What a front-of-jersey deal would actually be worth in the NHL The NHL doesn’t sell the front of the jersey. It sells a 2.5-inch patch on the shoulder. That distinction matters more than most people in this business admit, because it means every dollar figure the league talks about publicly is anchored to real estate … Read more
Arctos is paying 10% of $10.6 billion for a team, and the real story isn’t the price. It’s that this is the fourth NFL ticket in a 32-team slip, and the house rules are what make it work. Where this stands Arctos Sports Partners has agreed to buy up to 10% of the Atlanta Falcons … Read more
Two thousand brands. A hundred pro teams. Sixty-five college athletic departments. That’s the company the NCAA just hired to sell sponsorships it says it can’t effectively sell itself. On Aug. 20, 2026, the NCAA signed Playfly Sports to run local sponsorship sales across 90 of its 91 championships. The exception is the Division I men’s … Read more
Minor league baseball figured this out before anyone in England did. The big leagues sell prestige. The minors sell Tuesday night, a hot dog, and a kid’s name on the scoreboard. Nobody in Des Moines is losing sleep over what the Yankees are doing. They’re too busy selling out the ballpark down the street. Accenture … Read more
Having lived in San Diego, it gave me a sense of deja-vu as the Petco Park version of this story is instructive precisely because there isn’t one. No lawsuit, no “parasitic” language, no summary judgment briefs. San Diego solved the sightline problem before it became a legal problem, and the difference in approach tells you … Read more
Mark Walter bought the Lakers for $10 billion. Ten months later, he sold them for $12.5 billion. The math is clean. The story underneath it isn’t. The Number Everyone’s Repeating $2.5 billion. That’s the headline gain, and it’s real. Walter closed on a controlling stake in the Lakers on October 30, 2025, at a $10 … Read more
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
$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 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
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
