutes, which is slightly shorter than Oppenheimer’s 3 hours, but still his second-longest film.

Before the MLB instituted the pitch clock in 2023, the average baseball game was longer than Oppenheimer. Now it’s only as long as The Dark Knight Rises!

Ratings 📊: The Odyssey currently has a 4.4 rating on Letterboxd and an 8.5 on IMDB, which would make it Nolan’s third highest-rated movie behind The Dark Knight and Interstellar, using a blended average of the two scores

People need to go watch Inception again, because that’s the best movie of all-time. Also #JusticeForTenet1

Box Office 🎟️: The Odyssey is on track to make well over $1 billion worldwide… not bad for an adaptation of a book that we all complained about reading in high school. But even more impressive to me is what Nolan was able to accomplish at the box office with his original stories during an era when sequels, franchises, spin-offs, and pre-existing IP prevailed.

By my count, there are four live-action, English-language films since 2010 that were:

• Not part of a movie franchise

• Not based on a book, existing IP, or real people

• Sold at least $500 million in tickets worldwide

Nolan made three of those four!

Inception (2010) - $828 million
Gravity (2013) - $723 million
Interstellar (2014) - $681 million
Dunkirk (2017) - $526 million

Connective Tissue 🔗: Nolan revisits many of the same tropes and concepts throughout his filmography. The dead wife story device that he frequently uses has been discussed extensively, but we really need to talk about his obsession with characters falling into bodies of water.

Without giving away any specifics, The Odyssey has 9 out of the 11 Nolan elements that I identified above, and some very strong thematic ties to Inception and Oppenheimer (spoilers).

Nolan’s next movie 🏈: There aren’t a ton of sports scenes in Nolan’s filmography, but there are some. A key set piece in The Dark Knight Rises sparked thousands of arguments in fictional fantasy football league group chats over whether Hines Ward owners should get six fantasy points for a kickoff return TD even though the field exploded during the runback. Interstellar has two baseball scenes, one towards the beginning and one towards the end, which Nolan contrasts to highlight the progress of human civilization through the sport. The Odyssey has archery!

Could Nolan tackle the sports genre next?

A few weeks ago, we asked Hollywood screenwriters where LeBron should have gone in free agency to make the best movie script. Perhaps Nolan is the man for the job. His story is one of a man returning home and then later reuniting with a child. Plus, Nolan could pretty easily incorporate “Falling Into a Body of Water” if he wanted to.

What real-life sports story could work best as a Christopher Nolan movie? We want to hear your ideas.

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 stalled progress.

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The champagne arrived at The Langham shortly after 1 a.m. on the morning of March 18. Inside a meeting room on the third floor of the Manhattan hotel, representatives for the WNBA and its players union were slowly inching toward a resolution in a labor fight that had threatened the start of their 2026 season—and potentially so much more.

About an hour later, the two sides shook hands on the framework of an agreement, then popped the cork. According to ESPN, commissioner Cathy Engelbert, union president Nneka Ogwumike and union vice president Alysha Clark all gave toasts.

“We’re proud of these players,” Engelbert told reporters camped outside just before 3 a.m., praising the group that had stood opposite her for months. “We think it’s a fair win-win deal for all, or we wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

In that moment, the WNBA appeared poised for transformational progress. Growth had been slow for much of the league’s first three decades, but everything changed over its last few seasons. The arrival of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese coincided with a surge in investment (and interest) in women’s sports more broadly. The league set attendance, viewership and revenue records in 2025. Team valuations more than tripled, virtually overnight.

And so the 2026 WNBA season kicked off in May with the league’s two biggest business priorities—labor peace and TV deals—both secured for at least the next seven years, the dream for every major sports league. Owners continued knocking down Engelbert’s door to launch new teams at ever-higher prices. It looked like smooth sailing ahead.

Four months later, however, that progress is hard to find. Despite those underpinnings of stability, the WNBA, its leadership, its players and its fans are still very often at odds. Growing pains abound, and those problems have accelerated in the run-up to this weekend’s All-Star celebration in Chicago. A spotlight intended for the league’s biggest stars is instead showcasing its remaining warts.

• Clark won’t be participating in the 3-point contest, declining yet another invite over a reported aversion to shooting off a ball rack (skeptical emoji). Clark is simply bigger than the event, which will be held in the 10,837-seat Wintrust Arena. A bump in pay to $10,000 per participant hasn’t elevated the competition.1

• Clark’s treatment by teammates, rivals, referees and fans has become a runaway story of its own, with battle lines drawn on all sides. Some feel like she receives unwarranted special treatment; others that the league is squandering its biggest star by not protecting and celebrating her more. All of that was exacerbated this weekend due to a bizarre USA Today column that described a “white nationalist faction to Clark’s fandom” and invoked the brutal and racist 1955 murder of Emmett Till to chastise Clark for not being more self-aware.

• Indiana Fever drama doesn’t stop there. The team released a statement Thursday responding to allegations from former player Brianna Turner that a male staffer “was fired for sexual harassment” last year (the club declined to comment on “personnel matters involving former employees.”). A day earlier, the Fever responded to Sophie Cunningham’s (once-again viral) remarks about barring transgender athletes from women’s locker rooms and events. “We are committed to welcoming fans from every background and treating everyone with respect, and that’s what guides us as an organization,” the team said.

• Cunningham didn’t make the All-Star roster (or 3-point shooting lineup), but debate has emerged over the union not capitalizing on her pointing gesture, which went viral after an on-court altercation in a June game against the Phoenix Mercury.

Then there are the league’s 14 other teams…

• Toronto Tempo coach Sandy Brondello was suspended for one game for calling Reese a “protected species” during her team’s game against the Dream. Critics, including Reese, jumped on the comment as racially tinged. Brondello later said the phrase is common in her native Australia for an athlete that gets special treatment from referees, but she apologized to Reese.

• New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu, another one of the league’s A-list stars, recently denied a report claiming she had been invited, and turned down the invite, for Friday’s 3-point contest. “I can’t decline an offer I never got officially invited to,” the 2023 and 2025 champ in the event said.

• Minnesota Lynx wing Kayla McBride posted on Instagram that she “received a half-ass invite to the 3 pt contest, thru my agent.” Like Ionescu, she attempted to pivot the spotlight to those actually competing, including 2026 No. 1 pick Azzi Fudd.

• Friday’s events—the 3-point contest and a legend-laden Shooting Stars battle—are also devoid of any Chicago Sky players, despite the city hosting festivities.

• Initially, the Sky planned to show off a new practice facility this weekend. But it won’t be ready this season. “After 20 years in this league, it is long overdue for Chicago’s ownership to recognize how to properly resource and support professional (women) athletes,” WNBPA boss Terri Carmichael Jackson said in a statement following the building’s latest delay.

• Last week, Engelbert came under fire from longtime sports radio host Dan Patrick, who said his team waited two hours to speak with her at a previously agreed time before the talk was scuttled, reportedly by the commissioner’s staffers. The Dan Patrick Show aired images of Engelbert working on her golf stroke as he chided the league’s leader.

• NBA commissioner Adam Silver was non-committal about Engelbert’s future days earlier while speaking at NBA Summer League. “I think Cathy continues to do a strong job building that league,” he said. “We’ll have ongoing discussions about what the future looks like.”

• On Friday, both ESPN and The Athletic published long stories about Engelbert’s struggles. “She got us financially set up the right way,” an unnamed team exec told ESPN. “It’s the other pieces that we’re talking about.”

Engelbert and player representatives were back in a (virtual) meeting Thursday, reportedly talking for an hour-plus. They focused on common ground: the need for better security for stars, both in-person and online, as hateful comments follow in the wake of each controversy.

That collaboration can be read as a sign of progress. You could also see it as the progress yet to be made.

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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.

Spain won the World Cup, but La Roja wasn’t the only winner 🏅. And 47 teams lost the World Cup, but they weren’t the only losers 📉.

Here’s Club Sportico’s take on who emerged from the month-long soccer extravaganza in top form, and who needs to go back to training.

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🏅 Winner — Sports in America 🏟️: Soccer will see a jump in interest, both in Americans attending MLS matches and in viewership for overseas leagues. But the impact will be broader still. Politicians are eager to get involved in sports. Brands are hungry for more. TV networks can’t get enough. World Cup 2026 showed it’s not just (American) football that can dominate the public’s attention. The only question now is what comes next?

📉 Loser — Americanized sporting events 🦅: There are some good things about the U.S., as tourists learned this summer. We’ve got great restaurants and beautiful stadiums, for two. But we’ve got our flaws as well, and just about everything this World Cup did to the beautiful game seemed to be for the worse. The hydration breaks, the overstuffed halftime performance, the final flyover (that apparently was mistimed). I’m not sure global viewers loved whatever the Buffer brothers were up to for the pre-match introduction on Sunday either. What makes these elite, global sporting competitions so powerful is that the games get to speak for themselves, but our advertisers and event planners couldn’t help from squeezing a few loud words in as well.

🏅 Winner — Beer 🍺: It’s been a tough few years for alcohol of all sorts—all the data says younger generations are drinking way less than their predecessors. Then the World Cup started. Bars in Boston needed emergency deliveries thanks to Scotland fans. According to the Beer Institute, beer sales in bars, restaurants, stadiums and other venues rose 14% in U.S. host cities during the World Cup compared to the same period last year. Sales were up 4% nationally.

How better to document the culture blend of the World Cup than by tracking vices? Europeans revived smoking and drinking, and America likely converted a whole bunch of foreigners to ranch dressing and blue cheese.

📉 Loser — StubHub 🎫: Our social feeds all tournament were filled with horror stories from fans that bought World Cup tickets months ago on StubHub, only to have the orders broken in the days leading up to the game. It appears hundreds (maybe thousands?) of fans fell victim to one of the secondary market’s more pervasive and pernicious schemes: spec selling, whereby people sell you a ticket they don’t actually have, hoping they can buy one cheaper in the future and then fill your order. StubHub has a “FanProtect Guarantee,” but it allegedly failed to deliver en masse. Lawsuits are already flowing. Yikes.

We’ve largely operated in the past on the idea that all of the big ticket resale marketplaces are the same, but we won’t be ordering on StubHub any time soon.

🏅 Winner — Erling Haaland 🚣: Obligatory, but has to be mentioned. In a tournament where fans seemed hellbent on critiquing everything, including Leo Messi, Erling Haaland emerged unscathed. The Norwegian giant scored seven goals in his World Cup debut, and propelled his country to its best-ever finish in the tournament. Off the field, his social media’s blend of self-deprecation, low-fi tech and earnest selfies was an even bigger hit. For Eben, this is the most enduring photo of the tournament 👇

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📉 Loser — Middle Class Fans 💸 : We’ve already written at length about FIFA’s phenomenally lucrative and phenomenally cynical ticket pricing strategy. And sports leagues and teams have taken note for the future. So-called ‘slow ticketing’ is going to be more and more prominent moving forward, and while that likely means more money for some, it also means affordable tickets will be more and more rare for huge games.

U.S. sports have been gradually pricing out their most avid fans for two decades, and this will only accelerate that trend.

🏅 Winner — X 📱: For all the changes the app has undergone over the last four years, it still proved to be the place for sports conversation this summer. More stars seemed to be made online than on the pitch (see above). We’ll always have the memes.

📉 Loser — Automated Officiating 🤖: Folks, technology will not save us. Cameras and sensors that measure player position and ball contact down to the millisecond and millimeter meant there weren’t any blindingly obvious bad calls. But there was still plenty of controversy and conspiracy—to say nothing of the time wasted and goals called back.

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 the World Cup’s worst game.

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England was knocked out of the World Cup in painful fashion on Wednesday, surrendering two goals in the final 15 minutes of its semifinal clash with Argentina. Making matters more painful? The Three Lions weren’t actually “knocked out.”

A day before, France surprisingly exited stage left in a 2-0 defeat to Spain. But Les Bleus can’t go home either.

Instead, France and England will square off on Saturday in Miami—a clash of zombies in the World Cup’s third-place game, or what FIFA is trying to brand as “the bronze final.”

“None of our players and none of the French players want to play this match,” England coach Thomas Tuchel told reporters this week. “They want to play the final. We gave everything to achieve that. Everyone plays to win the World Cup, but that’s how it is.”

The match is not a pure exhibition. In FIFA’s team ranking formula, the third-place game has the same weight as the final played the following day. Goals scored count in the Golden Boot race1, and the winning team comes away from the World Cup $2 million richer.

Smaller countries have cherished podium finishes. Here’s how the Croatian squad celebrated after its 2-1 win over Morocco four years ago

But this game is not a must-win—especially for former champions like England and France. The annual soccer schedule is already jam packed, each additional 90 minutes carries more injury risk, and most of these players star on club teams whose seasons kick off in a month.

For soccer newbies, you can think of it like a non-CFP New Year’s bowl game. Like those battles, some top players are expected to sit or get subbed out over the course of the match. In the hours after Argentina’s comeback, when it became clear that Saturday’s tilt wouldn’t be Lionel Messi’s World Cup swan song in his adopted hometown, ticket prices cratered. The get-in price has dropped by more than 50% over the last three days, to $625 as of Friday morning, cheaper than any of the six group stage matches England and France contested. And dropping.

American tourneys used to have similar events—until they were killed amid sagging interest. The NFL’s third-place game in the 1960s was not-so-affectionately called the Loser’s Bowl or Toilet Bowl, and yes it was played for a few years after the Super Bowl was created. Virginia defeated LSU in the NCAA’s last men’s basketball third-place affair in 1981.2

While those games generated extra revenue and playing time in leagues’ early years, tournament expansion solved both problems more effectively. Involving more teams in the postseason proved significantly more interesting—and lucrative—than having more postseason for the same number of teams.

FIFA is slowly learning that lesson. It expanded to 24 teams in 1982 and 32 in 1998. This summer was the first with 48 teams and an additional knockout round. In 1934, teams played three matches in a 16-country tourney before the third-place final3. In 2026, England just played seven matches in less than a month. After a grueling league season, it’s understandable if stars don’t want to compete in a only-kinda-meaningful finale.

If the World Cup expands to 64 teams, the third-place game will feel even more unnecessary—and cruel.

The other side of this argument, of course, is that people will watch. The consolation match from the 2022 World Cup, a 2-1 Croatia win over Morocco, kicked off at 10 AM ET and drew 4.3 million viewers on Fox, plus another 2.7 million viewers on Telemundo. That’s 7 million people in America4, plus countless more around the globe. It was probably one of the most watched sporting events globally in the past four years. This year’s game will undoubtedly attract larger numbers.

And you’re not wrong for watching the latest (and possibly last?) installment of the bronze final on Saturday (5 p.m., Fox & Telemundo). It is still the World Cup, after all. It’ll be gone before you know it.

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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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If you want a detailed history of this game--which is pretty wild!--we recommend this post from The Front Porch substack.

The Front Porch

The bizarre life of the NCAA Tournament third-place game

Last week, I launched the first installment of a four-part project here at The Front Porch called the Comet Series, where I take a look at a program that enjoyed a brief run with national prominence before fading back to obscurity (or worse). It began with Stanford men’s basketball and will continue with three other programs…

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a month ago · 3 likes · Craig Meyer

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

What I Can’t Ignore 🙉: It’s become crystal clear as this World Cup advances that the internet can’t let a big sports moment pass without controversy or conspiracy theories. Every game now has some sort of massive viral outrage. Red card reviews! A ball that (maybe) hit the overhead camera wires! Games rigged for Argentina! I’m convinced that many of the people that gripe the loudest about diving ruining soccer are the same ones complaining about Swiss forward Breel Embolo’s blatant second yellow card from Saturday night.

The global soccer powers have already given us plenty of real things to gripe about, and no, it’s not because FIFA has secretly ordered refs to avoid calling fouls on Lionel Messi. It’s the bribery that influenced the bidding for the 2018 (Russia) and the 2022 (Qatar) World Cups. It’s racketeering and wire fraud that led to the 2015 indictment of 14 officials. It’s gaslighting everyone about human rights violations in Qatar four years ago. It’s the blatant cynicism of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, and the pricing of 2026 tickets to exclude even middle-class families.

Let’s not forget those things, but also, can we please just enjoy the final few games of a World Cup that miraculously has the four best teams on the planet still competing??

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What I Learned This Week 🧑‍🧑‍🧒: Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon sparked controversy last week by having the names of his wife and five children (one as young as 7 years old) engraved on the Stanley Cup alongside his players. Defenseman Joel Nyström played 38 games for the team last season and didn’t make the cut.

Detroit Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch has put a half-dozen of his kids on the Cup, but they all worked for the team. On the other hand, in 1984 the owner of the Edmonton Oilers had his father’s name engraved, and the NHL later covered it with Xs.

We highly doubt the NHL will have anything to say about Dundon, but in case you were curious (as we were), here are the rules for Stanley Cup names:

- There is space for up to 55 names and teams have to add any player that played 41 regular-season games, or one Final game.
- After that it’s up to team discretion to add other players, management, owners’ kids, etc.
- All names must be approved by the NHL and Hockey Hall of Fame.

Sportico Story of the Week 🏈 : Four NFL teams have been sold in the past decade, and three of the buyers have previously been minority owners of a different team. The latest is tech billionaire Vinod Khosla, who just reached a deal to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a league-record $9.61 billion (news broken by Sportico on Saturday evening!). Those deals give investors familiarity with the league, and vice versa.

David Tepper: Pittsburgh Steelers 🏭 ———> Carolina Panthers 🐱
Josh Harris and David Blitzer: Steelers 🏭 ———> Washington Commanders 🪖
Vinod Khosla: San Francisco 49ers ⛏️———> Seattle Seahawks 🦅

Video That Made Me Laugh ⛳: Golf has some of the best broadcast enhancements in sports, and the lines that help viewers read greens are largely great, but also… LOL 👇

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Video the Made Me Cringe 🏌️: With LIV Golf in a state of limbo, there’s been a lot of speculation about whether Bryson DeChambeau, one of the sport’s biggest stars, might try his hand at YouTube golf. DeChambeau has become a popular creator on the video platform, and many wonder if he might be able to do that full time, while occasionally playing the major pro tournaments.

This past week, video surfaced of the 32-year-old filming… something at a course in Canada and it’s bleak. I’d be shocked if he wasn’t full-time on either LIV or the PGA Tour next year.

Non-Sportico Story of the Week 🎾: I enjoyed this short New York Times story about why Czechia is dominating women’s tennis. In case you missed it, there were four women from Czechia in Wimbledon’s final 16, including the two finalists. I had assumed that this was legacy of Martina Navratilova, who defected from Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and redefined the sport. Turns out, neither Wimbledon finalist knew anything about her until they were already dominating youth ranks. The truth appears to be something much simpler, a commentary on how Czech kids learn to play the sport, and where bigger countries like the U.S. may be starting them off on the wrong foot.

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 what’s left for the King to claim. 👑🏀🎞️

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Over 23 NBA seasons, LeBron James has played every role, except for role player. He’s been a phenom, a villain, a prodigal son, and a power broker. Along the way he’s starred as himself in numerous commercials1 and film projects, directing untold more social media spots.

“I feel like every season for me is just like a movie. Every season is like a movie, and I’m, like, living in it,” James said on his show The Shop a few years ago. “I’m the star.”

Naturally, then, we called in a couple top screenwriters to see how they’d shape LeBron’s final act, as he goes through free agency one more time.

Angelo Pizzo wrote Hoosiers and Rudy. He has a clear idea for how he would script the end of LeBron James' storied NBA career. Adam McKay, who wrote Talladega Nights and executive produced Winning Time2, agreed with Pizzo. If he were alive, Joseph Campbell would certainly be on board too.

The King should return home.3

Yes, he’s already played that card once, but this time would feel different.

“I kind of like the idea that he goes and he has these worldwide adventures in Miami, in LA, in the Olympics, but yet at the end of the day, he’s going to do something that guys like Michael Jordan didn’t do, which is, he’s going to go back,” McKay said.

Towards the end of his previous stint in northeast Ohio, James opened the I Promise School. He was already thinking about what his legacy would be. “The basketball thing, I love it and I enjoy it, but to give back and open up a school, that’s something that will last way beyond my years,” he said in 2017.

This time around, he could support a new hospital, McKay suggested, or even better, “he’s gonna give every paycheck to starting a legitimate newspaper for the state of Ohio, a not-for-profit, fully staffed paper—not only for the state of Ohio but for the whole country.” Plus, at each stop on his valedictory tour, James could team up with local philanthropists to establish rec centers and otherwise spotlight overlooked communities like the one he came from.

It’s far from a guarantee that James is able to cap his career by celebrating one more NBA title. “That’s why I kind of like this,” McKay said. “You know, put it back into the soil.”4

Even still, a year-long do-good campaign might not win over the legion of LeBron haters that have developed since his 2010 heel turn.

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“What makes sports stories effective is the relatability,” Pizzo said. “That’s number one.”

And even though James has an inspirational tale, growing up with housing instability and dedicating himself to lifting his family into the upper echelons of society through basketball greatness, it’s still difficult for many people to see themselves in The Chosen One who became King James. Even as he has become more of a comic presence in recent years—a wine-sipping, Taco Tuesday-loving Uncle of every NBA star—LeBron will never be an everyman figure, much less an underdog.

The Cavs have emerged as the favorite for James’ services, though Miami, Golden State, Philadelphia, Minnesota, and Denver remain in the mix. Each would present their own story opportunities, though Pizzo said James needs more than another scenery swap to win people over.

“There have to be enough impediments, enough difficult times to go through in order to get to the other side, that people have a natural rooting interest,” Pizzo said. “The ultimate power of storytelling is in change.”

Maybe that comes in fully embracing a smaller role as connector or mentor, rather than star. Or it arrives as a realization about what he’s truly looking for in his hunt for “basketball happiness.” Maybe it’s catching a glimpse, away from the cameras, of the impact he’s had on kids in the city that made him. And the amount of work it takes to give them a shot at something grander.

After a lifetime on the move, constantly chasing something, what would it take for LeBron James to settle down and finally feel at peace? At home? There’s bound to be something relatable there.

Of course, at 41, James will have more story to experience after his playing days. Even if he won’t be a team owner, he’s still going to be around. Ultimately, the arc of LeBron is in the hands of one man.

“He has his own way of looking at his future, and he’s the one to tell his story,” Pizzo said. “I’m not the one to tell a story for him.”

Still, the masters of the craft had some advice.

When the swan song comes, McKay said, “You want to end that last year with whatever his sort of grand project has been. You want it to all end with an opening.”

That could be saying hello to the first baby born at a newly funded hospital. Or it could be watching a debut newspaper start rolling off the press, with the headline: Farewell to the King 👑.

Eben’s 🔥 Take: Counterpoint: LeBron should play the heel! As he said back in 2011 after leaving Cleveland the first time: “I've kind of accepted this kind of villain role that everyone has placed on me… I'm OK with it.”

LeBron should air all the receipts from those who have doubted or criticized him. He should conduct a very open free agency tour, forcing teams that want him to make their pitch publicly, sitting next to him in barber chairs on The Shop. And then he should convene a live TV special to announce his Decision, revealing that he’s taking his talents away from the NBA to anchor Project B’s first season. (Yes, it’s obvious I’m not a Hollywood screenwriter).

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 to start the week ⚽🎾😂…

The Hill We’ll Die On 🗻: Soccer’s rules weren’t designed to be enforced using microchips embedded in balls or high-def, super-slo-mo, frame-by-frame analysis. Add in the swinginess of a sport decided by a handful of moments, plus the passions created by a nationalism-fueled, quadrennial event, and we were bound for refereeing controversies at the World Cup.

On Wednesday, American Folarin Balogun was sent off thanks to a single still image of his foot bending the ankle of a Bosnia and Herzegovina defender. Played in real-time, the incident looked more innocuous.

On Friday, Croatia were eliminated after a goal was called back for offsides in the final moments due to the technology within Adidas’ ball, which measured a miniscule touch from a Croatian player.

Then, on Sunday, Balogun’s suspension for Monday’s match was itself suspended (he can play, in other words), as FIFA cited an arcane rule that requires a law degree to understand1. The U.S.’s opponent, Belgium, immediately lodged its own appeal.

Hours later, England and Mexico’s instant-classic Round of 16 matchup was marked by one red card given via video review and two penalty kicks granted after bang-bang plays.

You can easily argue that each call was made correctly. In England, the Premier League has touted that its video review system now leads to 97% accuracy in officiating, up from 87% on purely human-made calls.

And yet, 76% of Prem fans want to scrap the league’s system.

Rulesism has run amok. Soccer is a game, not a set of inalienable regulations. It’s the rules that should be changed to fit the sport’s entertainment value, rather than play paused and warped to most accurately administer the rules. No one roots for regulations, and no one hangs banners for “accuracy.” We’re measuring the wrong things.2

“We cannot go in this direction of microscopic VAR interventions,” UEFA chief refereeing officer Roberto Rosetti said in February. “We love football like it is.”

Every free-flowing, physical sport (soccer, football, basketball, hockey, etc.) is facing this issue.3 And many seem headed down the wrong path. If World Cup organizers continue apace, we will end up with sensor-laden shoes, socks, balls—and just as many controversies, if not more.

The last week’s events offer a lesson to every sport: technology won’t save you. Or, as Eben wisely wrote last year: “If you think putting a chip in the ball will make this issue disappear, you fundamentally miscalculate how much aggrievance, perceived bias and conspiracy theories have shaped modern sports fandom.”

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Non-Sportico Story of the Week: Politico’s decision to build a politics-of-sports beat is paying off. Here’s their breakdown of how government leaders up to President Donald Trump got involved in the push to have Balogun reinstated. It had seemed odd that Trump hadn’t been louder about the the U.S. Men’s National Team’s success to date in the tourney. He wasn’t going to miss this chance.

Gen Z’s Cringe King 👑: Erling Haaland, 25, has emerged as the undisputed champion of the World Cup so far. And he’s done it by embracing some social media behavior you’d never catch a self-serious millennial attempting.

His unfiltered selfie after beating Brazil has 65 million views on X, and counting.

His YouTube vlogs have more than 7 million views, boosted by his embrace of Cowboy culture and his attempt to play himself off as a simple social media guy, not the world’s biggest footballer.

Meanwhile on Snapchat, he’s posting … whatever this is.

We’re speechless. 🙇

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Sportico Story of the Week: Alongside Haaland, Norway’s Viking Row celebration has swept the nation. We loved this timely piece from Sara, tracking the bit’s origins … back to Sweden.

What Eben Learned 🎾: Naomi Osaka’s upset win over Aryna Sabalenka at Wimbledon granted her entrance into something called the “Last 8 Club,” a tennis tradition that we had no clue existed. Players that reach the quarterfinal—the “last eight”—at Wimbledon receive a boatload of lifetime perks, including grounds access, free tickets, special hospitality, hotel discounts and more. Turns out Osaka also didn’t understand the benefits, which made for a funny post-match conversation.

Jacob’s Streaming Nitpick: In 2026, spoilers are inevitable. Strong be the fan who attempts to wait and watch a game (or even highlights) after the fact while avoiding the result in the meantime4. But given the time differences involved in the World Cup, sometimes you at least have to try.5 Which is why I sympathize with those YouTube TV subscribers who are peeved that the mere length of the playback for a DVR’d match gives away whether extra time is coming and whether penalty kicks will be necessary. It’s better than the old days when recordings cut off after two hours regardless, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

A Bonus Palate Cleanser 😂: Try to keep a straight face through this interview…

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

This offsides, called on Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku, is not what soccer’s rulemakers intended…

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 Hot French Summer. 🚴

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Teenagers have accomplished almost everything you can do in major sports. Pelé scored in the World Cup final at 17. LeBron James was the NBA’s Rookie of the Year after debuting at 18; a feat Cooper Flagg matched this season. Wayne Gretzky won his first MVP at 19, the same age Michael Phelps won eight medals at the Athens Olympics.

But professional cycling has so far bucked the trend. It’s been more than 120 years since a teenager won one of cycling’s three Grand Tours1. In that span, only one man younger than 20 has even finished on the podium. As many sports get younger and younger, cycling has remained a (comparatively) older man’s game.2

We bring that up because 19-year-old French cycling Paul Seixas is pushing the boundaries. When the Tour de France begins Saturday in Barcelona3, Seixas will be the youngest rider to start the race since 1937. In his first ever Grand Tour, he’s opening with the third shortest odds to win the overall title.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Seixas (pronounced “secs-AHHS”) has the weight of a nation’s expectations on his young shoulders. French riders and the French teams that typically employ them have struggled for decades at the Tour de France. A Français man won nine of the 11 Tours from 1975-1985, and that marked the end of the country’s cycling dominance. In the 41 years since, the national angst has simmered into a full-on boil. Prodigies have come and gone, but none have come with the hype of Seixas, who earlier this year won a stage race rated just below the three Grand Tours.

It has many French cycling fans wondering if the man (boy?) who will break the drought has finally arrived.

“I hope to thrill the French this summer,” Seixas said told French sports newspaper L’Équipe, which put him on the cover this week.

Seixas is stepping up at a time when French sports fans have much to celebrate. Kylian Mbappé ⚽ has already scored six goals for a French soccer team now considered the World Cup favorites. Victor Wembanyama 🏀 became a full-on NBA superstar this season, leading the Spurs to the NBA Finals in just his third season. France had a very successful Winter Olympics ⛷️ in Milan and will host the 2030 Games.

Theories abound as to why French cyclists (and French teams) have struggled so much in the sport’s biggest event. Some of it is definitely financial—as a handful of teams have dramatically increased the money they spend on talent, analytics and equipment, French teams have been largely left behind. There’s also a quirk of French labor law that requires athletes and staffers to be full-time employees, which creates a sizable tax burden that doesn’t hit other teams that treat theirs as part-time contractors. On top of that, some cycling experts believe French athletes and teams are culturally less willing to make all the sacrifices necessary to build a Grand Tour contender. By some twisted logic, that may also include an aversion to doping.

Urbanization? Too much work-life balance? Cruel fate? Much like Canadians pining for the return of the Stanley Cup, or Englishmen hoping this is finally the year football’s coming home, every French fan seems to have their own set of theories about why a maillot jaune on The Avenue de Champs-Élysées has proven so elusive.

Seixas is now the backbone of a much broader movement to change things (you could even call it a revolution). He’s currently employed by Decathlon CMA CGM, a French team that was sold in the middle of last year’s Tour de France. A French sportswear brand and retailer, Decathlon said at the time that it was planning to spend $47 million (40 million Euros) per year on the team—that’s still less than the biggest teams, but a dramatic jump up from the ~$33 million (€28 million) that the team and its French peers had spent in prior years. A few weeks later, French shipping and logistics giant CMA CGM signed on for five years, providing a sizable cash infusion4.

If you’re an MLB fan, think of Decathlon CMA CGM as the San Diego Padres. They’re not spending up with the sport’s top dogs, but they’re hoping to find success by investing more than the fat middle of their competition. Another point of comparison might be the New York Knicks, who just overcame their fans’ own concerns about cultural issues and curses to snap a decades-long drought. Bigger-spending teams outside of France will likely to try to poach Seixas if he doesn’t re-sign with Decathlon before next year, amping up the pressure.

Though Seixas is the third favorite in the Tour de France, not many cycling experts are taking him seriously this year. The sport is currently dominated by two stars, one of whom (Tadej Pogačar 🇸🇮) will likely go down as cycling’s GOAT and the other (Jonas Vingegaard 🇩🇰) could otherwise have a legitimate claim. A bad crash seems to be the biggest impediment to Pogačar winning his fifth Tour de France.

But it’s unclear if French fans all see it that way. Speaking on a recent episode of The Cycling Dane podcast, former pro cyclist Jens Voigt, who won multiple Tour de France stages, gave Seixas some unsolicited advice.

“I would have a press conference—today or tomorrow—and go, ‘Dear friends, Dear nation, yes, I want to win the Tour and yes, I know you’ve waited for more than 40 years, and yes, I know it looks like I would have the potential. But not this year. Leave me alone. I’m still 19 years old. I might win a stage or two… But it’s my first grand tour and first Tour de France, not many people dare to do that,’” Voigt said. “I would go open communication.”

Seixas is taking a slightly different path. Asked this week whether he would risk his overall place in the race in order to pursue either a single stage win or some brief time in the yellow jersey, Seixas made it clear he was racing for the overall win, known in cycling as the general classification.

“The priority is the general classification,” he said. “What position that means, I do not know yet, I cannot tell you. But I would not take any risk for anything other than the general classification.”

The owners of his team were even more direct.

“Some people tell him, ‘You’ll win it in two years.’ I say: ‘Why not try now?,’” Rodolphe Saadé, the CEO of CMA CGM, said recently. “As a shareholder [of the team], do I set Paul Seixas the goal of winning the Tour de France? Of course I do, and I’ve told him so.”

Bonne chance, Paul!

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Jacob’s Watch Report 📺: Though it wasn’t designed as such, cycling is the perfect sport for background viewing during the workday. Most of the 21 stages start around 7:30 a.m. and last four hours, but each is generally decided by a critical couple minutes—either the steepest part of a climb on a mountain stage or the final meters of a flat-course stage set up for the sprint specialists in the peloton. Otherwise, you’re greeted to casual commentary and beautiful scenes of colorful cyclists cruising through historic French towns, often cheered on by elated locals. The vibes are 10% UFC, 90% Great British Bake Off.

Every stage can be streamed on Peacock in the U.S., with some encore presentations of marquee days on NBC. The overall GC fight is expected to kick off during the first tough mountain stage on Thursday, July 9, but we’ll be watching from Saturday’s Grand Départ.

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 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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2 months 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 t…

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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 …

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