andyabramson.com

The Third Shoe Just Dropped

Bayern Munich in mid-July. Paris Saint-Germain on August 3. FC Barcelona today. Same three products, same two-part structure, same company signing them one league at a time while everyone treats each one as its own headline. I called this ten days ago: La Liga and Serie A were the conspicuously open lanes in Google’s sports … Read more

The PWHL Is Running a Play I Wrote for The Philadelphia Flyers

$200 million in fresh outside capital, sponsorship revenue up 35 percent, merchandise sales up 50 percent, and a league still priced well below its closest comps. Fifty years after I helped build professional hockey’s first fan development shop, the PWHL is proving the same bet works, just with better financing. Andy Abramson $200 million in … Read more

Madden 27 Is Art Predicting The Coming Reality

Madden 27 just built an AI persona engine that writes breaking news headlines inside the game. That should worry more than gamers. I run a communications agency. I’ve spent thirty years watching newsrooms shrink while sports leagues grow. Now the biggest sports simulator on the planet has decided the most realistic way to model a … Read more

Let’s Talk About The Weather

Lately I’ve been focused on sports and sports technology, artificial intelligence and the shifting technology landscape that impacts both universes. That doesn’t mean my love and interest in wine has waned. It’s simply shifted. It’s shifted much as the weather has. And that weather shift is affecting the wine industry greatly. The wine world is … Read more

The AHL and ECHL Aren’t Development Leagues Anymore. They’re Farm Systems for a Second Market.

Fifty-two. That’s how many American Hockey League players signed with the Swedish Hockey League this offseason, more than double the number who went to Germany’s DEL. Fifty-eight ECHL players landed in Britain’s Elite Ice Hockey League, more than double the number who went anywhere else. And in Russia, the story splits cleanly down the middle: … Read more

DIRTY LAUNDRY: HOW SCANDAL BECAME SPORTS’ MOST RELIABLE REVENUE LINE

A $606,812.23 judgment against a volunteer hockey administrator nobody outside Colorado has heard of. A billionaire suing the family he sold his own team to. A max-salary forward one podcast away from a suspension. Three stories, no relation to each other on paper. One business model connects all three, and it isn’t the NBA, the … Read more

Sell the Fraction, Not the Whole

How a third-division club in Lima, and four teams like it, built sponsorship and identity models the big-budget playbook was never designed to sell. Every jersey deal in the world starts from the same assumption: one shirt, one buyer, one price the market will bear. Peruvian soccer/futbol club Municipal broke the assumption instead of negotiating … Read more

Looking Back on The Year I Called It: 2004, Twenty Two Years On

I didn’t set out to predict telecom’s future in 2004. I just refused to write about it like everyone else was writing about it. Most of the trade press treated VoIP like a hobbyist curiosity, a thing for people who liked soldering irons and free long distance. I treated it like a war that hadn’t … Read more