It's Not All Gucci at the French Open
Plus: Another athlete billionaire, a sports league with a spine, and the NBA Finals as a case study in t-shirts.
Here are six things we’re discussing on this Tuesday morning…
Sportico Story of the Week 🎾: Earlier this month, top-ranked women’s tennis player Aryna Sabalenka took the court at the Rome Open carrying a $3,650 Gucci handbag. What happened next seems up for debate. Sabalenka’s team said she had “written approval” from the WTA Tour to carry it; a WTA rep said players are not allowed to bring bags onto the court that “are not considered tennis equipment.” The incident is still under review.
Over the weekend our Sportico colleague Sara Germano dove into the increasing clash between fashion labels and tennis stars. The story has it all: the blurring line between marketing and performance, unequal treatment of male and female stars, and an athlete at the peak of her powers that traditional sports brands just don’t seem to value.
Non-Sportico Story of the Week 💰: Leo Messi is now a billionaire. While there’s not much new in this Bloomberg story announcing the 38-year-old as a rare athlete entrant into the ‘three commas club’, it starts with something I didn’t know.
Unlike other sports billionaires like Michael Jordan and Roger Federer, who hit the mark via investments and peripheral business deals, Messi did so largely from his soccer pay. As sports salaries continue to soar, we expect a lot more of this in the coming decade.
What I Was Wrong About 🥍: When I graduated from Princeton in 2010, I was convinced that the school’s once-dominant men’s lacrosse team had been passed by. The sport was spreading its geography and growing in popularity, and the richest schools in the country (like Michigan and Ohio State) were starting to take note. Princeton played in 19 of 21 NCAA tournaments from 1990-2011, then qualified for just one in the next 11 years.
Then everything flipped. The team got back to the NCAA tournament in 2022 and won its seventh national title over the weekend. I wrote a column on Tuesday about a second-order effect of the rapid push to pay college athletes, and why it spells optimism for smaller schools that care about niche sports.
What Made Me Laugh 🏀 : Here are some good Knicks tweets.
An NBA Thing I Like 👕: Speaking of… regardless of which team meets the Knicks in the NBA finals, we’re going to have a clash between a t-shirt team (Spurs/Thunder) and a non-t-shirt team (Knicks). Both the Thunder and Spurs have been able to get their entire arenas to wear giveaway t-shirts to improve the environment. Jacob wrote about the Thunder shirts last year; it genuinely looks cool.
As for Knicks fans, they couldn’t care less. A very fun New York Times story over the weekend basically boils down to this: New Yorkers pick their clothing very intentionally, and there’s no way they’re spoiling that with an oversized blue cotton handout. Notice a difference?
What I Loved ❤️: Kudos to the English Football League (EFL), which governs the three tiers of soccer below the Premier League, for actually punishing a team for cheating. In case you missed it, Southampton FC was one for the great stories in European soccer this season, until it was revealed that they’d spied on training from multiple opponents this season. The news broke with Southampton prepping to play in the Championship playoff, colloquially dubbed the “world’s richest game,” and the EFL moved quickly and harshly, eliminating them from possible promotion and docking them four points heading into next season.
I can’t imagine many fans—outside of the Southampton ones, of course—have issue here. It’s a lesson that should be learned by other leagues, particularly the Premier League, and the American ones that seem structured to protect owners, not punish them.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.