Fred Segal was a checked-out healthcare transactions lawyer practicing for seven years in Florida when he discovered his life’s calling by accident.

He was following sports on Twitter during, before and after office hours in 2015. Everywhere he looked, a reporter, news anchor or personality would triumphantly point out all the times their sports predictions or opinions were proven correct.

“I remember that same guy said things that were so wrong two weeks prior,” Segal told me last week over Zoom. “So I said to myself, nobody’s going to post those, so I’ll be the guy to do it. I meant it to be just for fun to mess with them, not to start a big feed or anything.”

But it didn’t take too long for Freezing Cold Takes to become an internet sensation, gaining more than 600,000 followers on Twitter and turning a passionate side hustle into a legitimate second act. Segal’s friend Ben Sosenko put his account in front of Sacramento radio personality Carmichael Dave and South Florida radio host John Zaslow. But the biggest break was a profile written by Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch— back when SI was still relevant and moved the needle— that garnered FCT tens of thousands of new followers.

Now 10 years in, Segal recently released his second book, “Freezing Cold Takes: College Football: An Incomplete History of the Game’s Most Inaccurate Statements and Predictions.” The book’s goal was not to just rehash his account’s greatest hits, but dive into the pre-internet newspaper era and fully uncover what was going on in yesteryear.

Of course, Segal has some of his personal favorite cold takes. Like in 2014 when Colin Cowherd said Dak Prescott was destined to be an NFL backup. Or a 2008 classic when Todd McShay claimed Brian Brohm had more upside than Aaron Rodgers. Or Ian O’Connor’s column that the New England Patriots would regret hiring Bill Belichick. Or his most viral tweet, on the 2022 Cincinnati Bengals.

Segal was able to quit his law job a couple of years into his Cold Take era to work as a social media manager for other brands— there was also an Awful Announcing FCT microsite for a spell— while searching for the most premium poor predictions to post on the feed. He said he gets thousands of submissions during a football weekend, and even dozens of suggestions on a slow day.

As so many in the sports industry pivot to video, Segal is keeping his content original and authentic, true to the cold take format everyone knows and loves. He’s considering starting some sort of short-form video series focusing on sports prediction history, but his bread and butter is what led to his rise from obscurity to one of my favorite social media accounts out there.

“The cold take stands on its own,” Segal said.

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On The Radar

1. Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital is reportedly leading a $1 billion funding round into Polymarket, investing $300 million into the prediction market at a $21 billion valuation. That’s on top of 1789’s previous $200 million investment into the company. This news comes four days after a New York Times report alleging that Trump Jr. told state attorneys general in March to back off of taking on prediction markets.

2. Trump Jr.’s Polymarket investment comes on the heels of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling Friday denying Kalshi’s efforts to stop Nevada from ending its operation in the state as an illegal gambling operation. “Kalshi’s attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sportsbooks betting are unpersuasive,” the three-judge panel said, allowing states to regulate prediction markets as gambling and setting up a likely Supreme Court battle.

3. A Louisiana judge’s ruling barring the NCAA from enforcing rules that would bar players who either signed pro contracts or played in NFL preseason games from going back to school has set up a showdown between LSU, who wants to bring these players in, and the SEC. The conference is reportedly considering drastic preventative measures, including boycotting playing against the Tigers or even expelling the school. Speaking of LSU, a bombshell report claims that a third party placed bets against the football team on Kalshi as a hedge against potential performance bonuses to head coach Lane Kiffin. Similar trades were reportedly placed on South Carolina’s team as well.

4. The Dutch football association reportedly wants to hold a global football summit to discuss key issues for a suitable candidate to be put up against Gianni Infantino in next year’s FIFA presidential election. Discussions would include limiting the president’s power in the future. The deadline to choose a candidate is Nov. 18. Infantino is in hot water for his plans to privatize the World Cup and sell a percentage to investors, led by Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital. “We failed to appreciate the political dynamics of global football, and the lengths some would go to,” Kushner told Axios on Monday. “Had we known what this would devolve into, we would not have gotten involved."

5. LIV Golf will reportedly file for bankruptcy next week as it looks to shore up its finances and finalize a new investor to keep the league alive. Perhaps they could use some cash from Scottie Scheffler, who passed Tiger Woods in career prize money after winning the $10 million FedExCup title on Sunday.
   
   READ: US Open 2026: The Honey Deuce is ready to take on all cocktail challengers. More than 700,000 were served last year, and, ‘We aim to break that record’

6. On Friday, the Tampa Bay Rays officially received final approval to build a $2.3 billion ballpark in Tampa, with $876 million in public funds, that would replace Tropicana Field in 2029. A new ballpark didn’t help the Miami Marlins from drawing fans, and I’m still convinced that Major League Baseball will never truly succeed in the state of Florida.

7. As the SEC and DOJ continue investigating Mark Walter, Truist and Fifth Third bank have reportedly paused the distribution of Delaware Life Insurance products as part of their financial institutions’ offerings. Are all of Walter’s insurance companies now too volatile and toxic?

8. Chelsea’s front-of-shirt sponsor, USDC by Circle, has faced a concerning level of scrutiny here in the U.S. The stablecoin had a criminal complaint filed against it by Wisconsin prosecutors, “alleging the USDC issuer intentionally disobeyed a court warrant to recover roughly 381,000 stolen tokens for a local scam victim.” It’s the fourth shirt sponsor in as many years for the Blues.

9. The Chicago Cubs are creating a scripted TikTok rom-com series called “Nine Innings to Love,” inspired by real fans finding real love and connections at Wrigley Field. I hope more teams get out there and take risks like this show, which launched on Friday.

   

   @cubsFor those who believe in a good love story. Nine Innings to Love: A 17-part vertical series, coming to your FYP this Friday. #booktok #romance #verticals #chicago #9ITL

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10. Soccer scoop king Fabrizio Romano tweeted that Lionel Messi had retired from professional football on Monday. The only problem is that what he said was inaccurate. Messi is retiring from the Argentinian national team, but not his club team, Inter Miami. If you’re going to be the most popular football personality, get your facts straight first, and don’t be misleading for one fleeting “here we go.”

Honorable Mention

Wyc Grousbeck and Aditya Mittal, who lost out to Vinod Khosla in buying the Seattle Seahawks, may get invited to join the ownership group after all…For the first time, women outnumber men in Forbes’ 10 highest-earning tennis players…College football finally moved up its calendar…Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, ESPN content president Burke Magnus and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey lead USA Today’s ranking of college football’s most powerful people…U.S. Soccer is taking over the U.S. youth soccer association…What is the Anaheim Angels Bill and why did Gavin Newsom sign it into law…Cool article on this guy who created an alternate MLB app that was so good that the league just hired him…Australia’s top basketball league may want to try some wild and wacky rules…VC founder David Shuman buys into the New York Islanders, while Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle sold their Pittsburgh Penguins stakes….Terrell Owens and comedian, writer and producer Chris Spencer launch a new podcast called “Get To The Point” on Tuesday…Jamie Vardy’s “Having A Party” online show will appear during select Friday Bundesliga matches this season….And finally, watch this:

Back in 2010, I was a young, naive graduate student still finding my way in the world at journalism school. One day, the great Prof. Sandy Padwe brought in a guest lecturer, Alan Schwarz of The New York Times. Schwarz’s superb reporting at the time focused on an overlooked issue that was largely met with groans and shrugs at first in the sporting world: The effects and impact on concussions and head trauma in the NFL.

Research found that football players were highly susceptible to a degenerative brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and the families of players who passed away started donating their brains for further research. The league denied and pushed back at the reporting and studies for years, until the evidence was too indisputable to be ignored. The league improved helmets and concussion protocols and standards, and the league settled a class action lawsuit filed by more than 20,000 former players that, as of June, has paid out more than $1.5 billion. While that seems like a lot, it’s actually an insultingly low amount considering the league generated more than $23 billion in revenue in 2024.

This issue may be even more dire than we thought.

A new study released Tuesday by the British Medical Journal looked at the 878 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. The brains of 235 of those players were donated for analysis to the UNITE Brain Bank and the UC San Francisco’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers. Of those 235 brains, 215 were diagnosed with CTE, meaning at minimum about one in four of those players had CTE, but the percentage is most certainly higher considering nearly 98% of the donated brains showed some form of CTE.

If the majority of these NFL players we watch, bet on, draft to our fantasy teams and idolize every Sunday are going to end up with severe brain trauma later on in life, is it ethical or moral to watch them or root for them each week? It’s something I grapple with on a yearly basis, especially this time of year when football season begins. And yet I still do it, though with some regret and rationalizing it as something I need to keep up with for work. If these players are choosing this lifestyle that pays them millions of dollars, why should I feel any guilt, regret or remorse about it?

Dangerous, hazardous, barbaric sports have been played and contested around the world for millennia, from Roman gladiators fighting for their lives in the Colosseum to UFC fighters hunting for a knockout or submission in the octagon on the White House lawn. Football has become America’s sport, the most-watched television show in the country by far. It’s the engine keeping major network TV afloat and the lifeblood for hundreds of millions around the world. But you see studies like this and witness the impact of so many players whose lives are tragically cut short or negatively impacted by brain trauma, and wonder whether all of this is worth it just for our entertainment.

Yet my hypocritical ass will be watching most weeks anyway, writing articles and substacks about the NFL as the players we cover and adore compete for short-term gain, adulation and lifelong riches knowing that lifelong pain, suffering, disease and trauma wait just around the bend.

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On The Radar

1. Months before LeBron James signed with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018, an LLC he controls reportedly took out a $300 million loan from life insurance companies advised and managed by an arm of Mark Walter’s Guggenheim. The bonds are due in 2049 and were backed by future earnings, most notably his lifetime Nike contract. It serves as an example of how Walter and other money managers have put policyholders’ money into less safe, more unconventional places over the last decade, and how wealthy folks like LeBron move money and borrow against their own assets without paying taxes.

2. Mark Walter’s TWG Global released a lengthy statement on Wednesday addressing “multipronged attacks…advanced by unnamed sources with self-serving interests that have been reported in the media…TWG stands firmly behind the integrity of its business and remains focused on continuing to deliver value to its stakeholders.” The company admitted to no wrongdoing as the SEC and DOJ investigate fraudulent loan practices, and said it was not selling any of its sports teams at fire sale prices. The statement said the Dodgers and the Cadillac F1 team are not for sale and “the allegation that the Los Angeles Dodgers were acquired or have been funded improperly is false and not supported by the facts.” The PWHL was not mentioned in the statement.
   

3. Jeanie Buss filed a petition in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, asking a judge to block her five other siblings from selling the family’s stake in the Los Angeles Lakers as part of Walter’s $12.5 billion sale to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner. “Other owners of stakes in the Lakers have expressed their support for Jeanie remaining Controlling Owner,” the petition said. Whether the Busses, two of whom joined the new San Diego Padres ownership group, can sell the roughly 18% of the team they still own as part of a carry-on clause triggered when majority control ever changed hands, is in question. That question may not be answered for quite some time.

4. The Big Ten, SEC and Big 12 all voted to ban players who have either signed with/competed in the NFL or who declared for the draft and did not withdraw, after examples of players competing on training camp rosters trying to go back to college. The Big Ten said coaches that don’t comply would be suspended for half a season, similar to the SEC’s punishment. The SEC also extended this ban to basketball players who have competed in the G-League, while the NFL laid down some rules of its own on this matter. Will the legality of these rules be tested in court?

5. EuroLeague basketball pre-approved 11 teams for expansion for the 2027-2028 season, accepting fees of $93.3 million. Eight of the 11— reportedly Red Star Belgrade, Dubai, Hapoel Tel Aviv, London Lions, Napoli Basket, Greece’s PAOK, Paris, Partizan Belgrade, Roma Maxima, Valencia and Virtus Bologna— will be accepted in September. The Euroleague is looking for ways to compete with the incoming NBA Europe, which still hasn’t announced which teams or market will join that new league in a year.

6. Paramount told Bloomberg on Wednesday that it’s open to selling off cable companies like TNT, TBS and CNN in order to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit blocking its $81 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.

7. Netflix has, reportedly, for the first time openly discussed bringing streaming competitors like Fox One and Peacock onto its platform. Amazon, YouTube and Roku already stream other networks and services. Speaking of Roku, its sports channel announced a deal with the NWSL to exclusively stream eight Sunday night matches in 2026 and 25 Sunday night games in 2027 after the league had to cancel a similar deal with streaming platform Victory+ that was and is dealing with money issues.

   
   READ: US Open 2026: Here’s why ticket prices at New York’s must-attend event of the summer are rising for tennis fans
   

8. A father and son duo from Argentina who have faced FIFA-related corruption charges for having bribed South American soccer organizations for TV and sponsorship rights have reportedly struck a secret plea deal with the US DOJ to avoid jail time. Hugo Jinkis and Mariano Jinkis were indicted in 2015 as part of a wide-ranging FIFA corruption probe, which found that Jinkis and son paid tens of millions in bribes— which they will have to admit to as part of the deal— that will likely include some kind of financial restitution.

9. The PGA Tour announced a championship series on Tuesday that begins in 2028. The top 90 players during the regular season compete in a series finale to determine a winner, and the top 32 in points for the regular season advance to a two-week match play tournament to determine the season’s tour champion. Elsewhere in golf, the PGA announced its schedule for next year, LIV Golf is set to fire most of its employees, there are no returning offers for LIV Golfers to rejoin the PGA Tour and Brooks Koepka is joining the TGL’s new Motor City team.

10. After being thrown out of the Chicago Sky-Indiana Fever game on Sunday, Enes Kanter Freedom has been banned from Wintrust Arena moving forward. "He has demonstrated to us, unequivocally, that he has the potential to be a threat," Sky governor Michael Alter told reporters on Tuesday. That Sky-Fever game was viewed on NBC by 3.31 million viewers, the most-watched regular season game since the opening weekend of the 1997 inaugural season. Elsewhere in women’s hoops, Unrivaled announced a $100 million Series C fundraise that valued the league at $650 million. Carmelo Anthony, Geno Auriemma, Ashton Kutcher and Trae Young are among the new investors.

Honorable Mention

Kalshi signs non-exclusive deals with five MLB teams, including the naming rights for a popular Dodgers club space…The MLBPA is open to banning players from "participating in personalized marketing campaigns connected to a VIP or tier program.”…States are 31 for 37 in winning court cases against prediction markets…RIP the Pro Bowl. Good riddance…DAZN buys NFL’s commercial Sunday Ticket partner EverPass…The Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta approved funding for a potential new NHL arena…The New York/New Jersey World Cup host committee announced a $3.5 billion economic impact during this summer’s competition…Stephen A. Smith, Pat McAfee, Inside The NBA lead Complex’s sports media power ranking…Blake Griffin to host late night basketball show The Stepback on Prime Video and YouTube…CBS named its college football broadcast talent for the 2026 season…TOGETHXR and Snap announced the return of a content creator accelerator program with nine athletes, including Taylor Townsend, Lauren James, Rae Burrell and Emily Gaetino…Max Verstappen plans to take on 100 go-carters in new Disney+ series…Apple’s Formula 1 ratings are down compared to last year on ESPN…Patrick McEnroe and Rich "Big Daddy" Salgado launched The Mac Daddy Show, a thrice-weekly podcast…US Open Airbnb rates are 27% higher than during the month after, per a new study.

At the end of last decade, quarterback Deshaun Watson was a budding superstar. He made the Pro Bowl each year from 2018-2020 with the Houston Texans, guiding his team to the playoffs twice and leading the league in passing yards in 2020. There was only one small problem: The same hands that made him famous for throwing the football were also winding up in places they shouldn’t have gone.

Between March 2020 and March 2021, more than two dozen women filed lawsuits— which were later settled— against Watson, alleging sexual misconduct that largely took place during massage sessions. The Texans had to settle with 30 women who accused the team of enabling their star quarterback’s behavior. But what I’ve learned from following the NFL for 30 years is that if you have talent as a football player, teams are willing to overlook almost anything.

Attempting to upgrade from Baker Mayfield, the Cleveland Browns not only traded three first-round picks and a trio of other draft assets to Houston for Watson in March 2022, but gave him a fully-guaranteed five-year, $230 million contract extension. Giving anyone a fully-guaranteed contract extension in the NFL was virtually unheard of. Watson became the reason why it hasn’t happened since.

After being suspended for the first 11 games of the 2022 season for the aforementioned misconduct, Watson suffered a severe right-shoulder injury that limited him to six games in 2023. In Week 7 of the 2024 campaign, a torn right Achilles ended his season. While rehabbing the injury in January 2025, he ruptured it again, causing him to miss all of last season.

In total, Watson has played 19 games with the Browns, winning nine of them, with 19 touchdown passes to 12 interceptions. To date, his contract is among the worst in the history of sports, comparable to Anthony Rendon’s seven-year, $245 million contract with the Los Angeles Angels that saw him play just 257 games, and Ben Simmons’ five-year, $177 million contract across three teams, where he played a total of 178 regular season and playoff games.

Now finally healthy in 2026, the 30-year-old Watson was named the Browns’ starting quarterback for the team’s season opener against Jacksonville on Sept. 13, beating out second-year nepo baby Shedeur Sanders for the job.

“Deshaun gave us the best chance to move the ball and score points," first-year head coach Todd Monken said, despite Watson’s poor preseason performances to date.

Watson is guaranteed $46 million this year whether he plays or sits, so you might as well see what he has left if you’re Cleveland. What makes matters worse for the Browns— and with this team, there’s always a worse— is that because so much of his contract was restructured to bonuses to clear more cap space while he was injured, the Browns have more than $86 million in dead cap space on their books for the Watson contract, per this incredibly insightful Spotrac breakdown. It’s by far the record for the largest dead cap number in NFL history.

If Watson isn’t released by the third league day of 2027, which he will, a contractual poison pill provision guarantees him $200 million more through 2029. Spotrac believes the $86 million in dead cap will eventually be spread out through 2027 and 2028, mercifully ending this nightmare of a trade.

Right now, the Browns have paid out $183.4 million for 19 games of Watson. This year is his chance to prove to Cleveland that there was anything positive that came from this contract and prove to the NFL that he should be playing professional football beyond January. While Watson’s contract may have already clinched the worst in the history of sports, now’s his last chance to prove there’s some silver lining in the most sank of costs.

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On The Radar

1. Following the Los Angeles Lakers’ blockbuster sale two weeks ago, Marc Lore sold his controlling stake in the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx on Friday to minority stakeholder and Dragoneer Investment Group founder Marc Stad at a $4.5 billion valuation. Alex Rodriguez will reportedly increase his stake in the franchise, and Lore rejected larger offers to keep ownership continuity with Stad. Lore is reportedly taking a step back to focus on his Wonder food delivery service company. After the Lakers sold for $12.5 billion and Arctos bought a 10% stake in the Atlanta Falcons at a $10.6 billion valuation, are we now going to see more team sales with prices skyrocketing?

2. A meeting between California and Paramount scheduled for Monday to discuss a potential settlement of an antitrust lawsuit holding up the company’s $81 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery was canceled. State Attorney General Rob Bonta accused Paramount of acting in bad faith, leaking alleged details of negotiations that would require Paramount to sell some cable channels and keep its movie studio separate from WBD’s. A statement from Paramount-Skydance claimed it was not the source of these leaks.

3. Another week, another deluge of drama surrounding FIFA and its embattled president, Gianni Infantino. UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin told a podcast over the weekend that Infantino should resign or face an election challenger next March, though it would not be him. On Friday, CONCACAF president and potential election challenger Victor Montagliani wrote a letter to Infantino urging him not to attend a youth tournament in the Dominican Republic over the weekend, a request Infantino ignored, while later he was seemingly snubbed by Saudi crown prince Muhammed bin Salman on Sunday in Paris.

4. San Francisco 49ers majority stakeholder Jed York was arrested Sunday in Ohio on suspicion in engaging in prostitution. The 46-year-old allegedly responded to an undercover ad, where a local agent said York agreed to have sex with a woman for $140 at the Wheat Hill Mobile Home Community in East Palestine. Ohio amended the charge to one count of disorderly conduct, which he pleaded no contest to, being sentenced to a day in jail for each out and paying a $1,150 fine. York filed for divorce from his wife in May.

5. The U.S. Open announced its main draw over the weekend and said it’s increasing its prize pool for the tennis tournament to $108 million, up 20% from 2025. I’ll be having coverage of the business behind the Open all week over at Yahoo Sports, where I will likely be watching RedZone-branded whip-around coverage.
   
   READ: US Open 2026: How scheduling and purse changes lured tennis’ biggest stars to mixed doubles event

6. While Texas’ biggest battle in 2026 is for a Senate seat, another is brewing in the NHL. Billionaire Dan Friedkin has reportedly already agreed to pay the NHL $2 billion for an expansion team, and deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic that one would be awarded by the end of the year to begin play for the 2029-2030 season. The question is whether this 33rd team would play in Houston or Austin. A new arena would be built for the team either way, with negotiations underway between the group and Houston’s Harris County.

7. On agent Rich Paul’s “Game Over” Ringer podcast last week, he alluded to client Peyton Watson’s hamstring injury that caused him to miss the Denver Nuggets’ losing first round playoff series against the Timberwolves. “He was dealing with a hamstring injury, soft tissue injury," Paul said. "And when you’re dealing with those injuries, you have to be very careful in your return. Guys want to play, and you have to protect them from themselves in that moment. Because you’re up for a contract.” Watson seemingly put himself before the team for his long-term financial health and it paid off, inking a four-year, $88 million contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers, who acquired the talented 23-year-old wing in a trade from Denver last week. This situation happens way more than we think across all sports.

8. As England’s Football Association investigates Manchester City on 115 charges of breaching financial fair play regulations, City’s ownership, led by Emirati royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, may reportedly turn this dispute into a geopolitical nightmare. If things don’t go City’s way, relations between England and the United Arab Emirates may deteriorate, Bloomberg reported. This is what happens when an entire country owns a powerful sports team and doesn’t like when it’s being probed for not exactly following the rules.

9. One benefit of Mark Walter potentially being forced to sell the PWHL could be speeding up the process in which its 12 teams go on sale for individual ownership. Right now Walter and his company owns each team in the league, a structure the PWHL says will eventually change.

10. Is Enes Kanter Freedom, who was kicked out of Chicago’s Wintrust Arena on Sunday night for stepping on the court during the Sky’s game against the Indiana Fever, being backed by a Trump-aligned organization? Talking Points Memo seems to think the former NBA player who’s declared for next year’s WNBA draft is collaborating with the America First Policy Institute. Freedom told Fox News on Monday that he was invited by Sky general manager Jeff Pagliocca to the game, a day before a league source told Front Office Sports that Freedom and Royce White won’t be eligible to play in the league.

Honorable Mention

Thanks to a one-time NCAA eligibility ruling, a tight end the Browns just released cm go back to college to play at LSU…Puck reports Steve Ballmer will be completely cleared in the Kawhi Leonard investigation and ruin reporter Pablo Torre’s credibility. I’ll remain skeptical…ESPN Unlimited is set to raise rates by $2 a month…An interesting look at a dispute between the NFL and bars wanting to carry its games this fall…Massachusetts is reportedly investigating Arizona Cardinals exec Ryan Gold’s alleged illegal betting activity…The Red Sox, Dodgers and Braves are quietly rolling out sponsorship deals with Kalshi…DoorDash unveils major college football strategy…The NFL’s website may be populated with Athletic content as part of a deal…Beekeeper Coffee announces fundraise that includes Rich Paul, Draymond Green and Anthony Davis…Florida Panthers inks arena F&B deal with Sodexo.

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It’s painfully obvious that the current Los Angeles Dodgers dynasty is a house of cards built on a foundation of deception and fraud. Guggenheim Partners’ Mark Walter bought the team in 2012 for $2.15 billion from Frank McCourt, whose own bankruptcy helped exempt the team from a portion of its television money going toward revenue sharing. The Dodgers’ subsequent 25-year, $8.35 billion local TV contract is even richer because the team not only owns the network, but insurance companies Walter either co-owns or his immediate circle owns carries all of its debt, to the reported tune of $1.45 billion.

Clear Spring is a life insurance company that’s a subsidiary of Walter’s Group 1001, yet the business ties between Clear Spring and American Media Productions, the name of the Dodgers TV network’s parent company, was filed as unaffiliated. Clear Spring and Delaware Life are being investigated by the SEC and DOJ, who are looking into whether businesses with ties to these companies were improperly listed. Meaning, where the same ownership is on both sides of various transactions, while policyholders of these insurance companies have no clue what’s going on with their money. It poses a huge credit risk to those policyholders, who expect their money invested in low-risk assets that reliably grow over time.

In an effort to get rid of tens of billions in troubled assets under investigation, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers last week at a $12.5 billion valuation, and is in discussions to sell his minority stake in Chelsea FC. In a regulatory filing on Tuesday, Walter’s TWG Global plans to buy $6.5 billion in assets from Delaware Life that have posed a conflict of interest to regulators.

It’s clear that Walter needs cash, quickly. Before selling the Lakers, Walter reportedly tried securing a loan against his ownership of the team and tried getting out of his massive Dodgers and Lakers TV contract for a lump sum from Charter Communications. The next logical place Walter can get an enormous amount of money from is the Dodgers, whose astronomical payrolls and deferred contracts to superstars like Shohei Ohtani have seemingly been funded by smoke and mirrors this whole time.

Ohtani’s then record-breaking 10-year, $700 million contract he signed with the Dodgers prior to the 2024 season only pays him $2 million per year through 2033, but $68 million per season in deferred money between 2034-2043. And the way things are going for Walter, chances are that he not only won’t own the team in eight years from now, he may be compelled to sell it in 2026. If that’s the case, Ohtani has what’s called a “key-man clause” in his contract, where he can opt out if either Walter sells or team president Andrew Friedman is no longer in his role. While ESPN and The Athletic both report that an opt-out is currently unlikely, that sentiment could easily change if things get even worse for Walter in the not-too-distant future.

Conversely, Ohtani may choose to stay in L.A. for a number of reasons. He’s won so much as a Dodger. It’s the team that’s cemented his status as an all-time great on the field and an endorsement revenue machine off of it. Shohei is reportedly projected to earn $125 million in sponsorship deals in 2026 alone, in large part due to his otherworldly popularity in his native Japan. Why risk leaving the Dodgers when he’s already making so much money in Hollywood?

Maybe Walter’s investigation leads to the Dodgers’ nucleus being broken up, if a potential salary cap doesn’t already do that itself and L.A. is forced to offload Ohtani due to new rules. Maybe Shohei doesn’t have a good feeling about the owner or group Walter sells to. What if the next collective bargaining agreement doesn’t require a salary cap and Ohtani thinks he can get even more than $700 million? It sounds crazy, but the value he’s brought to the Dodgers justifies an astronomical price tag.

In short, it looks like Walter is going to have to offload the Dodgers, even if he doesn’t want to, putting Ohtani’s short and long-term future in doubt. What happens to baseball’s team of the 2020s over the next 6-12 months could determine the future of baseball’s best team and best player well into the 2030s.

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On The Radar

1. Just a little more on Mark Walter here. “His playbook, using loans from insurance companies he controls to finance his other investments,” The Wall Street Journal wrote, “is now under government scrutiny.” The WSJ piece goes over his sports and other properties, like David Geffen’s $85 million Malibu beach house, in a comprehensive profile you should check out. One of those sports assets, the PWHL, is reportedly not expected to be sold, though there’s a fair amount of regret over naming the championship trophy the Walter Cup. Walter’s Cadillac Formula 1 team, the only team to not score a point this season, just fired its team principal last week.

2. The Buss battle over whether the family that’s governed the Los Angeles Lakers since 1979 can sell its remaining 17.8% stake in the team is only beginning. Jeanie Buss wants to retain her position as Laker governor, which she kept even as the family sold a majority stake to Walter, but can’t do so under NBA rules unless she or the family owns at least a 15% stake. The Athletic reports that Jeanie is open to exploring a scenario in which she gets 15%, whether buying out her five other siblings— who maintain their stake will sell to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner in a “carry on clause” from the Walter sale— or through other means.

3. Super interesting Substack article on Wednesday from Joe Pompliano on Mat Ishbia’s ownership of the Phoenix Suns. In short, Ishbia put up $4.6 billion in United Wholesale Mortgage stock as collateral with JP Morgan to buy the Suns in 2023. “Those shares,” Pompliano wrote, “are now worth $1.15 billion.” What happens if JP Morgan wants its money back and Ishbia can’t afford to pay it?

4. Sometimes in business and in life, all it takes is a simple change of scenery to revitalize someone’s career. That’s what happened for 29-year-old English forward Dominic Calvert-Lewin, who left Everton for Leeds United last season and finished seventh in the Premier League with 14 goals scored to help LUFC stay in the league. Last month in New York, I chatted with DCL about his second act in soccer, what it was like barely missing England’s World Cup team, why Americans should choose Leeds— whose season begins Saturday against Nottingham Forest—and more:

5. During an interview this week with a German media outlet, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell made waves when he said there was no doubt that the league would one day have teams based outside the United States. Whether that will happen during his tenure in charge, via relocation or expansion, remains to be seen.

6. Elsewhere in NFL land, ESPN is quadrupling down on Pat McAfee, adding him to its Monday Night Countdown pregame show as it negotiates a contract extension that could be worth as much as $60 million per year. The network also officially announced its NFL Network crews for international games and other game specials, with Dave Pasch, Kurt Warner and Jason Kelce calling three European games and Bob Wischusen and Louis Riddick calling three others.

7. Remember two days ago when I told y’all that a consortium including Jeff Bezos was buying 30-33% of Liverpool at a $7 billion valuation with an option to buy a majority stake over the next year at an $8 billion valuation? The minority stake is reportedly 40%, an even more sizable chunk than once anticipated.

8. During its first week in operation as a prediction market, Novig did $125 million in trading volume, more than Kalshi or Polymarket generated in their first weeks. This comes as the Trump administration tries to stop states from enforcing bans against prediction markets from operating there.

   

9. As Peacock gets set to raise rates, the first year of NBA’s new TV deal, including games on NBC and Peacock, yielded $2.11 billion in partner ad sales, a $580 million year-over-year increase. NBC also named its college football talent squad this week, with Jason Benetti and Dave Flemming debuting in play-by-play.

10. As Tennessee and Kansas State announced jersey patch sponsor deals this week, Progressive inked a contract with 13 separate teams, including Georgia, Oregon, USC and Colorado, for on-field advertising. Meanwhile, after the Big 12 was heavily criticized for its Monster Energy deal, the conference has a LinkedIn posting out for a new director of partnerships.
    
    
    Honorable Mention
    
    RIP ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen…Fanatics joins the NFL as its new official sportsbook sponsor…The Raiders want an extra $75 million from Las Vegas to build a new entry point to Allegiant Stadium, which drew a disappointing figure during WWE Wrestlemania in April…The U.S. Open’s signature honey deuce will remain $23 this year…Don Orsillo and Mark Grant of the San Diego Padres top Awful Announcing’s rankings of MLB local broadcast crews…Clay Travis introduces new platform Sport & State, while Craig Carton announces new Outkick show…San Francisco will host the 2027 WNBA All-Star weekend…The NWSL’s Boston Legacy won a court order allowing them to continue renovating White Stadium…LIV golfers reportedly have mixed feelings after meeting potential new investor…The Enhanced Games have lost $62 million so far this year…And The Realest announced that Shohei Ohtani’s game-used and signed New Balance Ohtani 1 shoes from the opening game of the 2025 MLB Tokyo Series sold for $440,055, a public auction record for the most expensive baseball shoes ever sold.

    

    
    READ: Seattle’s secret door: How an Instagram doomscroll turned into MLB’s hottest new ballpark experience
    

    Thanks for reading! If you read The SprungStack ‘til the end, recommend to a friend!

The sports business world’s biggest story last week was private equity’s further infiltration of the world’s most valuable franchises, with Bob Iger and Thrive Eternal’s Josh Kushner buying a majority stake of the Los Angeles Lakers at a record $12.5 billion valuation and Apollo Sports Capital putting $2.6 billion into the New York Yankees for a minority stake.

Sports leagues have, for now, put strict limits on how much of a team or teams PE firms can own in a given league. MLB rules limit private equity ownership stakes in its teams to 30%, with one fund only allowed to own 15% of a team. NBA and NHL teams have the same 30% limits, but individual funds can own up to 20% of a single team. The NFL only lets certain funds buy into teams and restrict per-team ownership to up to 10%. I delved into why PE loves sports so much for Yahoo on Wednesday, with tremendous insights from Jeff Shaffer, the managing director at Alvarez & Marsal Private Equity Services, which specializes in pre- and post-acquisition operations assessment and integration, and Greg Betinnelli, a partner at The Chernin Group, a growth equity fund that has bought and sold stakes companies ranging from Slack, Oura and Ro to Barstool Sports and The Action Network.

What Shaffer also discussed that I found super interesting, but didn’t make the Yahoo piece, was the ways in which these private equity companies can exert authority and soft power over these multi-billion dollar sports teams while still being barred by league rules from holding controlling interests in them. Huge PE firms like Arctos, RedBird, Apollo and Silver Lake will bring operational expertise where they own 100% of a team’s certain vital functions like scheduling, training, AI or analytical tools that are critical to their success.

“If you’re talking about a data analytics platform that feeds decision making for a professional team,” Shaffer told me, “PE can own that 100%, where it’s only at the franchise level where I don’t get a controlling interest. So the mid market funds are going after other elements that are not as expensive where they can create value.”

PE firms can affect a seemingly limitless number of team processes that can help a team’s bottom line or operational efficiency, from technology to the way uniforms are made or designed. And if a subsidiary you own a majority of becomes disproportionately important to a franchise for some reason, you hold leverage over that team even without the ownership stake or equity to make majority decisions. Based on the ruthless way private equity companies run their businesses, chances are likely that this soft power is being wielded in sports right now. How prevalent this trend becomes, or already is, will likely grow even more significant as private equity’s role in owning our favorite teams increases.

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On The Radar

1. This SEC investigation into Mark Walter, the former Los Angeles Lakers owner, current owner of the L.A. Dodgers, Sparks, PWHL and others, has deep, meaningful ramifications in sports and the entire global economy. The CEO of Guggenheim Partners may have committed fraud, per The Wall Street Journal, “by concealing financial connections while borrowing billions of dollars from insurers he controls.” Four companies, Miami-based ABS Capital, investment company Amistad Financial, real estate brokerage Bradford Allen and Chicago-based Hudson Trading may have passed proceeds from loans made by insurers Walter and Guggenheim own to fund other businesses Walter controls, like his sports teams.

   Other people in Walter’s circle now face heightened scrutiny, like Dan Towriss, the CEO of Walter’s Group 1001 (owner of Gainbridge) that reportedly holds $76 billion of annuity money. And Sammons Enterprises, which owns a reported 1/3 of Guggenheim. Walter sold the Lakers last week to raise money to address the loans facing federal review, and he and business partner Todd Boehly are in talks to sell their stakes in Premier League club Chelsea to Clearlake Capital, whose managing partner Jose Feliciano was unanimously approved Monday as the new San Diego Padres owner. And if Walter is found guilty of misusing ordinary people’s insurance money and enough others have copied this practice, what would that mean for the bigger economic picture?

2. The Lakers’ latest soap opera began Monday afternoon, when ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the Buss family, which controlled a majority stake in the Lakers from 1979 until last fall when it sold to Walter, agreed to sell its remaining 17.8% stake to Iger and Kushner, ending Jeanie Buss’ reign as governor. The six Buss siblings had a family trust that required four votes to trigger a carry-on clause to join a team sale. Jeannie was reportedly the only one to vote against the sale. Jeanie and her lawyers are disputing the validity of this sale (be sure to read the letter at the bottom) citing a 2017 court order saying a sale can’t happen without her approval. Curiously, Lakers finance exec Joe McCormack reportedly called for an emergency meeting of the Buss siblings last Monday to dissolve the family trust and seek unanimous approval to lock all family shares for four years under a new trust. That’s quite specific timing, just two days before Walter’s sale to Iger and Kushner became public.

3. As we inch closer to the start of NBA training camp, the league’s investigation into the Los Angeles Clippers and Kawhi Leonard remains unresolved. But ESPN reported Monday that the NBA found no evidence that Clippers governor Steve Ballmer funneled money to Leonard through team sponsors in an effort to circumvent the league’s salary cap rules. “The league is examining whether the Clippers are guilty of ‘failure to supervise’ employees, though it’s unclear what specific rule the team would have violated or what the penalties would be,” two the sources told ESPN. The NBA’s lead spokesman, Mike Bass, said that not only did the league decline to cooperate in ESPN’s story, but it “contains numerous and significant inaccuracies. The results in this matter will be made clear once the investigation is concluded.”

4. Last Tuesday, I wrote about Monumental Sports & Entertainment exec Zach Leonsis’ reasoning why the Washington Wizards weren’t trading Anthony Davis. As part of our wide-ranging conversation last month, he also spoke about a $1 billion renovation to Capital One Arena. Leonsis explained to me why MSE was fine with taking just over half of that amount from taxpayer dollars to complete the transformation in time for the 2027-2028 basketball and hockey season.

   

   “The impact that Capital One Arena has on downtown Washington D.C. is unmistakable,” Leonsis said, “and at this point, I think everyone understands that we’re a key driver in bringing 3 million people downtown. We have historically owned and operated our building and invested back into it and carried a deep mortgage. Lifespan of arenas are about 30 years old. Our building is turning 30 next year. We really needed to reinvent our building to be best in class because we work and operate in a best in class city where you have some of the best bands in the world, and they have a certain expectation that the world’s most powerful city should have one of the world’s best arenas. The city’s contribution is critical in order for us to achieve the results that our fans deserve, and so it’s a huge responsibility when we oversee support like that. We’ve got almost 30 years of fan data and demand that we know exactly what our fans want, and our new building will meet the moment.”

5. CNBC reported that the consortium featuring Jeff Bezos that’s agreed to purchase about 1/3 of the Premier League’s Liverpool from Fenway Sports Group at a $7 billion valuation has an option to purchase majority control over the next 12 months at an $8 billion valuation. That would be an even bigger windfall for minority stakeholder LeBron James…
   

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6. Who created a YouTube channel over the weekend to document his newfound love of golf. His debut video, chronicling a trip to Scotland with his teammates from the 2016 NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers, already has nearly 2 million views as LeBron is expected to post monthly.

7. Nielsen released its first ever NFL Fandom Index to determine America’s most avid football fans using eight key metrics: apparel purchases, event attendance, streaming, social media following, tv viewership, radio listening, betting intent, and overall interest level. Here’s how the list shook out:

   

   Smaller markets outperformed larger ones here, with the AFC North all ranking in the top 10. You can dive into the full results here.

8. Ubiquiti, a technology company owned by Memphis Grizzlies governor Robert Pera, was sued in federal court last week by Ukrainian civilians. They’re alleging that Ubiquiti “helped power the battlefield communications network Russia uses to hunt, target, and kill Ukrainian civilians with drones.”

9. Nevada informed Kalshi on Saturday that it will face penalties of $120,000 a day for not complying with a geofencing order banning its use in the state. Kalshi replied with a letter saying that it was compliant and that it was violating federal law.

10. Move over, honey deuce? American Express and Moët are introducing a new U.S. Open cocktail featuring the champagne beverage being served out of a tennis ball can. Will it be tennis’ next viral concession sensation?

Honorable Mention

Fans will now get Heisman Trophy votes, kind of…Sam Houston State’s interesting Snapback Sports deal…Dave Pasch and Kurt Warner, and Bob Wischusen and Louis Riddick are reportedly ESPN’s new secondary NFL announce teams…Luke Kuechly will replace Bill Belichick on Peyton Manning’s ESPN matchup series…Tom Pelissero will join Netflix and The Ringer…Is Alexis Ohanian hinting at interest in buying a sports team…MLB All-Star is heading to San Francisco in 2028 and possibly Toronto in 2029 and Baltimore in 2030, while next year’s Field Of Dreams game heads from Netflix to NBC…There’s potential momentum for a new Chicago White Sox stadium site…Rookie Ceyair Wright left the Cincinnati Bengals to pursue acting…Alex de Minaur is Ralph Lauren’s new brand ambassador…And check out this French soccer team, whose fan scarves now double as their season tickets.

WATCH:

Listen:

It’s been an eventful summer for Josh Kushner.

The founder and managing partner of venture capital fund Thrive Capital and Thrive Eternal was slated to be the lead investor in FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino’s failed FIFA Forward Enterprise. The plan was to turn the World Cup and major events into a private, for-profit enterprise that would have sold 20% of the business for $4.2 billion to private investors led by Kushner and Thrive Eternal. The uproar over FIFA’s proposed commercialization made the quickly-withdrawn plan doomed from the start, putting Infantino’s decade-long reign as FIFA president in peril.

So what does Kushner do? In a stunning deal on Wednesday, he and former Disney CEO (and Thrive advisor) Bob Iger agreed to buy a majority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers from embattled governor Mark Walter (more on him later) at a sports record $12.5 billion valuation. The reported acquisition comes less than a year after Walter’s $10 billion purchase from the Buss family was approved by the NBA’s board of governors.

The deal reportedly came together quickly in the last few days, with Kushner and Iger pivoting away from pursuing a Las Vegas NBA expansion franchise. The 41-year-old vice chairman and co-founder of Oscar Health is no stranger to sports ownership despite his relatively young age. He will have to divest from a minority stake in the Miami Heat, previously held a stake in the Memphis Grizzlies and in April, Thrive Eternal announced the purchase of a minority stake in the San Francisco Giants.

"As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world,” Kushner and Iger said in a statement. "Our long-term commitment is to build on that foundation, compete at the highest level, and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles."

Kushner’s relationship with his brother and familial closeness to the Trump administration has set off plenty of speculation and conspiracy about the pending Laker acquisition. I’ve written about Infantino’s Trump ties and Kushner’s FFE involvement, and acquiring the Lakers whose governor is under investigation for fraud from Trump’s SEC is quite the coincidence. A White House spokesperson told Front Office Sports that this Lakers deal "has nothing to do with President Trump or his administration."

Lakers superstar Luka Dončić approved of the deal on social media.

Regardless of how we got here, Kushner now owns significant pieces of the Lakers and Giants, two of sports’ crown jewel sports franchises. That will lead to increased scrutiny about his past. Like in 2021, when a judge ruled that an apartment company he co-owned “repeatedly violated state consumer protection laws by collecting debts without required licenses, charging tenants improper fees and misrepresenting the condition of rental units,” awarding tenants more than $4 million in a class-action lawsuit granted just last month.

Whatever he’s been known for, whether in venture capital, his marriage to Karlie Kloss or his business success, doesn’t matter in comparison to his newfound sports ownership. He’s now one of the most powerful figures in American sports, with every action now more scrutinized than the last.

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On The Radar

1. The shocking Lakers sale by Mark Walter, the Guggenheim Partners CEO, comes at a suspicious time, as Walter and his conglomerate, TWG Global are under investigation by the DOJ and SEC for loan fraud. Flipping the Lakers for a $2.5 billion profit after a year is good business, but it just never happens this soon. My first impression upon seeing the bombshell Ramona Shelburne report Wednesday morning? Walter is in trouble, especially considering the deal was reportedly negotiated and completed within 72 hours. Bloomberg reported that Walter was seeking to raise funds to pay off debt related to the DOJ investigation, and $12.5 billion certainly helps on that front. But things seem off. To sell to a Trump-aligned businessman while under investigation after he failed to buy the World Cup seems like something is going on that we can’t see. While Walter doesn’t intend to sell the Dodgers, the future of his PWHL leadership should raise questions.

2. As Thrive Eternal is set to own 20% of the Lakers, Apollo Sports Capital officially invested $2.6 billion in the New York Yankees on Tuesday— part equity, part credit— to help refinance debt and infuse some cash. The Steinbrenner family has controlled the team since 1973, but as new asset-rich ownership have entered MLB, they’ve become lower on the list of richest MLB ownership groups. Perhaps Apollo helps put the Yankees back in the game in that regard. Apollo also owns a majority stake in Atlético Madrid and a minority stake in Ryan Reynolds’ Wrexham.
   
   READ: Lakers’ $12.5 billion sale shows why private equity loves sports — and won’t leave

3. In the last week of July, I had a chance to catch up with Leeds United midfielder and U.S. Men’s National Team player Brendan Aaronson, who was with his club on a preseason Premier League tour of America. We spoke about taking his teammates to New York, recapping his successful 2025-2026 season, how USMNT should build off of this year’s World Cup, dealing with the Folarin Balogun controversy, improving U.S. soccer’s youth development and why Americans should pick Leeds as their Premier League club.

4. In a two-minute pregame statement before Tuesday’s nationally televised game against the New York Liberty, Indiana Fever head coach Stephanie White fired back against online critics calling for her firing and “trying to create narratives that simply don’t exist.” After a game in which the Connecticut Sun’s DiJonai Carrington hit Fever backup Sophie Cunningham across the neck, White was criticized for saying the foul wasn’t intentional. “The hate, the fear-mongering, the divisiveness, the stuff that’s trying to hijack our league will not win,” White continued. “Every day these women put their ass on the line. Every day. When they go low, we go high. Love will win. Grace will win. Humility will win. And kindness will win. I stand by them, I will always stand by them. Everybody else can go to hell.”

After the win over New York, Caitlin Clark said there was no way they were losing that game following White’s speech.

5. A WNBA task force made of team president and general managers met Wednesday, and while they discussed transgender athletes, they did not settle on any eligibility rules. The statement from the league: "Today's meeting covered a wide range of topics, including ongoing discussions on transgender athletes and the continued hate and vitriol directed at players online. We will continue to engage all league stakeholders in the coming weeks and months. We will approach these important conversations thoughtfully and in alignment with the values of our league. There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others."
   

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6. At CBS’ annual NFL media day in New York on Tuesday, CBS Sports president David Berson did not comment on the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, but said that conversations with the NFL about the next media rights deal were ongoing. I was in the room and had the chance to speak with Jim Nantz and Tracy Wolfson about Tony Romo, who remains on indefinite leave following his OWI arrest last month. JJ Watt will take Romo’s place on the A team, with Ross Tucker moving up to the B team.

   
   
   READ: Tony Romo’s CBS future remains uncertain as network says it’s still ‘assessing’ his fate

7. Sportico released its annual NFL franchise valuations on Wednesday, with the Dallas Cowboys on top at $15.5 billion, followed by the Los Angeles Rams ($12.7 billion), New York Giants ($12 billion), New England Patriots ($10.4 billion) and New York Jets ($10.35 billion). The average team is worth $9.34 billion, up a whopping 31% year over year.

8. In a shocking press release on Tuesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission gave Kalshi emergency authority to continuing operating as normal in New York and ignore their gambling laws and a lawsuit ordering Kalshi to stop operating in the state. It sets up an even more intense war between state and federal regulators as Kalshi surpasses $4 billion in monthly revenue.

9. Phoenix Suns governor and United Wholesale Mortgage CEO and Chairman Mat Ishbia lost more than $600 million last week on poorly-timed bets on interest-rate hedges that did not fall like he thought. It caused UWM to suspend its planned stock dividend last week and forced Ishbia to take financing from distressed asset lender Oaktree Capital Management. The hundreds of millions Ishbia received in these annual dividends were invested into the Suns, the Financial Times reported.

10. The day my conversation with Monumental Sports & Entertainment executive Zach Leonsis came out, MSE announced a naming rights extension with Capital One for its arena that’s undergoing an $800 million renovation and released some renderings and AI generated videos of the building.

Honorable Mention

Buffalo Bills will address feedback of new Highmark Stadium….LIV Golf cancels season-ending event…New San Diego Padres ownership could take over next week…Former New York Knicks president Dave Checketts is part of a group that wants to buy the NBA Europe’s $1 billion London franchise…Will Apple bid on media rights for golf’s British Open?…Go check out the Chicago White Sox’s pope night…Matt Hasselbeck joins research effort into diagnosing CTE in living people…Karl Ravech will work the Little League World Series as his last ESPN assignment after last month’s layoff…Damien Woody is out at ESPN after 15 years…College basketball’s 24-hour marathon is amazingly back…The Jonas Brothers will perform at halftime of the NFL’s Sept. 10 Australia game…After 80,000 fan submissions for a New York Islanders third jersey, eight finalists remain…On stock down 22% after missing projections…Coco Gauff and Taylor Fritz add Oura sponsorship…Formula E is coming to Disney+…And Kawhi Leonard touched down in Toronto to watch tennis.

As Monumental Sports & Entertainment’s president of media & new enterprises and the alternate governor for the NBA’s Washington Wizards and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, Zach Leonsis has helped oversee a lot of rebuilding lately on multiple fronts.

We’re in year two of Capital One Arena’s $800 million renovation project set to finish in the fall of 2027, growing the building’s footprint from 900,000 square feet to 1.6 million. After missing the playoffs the last five seasons, the Wizards have an exciting young core led by center Alex Sarr, forward Kyshawn George, guard Bilal Coulibaly and AJ Dybantsa, a dynamic ball-handling forward taken with the first overall pick in June’s NBA draft. After missing the postseason for two straight seasons and not advancing in the playoffs since their championship year of 2019, the Mystics have won seven straight games behind the All-Star duo of 22-year-olds Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen. The NHL’s Washington Capitals already plan to re-tool after Alex Ovechkin, the league’s all-time leading scorer, retires.

“We have been focused on drafting and developing young talent, and now both teams seem to be taking that next step towards building up and becoming much more competitive,” Leonsis told me over coffee last month in New York. “We’re getting the development of our young players to get to a place where we want to be, where we can be contending.”

Getting to a contending window does not happen overnight, but there are ways for teams to bring in veteran players who are not just able to help young foundational pieces develop, but accelerate the rebuilding process. It’s why the Mystics claimed championship-winning veteran Betnijah Laney-Hamilton off waivers from the New York Liberty over the weekend. And it’s why the Wizards swung a pair of massive, relatively unexpected trades in January and February to acquire multi-time All-Stars Trae Young and Anthony Davis.

The Wizards’ basketball operations leadership team of Michael Winger, Will Dawkins, Travis Schlenk and John Thompson III presented Leonsis and ownership a plan to partner the young players with established veterans who can teach them how to be franchise players and what it’s like to make a deep postseason run. It’s why when Davis was mentioned in offseason trade rumors as, potentially, the missing piece to entice LeBron James to sign somewhere, it was pure, fantastical, hot-takey click bait.

“There are always going to be rumors about players and whatnot,” Leonsis said, “but we’re so excited about Anthony being on our roster as a top-75 player of all time. He’s a future Hall of Famer. We are treating him with the respect that he deserves, and we think he’s going to be a critical part of our roster this year and beyond. We can’t wait for our younger players to learn from him. You can’t replicate that experience and that wisdom that a guy like that can bring. We view both Trae and Anthony as critical to our team today, and, frankly, to our team in the future with our younger guys.”

With said younger guys improving, Dybantsa coming into the fold as a potential generational talent and Davis and Young solidifying an improving roster, there’s more optimism about the Wizards going into a season than we’ve seen in quite some time. The Wizards and Davis will even reportedly discuss a contract extension when the regular season begins.

“It’s not fun to rebuild a team, but it’s the right thing to do if you want to build a longer window of sustainable winning,” Leonsis said. “We have been patient and it makes us more excited that next year, we’re going to be a much more competitive team, which is what we deserve and our fans deserve. Everyone’s really excited about what we started to build.”

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On The Radar

1. Liverpool owner Fenway Sports Group is reportedly close to selling a 33% stake in the club for $2.03 billion to a consortium led by the son-in-law of steelmaking billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. An announcement could be made this week that would mark the first sports investment for Bezos, the all-powerful Amazon founder, who may get a taste for sports ownership, leading to speculate on what else he may want to buy, which could be anything. Liverpool is coming off a preseason American tour, that included a visit to Yankee Stadium, before its Premier League season opener at Newcastle on Aug. 23.

   

2. College Football Playoff executives met virtually Monday to discuss potential CFP expansion for the 2027 season. We remain stuck at a stalemate where the Big Ten and Fox wants a 24-team field, where Fox can possibly get some CFP games currently all owned by ESPN, and the SEC and ESPN want a smaller field so it can keep all the rights for itself. One new proposal is expanding the CFP field from 12 to 16, with play-in games determining the final four spots. A 20-team tournament that would eliminate conference championship games is also an option.

3. After Pablo Torre’s podcast late last week revealed an undisclosed secret side deal between Kawhi Leonard and scoreboard manufacturer Daktronics, colleague Jake Fischer reported that law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz investigating the Kawhi case for the NBA already knew about his alleged ties to Daktronics and USL club Rhode Island FC. Leonard is reportedly working under the belief that the league’s investigation will conclude before training camp, ending up on the Toronto Raptors after all, with sanctions against the Los Angeles Clippers for salary cap circumvention the likely outcome. Will the Clippers appeal any type of punishment via arbitration?

4. The drama surrounding FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino never ends. UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation released an open letter Monday discussing “the integrity of the game, and the integrity of those elected to lead it,” surrounding Infantino’s push to privatize the World Cup. “When trust is broken through deception,” the letter continued, “when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.” U.S. Soccer also joined its condemnation of Infantino (shown below)

   after Mexico and the African confederation endorsed Infantino late last week. UEFA is also reportedly considering investigating Infantino’s 16-year tenure working at the company amid a report that he once paid off a mistress while serving as UEFA’s secretary general. FIFA released a statement on Friday saying that it “will not support, facilitate or tolerate any process concerning the election of the FIFA President that is inconsistent with FIFA’s Statutes, democratic procedures and established governance framework.”

5. Once again, there is more drama in the battle between prediction markets and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and states who want to regulate the prediction markets for themselves. The CFTC last week warned prediction markets against displaying casino-style betting odds as it battles states who contend these sports markets constitute gambling. New prediction market Novig then went on offense, suing New York, Massachusetts, Washington and New Mexico— states that already have rulings against prediction markets on the books— to try and tie up anti-PM enforcement in those locations. Connecticut also had a ruling in its favor Monday, allowing it to proceed in its case against Kalshi.
   

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6. The WNBA players union had to issue a statement urging that players should not be used as political pawns, a message that, of course, everyone will listen to. As a battle rages over Caitlin Clark’s refusal last week to weigh in on trans men in women’s sports, Fox’s Colin Cowherd went off on Megyn Kelly for calling Clark a coward (bit of a tongue twister, but stay with me here). Some people, like Clark’s Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cunningham, have seen the advantages of being used as a political football, reportedly shopping a tell-all book to capitalize on her newfound fame in conservative political circles. As she racks up points off the court, Cunningham has scored a combined eight points in her last three games in 68 total minutes.

7. The unrest in the Middle East this year has cost Formula 1 dearly. Liberty Media’s second quarter earnings showed a 38% drop in total revenue year over year, an operating income drop from $293 million to $73 million and a $197 million decrease in total team payments.

8. As Thursday’s Hall of Fame Game preseason opener between the Carolina Panthers and Arizona Cardinals drew 7 million viewers to NBC and Peacock, The New York Times published a great story about the proposed village the NFL had endorsed for the HoF’s home city of Canton, Ohio last decade. The project is now reportedly in $300 million in debt, with the NFL having backed out of the plan and its $10 million pledge of support.

9. On Aug. 18 of last year, Spanish tennis player Rafael Jodar was ranked 395th in the world in singles. The 19-year-old is currently 15th after his run in the National Bank Open in Montreal, where for the first time in the history of an ATP 1000 level event, all of the quarterfinalists were born after 2000.

Honorable Mention

Caitlin Clark will be all over TNT and HBO Max next month at the women’s basketball World Cup…Kevin Costner will participate in Netflix’s Field of Dreams broadcast from Iowa on Thursday, with the get-in ticket price of $620…Netflix and Jason Bateman are developing a series on the history of the New York Yankees, while the current Yankees are part of a series of games over the next several weeks that Apple will broadcast in virtual reality…The MLB playoffs begin on Sept. 29 and run until Halloween night at the latest…Los Angeles Olympic ticket prices are the highest ever recorded for a Games…Obstructed views and a smaller-than-expected video board as the new Highmark Stadium opened in Buffalo…A first look at the Monster advertising on a Big 12 basketball court…The FBI and NCAA are working together to prevent sexual exploitation among collegiate athletes…CBS Sports adds Lindsay Czarniak as a host for CBS Sports HQ…Chevrolet and Nike team up with Devin Booker on Impala-inspired sneaker collection.

LISTEN:

Much has already been said about NFL analyst Ryan Clark’s very public layoff from ESPN just over two weeks ago, awkwardly leaving the company for good in the middle of an NFL Live episode. His ouster has been widely politicized on both sides of the aisle.

Fox News-owned Outkick broke the story, then discussed why it was hard to justify the network keeping him and then said the media was portraying Clark as the victim and ESPN as the villain. Former ESPN anchor turned conservative personality Sage Steele claimed that Clark wouldn’t go on the air with her as part of her lawsuit against the network. CNN’s Jason Lee said a “culture war” led to Clark’s departure, and both former ESPN anchor turned liberal personality Jemele Hill and current ESPN titan Stephen A. Smith criticized the move.

“I knew I couldn’t be too Black,” Clark said on an emotional episode of The Pivot podcast, which he hosts twice a week with former NFL stars Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder, shortly after his exit. “What makes me sad is even in trying to adjust, to be at least more of what certain people wanted, they still fired me. So that is difficult.”

On Tuesday, The Pivot shot a live episode from the Paley Center in Midtown Manhattan, with former New York Giants legend Plaxico Burress on as a guest. Before the show started, I had a brief conversation with Clark, who made it clear he wouldn’t change anything about his 11-year ESPN tenure.

“You make decisions based on what you can live with, based on ways of being able to respect yourself,” Clark told me. “I enjoyed my time there. The relationships I was able to gain through NFL Live, Monday Night Countdown, Get Up, First Take, the amount of people that called me, reached out to me, offered to help me, spoken up on my behalf, shows me that the person I was, was the person I was supposed to be. Jobs come and go, right? But there are relationships that can last a lifetime. And I was able to build those in many ways despite the nasty way it ended.”

Clark didn’t want to speak much about the past, referring me to the episode of his podcast linked above. Now it’s time, he said, to move on and move forward.

“I know and understand what happened. Now who am I in taking the next step?” he said. “I’m now in a place to have to prove myself all over again. Whatever I did the last 12 years doesn’t matter. But the thing that isn’t done is quickly in a place where people are watching, to where people are supporting, where people want to know what the next move is going to be.”

Whatever Clark does next, he’s thankful he still gets to talk about the game he loves with people he enjoys working with in Crowder and Taylor.

“Finding that next thing may not be as easy or just stepping into a new job,” Clark said, “but luckily I have the platform of The Pivot where I’m already doing some of those things. And now it’s about taking that next step and expanding new places.”

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On The Radar

1. Potentially on the verge of shutting down after 2026, LIV Golf said it’s found new life with an unnamed lead investor signing on after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund pulled its support earlier this year. LIV is also speaking to more than a dozen potential minority investors for “LIV 2.0,” which will be majority owned by the players. The news came a day after a players-only meeting led by Bryson DeChambeau was reportedly held to discuss the league’s future. BC Partners— which owns a stake in GSE Worldwide, an agency where LIV players like DeChambeau are clients— is reportedly considering lending LIV money. LIV’s news ironically comes on the same day in which the PIF finalized its $55 billion acquisition of gaming giant Electronic Arts, a deal in which the company will take on more than $20 billion in debt.

2. As FIFA President Gianni Infantino still waits on Saudi support for his embattled re-election campaign, he and senior leaders went to Morocco for emergency meetings, where FIFA apologized for errors made in its commercialization push, but senior leadership reaffirmed its support for Infantino. Those meetings also led to Infantino reportedly offering Morocco the 2030 World Cup final— which under any normal president would happen in Barcelona or Madrid— in exchange for its support of Infantino. The Moroccan trip comes as the head of Jordan’s football association accused Infantino of blackmail, holding up prize money from last year’s Arab Cup in exchange for endorsing his re-election campaign. In an unrelated note, North American World Cup host cities have reportedly claimed FIFA still owes them money as well.

3. I attended the introductory press conference for incoming Major League Soccer commissioner Larry Berg (shameless Yahoo recap article plug here) on Tuesday, and search committee co-chair Jimmy Haslem (who owns the Columbus Crew, Cleveland Browns and Milwaukee Bucks) laid out the full hiring process. Korn Ferry and CAA helped compile a list of 125 different names from all over the world in sports, media, tech and business. That list was whittled down to 25, with Korn Ferry narrowing it to 12-13. Interviews halved that candidate list, and Berg, former Fox executive David Nathanson and San Francisco 49ers and Leeds United executive Paraag Marathe were the three finalists. Marathe dropped out, and then it was down to Berg and Nathanson to present their case to league owners.

   

4. A federal judge ruled Tuesday in a summary judgment that Utah’s anti-gambling laws apply directly to Kalshi, “rejecting Kalshi’s claim that its status as a federally registered exchange shields its sports betting contracts from state law.” It was the first state in which a final verdict went down against the prediction market, and New York has already cited the new ruling in its ongoing litigation against Kalshi. The dominoes against unregulated prediction markets are beginning to fall.

5. Fox released its 2026 NFL broadcaster pairings, finalizing the permanent move of Drew Brees on to its C team after analyst Mark Sanchez’s bizarre arrest following an October altercation in Indianapolis. Kevin Burkhardt, Tom Brady, Erin Andrews and Tom Rinaldi return as the lead announce crew for the network.
   

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6. ESPN’s 2026 college football broadcaster pairings will see Katie George join the B team as sideline reporter, and Kris Budden moving up to C team sideline reporter. Alyssa Lang will replace Matt Barrie as lead ESPN studio host.

7. Cleveland’s expansion WNBA team starting play in 2028 will be known as the Sirens despite the PWHL’s New York team already using that name. While Cleveland’s team is inspired by the Odyssean siren and New York’s team is inspired by the sounds of New York City, Cleveland could’ve just come up with a name that hasn’t been used yet.

8. On Monday’s episode of The Five on Fox News, host Jesse Watters refreshingly admitted that he doesn’t care about the WNBA and is tired of talking about it on cable news.

   Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, a lightning rod of controversy of late, told reporters Wednesday that “all we ever do is cover everything except basketball.” I look forward to the day where people pay more attention to what actually goes on in the W on the court, where 2.5 million people watched Sunday’s Fever game against the Minnesota Lynx, than fake, irrelevant issues off it.

9. The NWSL said Wednesday that its 2027 season will kick off on Feb. 11 in Los Angeles, earlier than ever and three days before the Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium, due to the FIFA Women’s World Cup necessitating a seven-week break in the campaign in June and July. The 30-game regular season will precede the playoffs that conclude with the championship game on Nov. 20. Fans of the NWSL and Ted Lasso will be happy to know that the Kansas City Current was the inspiration for a major plot point for season four, which dropped Wednesday on Apple TV.

   

10. Jury selection and the trial for the infamous rigged poker game face in which Chauncey Billups is a defendant has been moved from Nov. 2 to Nov. 30. In the related NBA gambling/insider trading case in which Terry Rozier is a defendant, fellow defendant Deniro Laster has been accused of trying to tamper with witnesses and obstruct justice by federal prosecutors, who have asked a federal judge to revoke his bond.

Honorable Mention

ESPN quarterly revenue is up 4% as the network announced it sold out its Super Bowl advertising inventory…Massive changes at horse racing’s Preakness Stakes…Bijan Robinson is now the highest-paid running back in NFL history…The Paramount/Warner Bros. Discovery antitrust trial has been set for March 2…A new NHL partnership will allow the trading of futures contracts based on teams’ on-ice performance…Ricky Williams’ new memoir comes out on Oct. 7…Miami Dolphins and Miami Grand Prix exec Tom Garfinkel left the company after 13 years…Mike Golic Sr. joins Notre Dame football radio coverage…Matthew Berry’s podcast comes to Audacy…The NBPA’s new Los Angeles training facility…The NBA considers the Battersea power station as an arena location for London’s potential NBA Europe team…You can become Akron’s offensive coordinator for the first series of its home opener.

Watch: The Dink

Gianni Infantino worked hand in hand with President Donald Trump, his family and his administration for years, leading to this summer’s FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America being the most profitable ever edition for soccer’s global governing body, which Infantino has run for the last decade. It’s why while his reign as FIFA president is in danger, the 56-year-old was reportedly set to hold meetings with senior figures in the Trump Administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Monday as he looks for public support to save his job.

Led by Infantino, FIFA leased office space at Trump Tower on 5th Ave, awarded Trump with a peace prize he made up to appease the president and after administration officials complained last month, delayed the red card suspension of star U.S. striker Folarin Balogun so he could play in its round of 16 match against Belgium. It was the first red card postponement in the World Cup in more than 60 years.

The North American World Cup proved to be an audition of sorts for Infantino’s commercial ambitions, featuring excessively high ticket prices, hydration breaks in each half adding to media revenues and a star-studded halftime show during the final that managed to be dull and unexciting despite having Madonna, Justin Bieber and Shakira perform.

Late last week, information leaked about Infantino’s plan to form a commercial organization called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), which would run its major global events and lead its media contracts. FFE would then sell 20% of the new venture to private investors led by Josh Kushner, the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared, at a $20 billion valuation without a formal bidding process that would have likely valued FIFA’s business way higher.

Infantino was set to lead FFE with a $30 million base salary that would have set him up for life, inspired by, per The Athletic, “Trump’s ability to network and make money.” The FFE announcement was supposed to take place on the eve of the World Cup final in New York at the Waldorf Astoria, which Trump famously once owned. This grand spectacle was ultimately delayed, which may have doomed the plan because Infantino couldn’t stop talking about it, which may have led to it leaking to British press.

Once the FFE plan was out in the open, continental football governing bodies UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian confederation voiced its disapproval of the plan to the point where Infantino announced Friday that the gambit was being scrapped before it had any chance of going to a vote. UEFA nations are now set to put a no-confidence vote up for Infantino unless he resigns, putting his decade-long presidency in peril. It takes 20% of FIFA’s 211 member nations to call a vote of no confidence, and UEFA has 55 members itself. CONCACAF, whose president and FIFA vice president Victor Montagliani is emerging as a possible Infantino electoral opponent, is likely to join UEFA in the no-confidence uprising. UEFA is also planning various measures to “paralyze FIFA” to force Infantino’s resignation, including a Club World Cup boycott.

UEFA also reportedly asked Infantino not to destroy any documents in relation to his FFE plans in the event of a future investigation or litigation. Infantino has reportedly tried and failed to reach President Trump in recent days in order to lobby other countries to save his job, but a Telegraph story reports Trump will do “everything possible” to keep Infantino in his role.

The FIFA boss has attached himself to Trump for years, to the reported dismay of those in Infantino’s organization.

“Several leading executives were quietly furious about Infantino’s extremely public courting of Trump in the lead-up to the World Cup,” The Athletic reported.

Jared Kushner was reportedly a key figure in Infantino awarding last month’s final to Metlife Stadium in Kushner’s native New Jersey, and paved the way for the 2034 World Cup bering given to Saudi Arabia, whose Public Investment Fund gave Kushner’s Affinity Partners $2 billion in 2021. Kushner and Infantino are both close friends with Saudi crown prince Mohammaed bin Salman, whose country reportedly pays FIFA $100 million a year in sponsorship deals. Trump was seen at last year’s Club World Cup final, also at Metlife, handing the winners Chelsea with the trophy as Infantino awkwardly and unsuccessfully tried shooing him away from the shot.

Infantino was more successful this in ushering Trump off the stage as Spain hoisted the World Cup trophy, but he still had to be edited out of some of the team’s official photos.

Infantino apparently devised this outlandish FFE plan without FIFA’s top executives knowing about it, with COO Kevin Lamour telling the Associated Press that his plan “deceived” his staff despite it reportedly being in motion for more than a year. Instead of FIFA executives, Infantino reportedly sent FIFA legends to dazzle potential outside investors in meetings about the plan, which was quickly quelled by leading continental and national governing bodies who don’t want football commercialized for private gain.

Even before this FFE gambit became public, House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (D, MD) wrote a letter last week to Infantino, launching an investigation “into mounting evidence of corruption and a potential quid pro quo between FIFA and the Trump Administration.” The letter alleges a long-standing campaign by FIFA to secure special favors from Trump, including the dismissal of past corruption cases, while asking Infantino “to preserve all communications between FIFA personnel and individuals affiliated with the Trump Administration or its inaugural committee.”

President Trump reportedly made $4 billion in the first year of his second term in office and Infantino, his yearslong ally, hatched a grand plan to similarly benefit from his official position while enriching the Kushner family and his extended circle. But with FFE now DOA, it seems like not even his friend Trump can save Infantino from his eventual ouster due to his greed and corruption that finally was not tolerated outside the United States.

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On The Radar

1. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ acquisition of pitcher Tarik Skubal, winner of the last two American League Cy Young awards, from Detroit prior to Monday’s MLB trade deadline not only sent fans outside California into a frenzy, but underscored baseball’s complaints about the sport’s lack of parity as it fights to implement a salary cap for next season. The Dodgers entered Monday with a $430 million payroll and a $180 million luxury tax bill that’s higher than 14 teams’ total salary expenditures. L.A. is loaded as it looks for its third straight championship, with a TV revenue arrangement that gives the team a distinct advantage. Will another Dodgers title this year make a lockout next season even more inevitable than it already is?

2. LAFC co-owner Larry Berg was named Major League Soccer’s next commissioner on Monday. The 60-year-old will start Jan. 1 and replace the retiring Don Garber, who’s held the role since 1999 and will shift into a role as chairman. Berg, who will have to divest from his LAFC shares, and former Fox executive David Nathanson were reportedly the finalists. Berg is a senior partner at hedge fund 26 North and a former Senior Partner at Apollo Global Management.

   

3. With Tony Romo now on leave from the NFL on CBS following his recent arrest for operating a vehicle while intoxicated, will this be an excuse for the network to try to get out of his 10-year, $180 million contract as its lead football analyst? My gut says yes.

4. New York’s $36 billion lawsuit against Kalshi to shut the platform down in the state is the biggest declaration of war to date on the burgeoning prediction market industry. “You're going to have a lot of pissed off New Yorkers if we got shut down in New York," Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told CNBC Monday, adding that New Yorkers have made $200 million on the platform, which he said would be impossible at a gambling sportsbook. In 29 preliminary induction cases so far where states are parties to a lawsuit, states have defeated prediction markets in 23 of them.

5. The Tsai family said nothing would change following the divorce of Brooklyn Nets governor Joe Tsai and New York Liberty governor Clara Wu Tsai. The Tsais are viewed as one of the WNBA’s most forward thinking ownership groups, and we’ll see if the status quo remains the same despite their marital separation.

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6. A long adage in the sneaker industry is that big men can’t sell shoes. A long-term extension with Nike will bring Victor Wembanyama is first signature shoe in the not-too-distant future. Can Wemby break the mold in the U.S., especially as an international player?

7. Netflix and ESPN made waves over the last few days in the NFL media world (non Romo division). Noah Eagle, Luke Kuechly and MJ Acosta will call Netflix’s Sept. 10 season opener between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams from Australia, with a studio crew led by Elle Duncan, Michael Irvin, Nick Foles and Clay Matthews III. ESPN said Jason McCourty will join Monday NFL Countdown, replacing Ryan Clark, while Molly McGrath will move from college football reporting for the network to NFL duties as their B team sideline reporter.

8. An underreported source of private funding in sports is in soccer with the USMNT. After Citadel CEO Ken Griffin largely bankrolled the team’s hiring of Mauricio Pochettino as head coach, he’s reportedly a major reason why the Argentine is staying with the team on a four-year contract extension.

9. With the Dallas Wings announcing plans to move from the 6,000-seat College Park Center in Arlington to the American Airlines Center for the 2027 season, it’s time for all WNBA teams to move into NBA-capacity level arenas. The Washington Mystics already have plans, but it’s time for the Atlanta Dream, Toronto Tempo and even Chicago Sky and Las Vegas Aces to migrate to larger venues.

10. Lack of funding and missed payments have led sports teams and leagues to leave Victory+ in droves, with the NWSL’s departure after less than a full season the latest setback. It underscores the risks taken to back unproven streaming services as teams and leagues look to extract media revenue wherever they can right now.

Honorable Mention

Former NHL enforcer Sean Avery’s second act starring in Christopher Nolan movies…An interesting day Monday for the shut-up-and-dribble crowd, which was pumped up about Aaron Rodgers bashing Anthony Fauci on Pat McAfee’s show, but upset that Caitlin Clark didn’t want to discuss the right wing “protecting women’s sports” issue…A potential $1 billion buyer for London’s NBA Europe team…The Big East’s newest commissioner and former MLB executive…Over 100 women’s college hoopers join unionization effort…Athletes Unlimited’s basketball league on leave…The Professional Tennis Players Association’s defamation lawsuit against Andy Roddick’s podcast,

While any league’s All-Star weekend is generally supposed to be about celebrating the sport and the players on the court or field, last weekend’s WNBA event in Chicago became about Cathy Engelbert’s reportedly tenuous position as the W’s commissioner.

An ESPN article on Friday sourced more than 20 stakeholders in and around the league who concluded that after seven years on the job, Engelbert is “not the right person to navigate the demands the league currently faces and what its stakeholders now need.” Engelbert has guided the WNBA to new heights during her tenure, through two collective bargaining agreements, including one that just increased the average player salary fivefold, and a new lucrative media rights deal. But her leadership style, her perceived lack of strong communication skills and her inability to be nimble when it comes to issues like officiating, online threats and the constant Caitlin Clark mistreatment allegations have put the former Deloitte exec under fire.

While NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, Engelbert’s boss, has been complimentary of the job she’s done, he’s been largely non-committal about her future in charge as the WNBA completes its 30th season.

If this is indeed Engelbert’s last season as commissioner, and there’s no reporting to indicate it definitely is, then maybe we should go through a speculative exercise of listing the top hypothetical candidates who could replace her. So with the help of women’s basketball insider and podcast host Khristina Williams and journalist, host and producer Greydy Diaz, here are five candidates my colleagues and I think would be suited for the job:

Bethany Donaphin: The head of WNBA league operations for eight years is Engelbert’s number two on the org chart. She played for parts of two seasons with the New York Liberty in the early 2000s, has management experience with the NBA and Deloitte and would be the choice if the league wants a commissioner change but also a sense of general continuity.

“She’s someone who is respected by players and has built up the experience,” Williams said.

Terri Carmichael Jackson: The current executive director of the WNBA Players Association is quite popular among players and knows what they like and need. If the league is looking for a player-friendly option who knows how to negotiate, she’d be a very strong option.

“She is a leader with deep WNBA experience in labor relations, governance and transformative and sustainable growth,” Diaz said. “The trust she has built with players throughout the years should help bridge communication between players and the league.”

Mark Tatum: The NBA’s deputy commissioner and number two to Adam Silver and was the interim WNBA commish in 2018 after president Lisa Borders stepped down. He knows how to run a profitable sports business and would certainly have the respect and backing of ownership. But would he consider the W job a downgrade, or valuable experience if he aims to one day succeed Silver?

Swin Cash: The Basketball Hall of Famer won championships in college, the WNBA and Olympic gold. For years, Cash was the New Orleans Pelicans’ vice president of basketball operations and team development, one of the highest-ranking female executives in the NBA during her tenure. A current WNBA analyst for Prime Video, Cash possesses both the executive and playing experience to command the respect of both owners and players.

“Being a former standout player gives her invaluable perspective and knowledge,” Diaz said. “Her front office leadership, player advocacy and relationships across sports and business would serve as an advantage in a role that she would have room to grow in like any candidate.”

Micky Lawler: The commissioner of Unrivaled Basketball has in 2.5 years turned the league into a player-friendly model other women’s sports outfits aim to emulate. Over All-Star weekend, when players were asked where the league should expand to next, many of them said Miami in part because of their positive Unrivaled experience.

“The players are familiar with her through that relationship,” Williams said. “She knows what it takes to operate major sports leagues, and be successful at it.”

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On The Radar

1. On Tuesday, FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino unveiled an insanely audacious plan to form a commercial organization called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) that would be in charge of putting on its major global events like the World Cup and Club World Cup. The plan would then be to sell stakes in this company to private investors. Up to 21% of FFE would be sold at a $20 billion valuation, with Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital listed as the lead investor— and potentially others in Trump administration circles— in a process JP Morgan has signed on to lead. This plan, for an organization that’s registered as a not-for-profit in Switzerland, has to be approved by the 211 FIFA members and its 37-member council. Infantino, who may have been planning this gambit for more than a year, would head up the FFE and reportedly command a salary rivaling the $64 million per year NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell makes. To sweeten the pot for countries to back the plan, each nation would receive $20 million in the next World Cup cycle, up from the $8 million they’re currently slated to receive, which is appealing to smaller federations like the Czech Republic. Infantino has tried to apply pressure to countries to say yes by offering $40 million if they accept by Sept. 19 and then $10 million after that, a scheme one official called “pure bribery.”

   

   “This is about the democratisation of football worldwide,” Infantino claimed, but leading governing bodies have vehemently disagreed. UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation already came out in opposition of a move that would rival the failed European super league as a pure money grab. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham concurs, as does the association of European football leagues. European officials are so pissed off by this that they reportedly may back a Qatari competitor to Infantino in next year’s presidential election. The FFE would likely make high ticket prices and quarter breaks disguised as hydration pauses that most football fans hated permanent, as global soccer would become more about capitalistic greed than the product on the pitch that brings the world together. Will European teams actually boycott? Would a $20 billion valuation actually be low for what FIFA’s worth? More to come, I’m sure.

2. The two largest college sports jersey patch sponsor deals to date were signed Tuesday. Ohio State’s $15-17 million annual contract with Chase was quickly topped by Notre Dame’s $18-20 million yearly pact with SoFi. Expect the other blue bloods to race to sign an even bigger contract before the college football season kicks off next month.

3. There is near universal disapproval of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s proposed rules on governing sports-related prediction market events trading. A letter sent by 44 state attorneys general this wrote that its rule “is in tension with the Constitution” and that sports bets and gambling are and should be regulated by the states. The NBA and NFL were among the leagues that claimed the CFTC wasn’t doing enough to protect their integrity when it came to the events and bets allowed on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.

4. More information continues to emerge in the SEC investigation of Mark Walter, the majority stakeholder in the Los Angeles Dodgers, Lakers, Sparks and PWHL. Bloomberg reports that the FBI seized Walter’s cell phone last September, and the Financial Times said that loans from Walter’s Delaware Life insurance company to Dodgers Tickets LLC is facing scrutiny for potential fraud.

5. As time quickly runs out to pass some version of the Protect College Sports Act in the Senate before the August recess, the College Football Playoff committee will resume meetings on Aug. 10 about potentially expanding the CFP field from the current 12-team format. Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti is still advocating to double the amount of playoff to 24 teams.
   

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6. Learfield’s newest NIL report showed that the company helped collegiate athletic departments raise more than $300 million in partnership revenue last academic season, up 122% year over year. That includes more than 1,750 NIL deals featuring more than 1,300 brands as Learfield looks to further cement its status in the college sports revenue sharing landscape.

7. As war and unrest continues to surge in the Middle East, Formula 1 said Wednesday that it would decide in September whether to end its 2026 season in Europe if races couldn’t be held in Qatar and Abu Dhabi on Nov. 29 and Dec. 6. There was reportedly consideration to adding a second Las Vegas race after this season’s Grand Prix on Nov. 21 after the October Bahrain race was moved to Malaysia.

   

8. It’s been a big week in sports media for former Carolina Panthers. Luke Kuechly will reportedly be named Netflix’s number one analyst for their five-game NFL schedule and will call the L.A. Rams-San Francisco 49ers game on Sept. 10 in Australia alongside Noah Eagle. That’s in addition to some reportedly encouraging ESPN analyst runs from Steve Smith and Adam Thielen.

9. MLS supporters have waited for decades for a more open salary system that encourages more spending and makes the salary allocation process far less complicated. As the 30 teams convened in Charlotte for Wednesday’s All-Star Game, league owners are reportedly meeting about potential changes that likely couldn’t be implemented before the current collective bargaining agreement runs out at the end of January 2028. With the league calendar now flipped to fall to spring, the CBA running out in the middle of the 2027-2028 season could prove problematic.

10. New York sports fans for the last couple of years have had to deal with a Gotham Sports app that was terribly unreliable and often didn’t work at all. The MSG and YES Network teams will now take their direct-to-consumer rights to DAZN for the fall. DAZN also has its sights set on other NBA and NHL digital rights this fall as well as the NBA’s local TV bundle deal expected to launch in 2027.

11. LeBron James’ jersey sales over the first 48 hours after he signed with the Philadelphia 76ers broke Fanatics’ all-time record for any player in any sport joining a new team, beating out Shohei Ohtani.

Honorable Mention

Now the Kawhi Leonard aspiration investigation may not be wrapped up until 2027?… Shane Hennen, a defendant in the illegal poker and gambling scandal Chauncey Billups is caught up in, pleaded guilty to wire fraud…We’re close to MLS naming a successor to commissioner Don Garber…Real Madrid boasted record revenues last year despite not winning a trophy…The Bundesliga reportedly met with Apollo Sports about a $1.1 billion loan…Germany’s future World Cup bid would come with a pledge for lower ticket prices…Streaming in May accounted for 48.6% of all TV watching, with YouTube TV’s percentage of viewership eclipsing Netflix and the Disney bundle combined…LIV Golf may have to cancel its season-ending event as the PGA Tour offers a quiet viewing option…Prime Video in Canada making major rights moves for the NHL in Canada…The NHL has a newest highest-paid player…A four-nations face-off style tournament is coming to lacrosse, as I reported last month could happen…CONCACAF Champions Cup to CBS…John Isner’s “Nothing Major” tennis podcast is moving to The Volume.

While the Philadelphia 76ers were clearly the biggest winners of July’s LeBron James sweepstakes, prediction markets came pretty damn close.

You may have heard that on Friday morning, the all-time great announced that he’d join the Sixers on a two-year, $8 million veteran minimum deal, ending a three-week period of speculation that had the basketball world in a vice grip. Every word and detail from him, his family and his representation was delved into so crazily that NBA fans basically became Swifties sleuthing for clues this summer. Adam Silver said the league was waiting on him to make their schedule for next season. At Fanatics Fest on July 17, LeBron mentioned “trusting the process” when it came to choosing his next team, sending the crowd into a frenzy.

This type of speculative conspiracy mongering without any verifiable facts or insider information is encouraged on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, which both made a killing on where LeBron would end up. Of the $233.7 million in Kalshi trading volume on where James would end up, a reported $33 million was placed on Philadelphia. Of the $46.2 million Polymarket took for its LeBron-a-thon market, just $3.8 million was placed on the 76ers.

While Kalshi sports markets were initially available in all 50 U.S. states, lawsuits alleging that sports-related results is gambling and should be regulated like sports betting companies have begun taking hold and limiting prediction markets’ sports-related offerings. Kalshi is restricted in Nevada, and on Friday, the state’s Gaming Control Board said the two parties reached an agreement that would fully prevent the prediction market from circumventing its ban. A county judge in Washington State granted the state a preliminary injunction last week against Kalshi, saying it will likely succeed in proving the prediction market is an illegal gambling operation. In a rare legal win for Kalshi, a judge Monday granted a Commodity Futures Trading Commission request to temporarily stop Minnesota’s full ban on prediction markets, which was set to go into effect on Saturday.

Earlier this month, Kalshi’s preliminary injunction against New York was rejected— and an additional emergency injunction was also rejected Monday— meaning that the Empire State can enforce its gambling rules and regulations against operators like Kalshi and Polymarket that haven’t applied for a sports book operator license. While Kalshi is restricted or limited in 10 states right now, that number is expected to grow in the coming months, setting up a potential future Supreme Court battle.

Last month, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, who’s been on the side of prediction markets throughout his tenure, issued a proposed rule and framework on events contracts that go against the public interest like “activity that involves terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or conduct that is unlawful under federal or state law.”

“The CFTC will protect the integrity of our regulated markets without standing in the way of responsible innovation,” Selig said. “This proposal gives the Commission a durable, transparent framework to identify the contracts Congress directed us to scrutinize while letting legitimate markets move forward.”

A letter the NFL sent on Monday replying to this proposal said that these “rules fall significantly short of protecting the integrity of sporting events.” The league is rightfully worried about insider trading and market manipulation that has come with numerous different prediction market trades.

Roughly 80 to 90% of trading volume on Kalshi is sports related, and its ability to accept trades from the biggest states is shrinking. Will prediction markets be able to take advantage of next year’s Super Bowl? There’s a chance that the LeBron sweepstakes might have been prediction markets’ last major sports payoff as states become wiser to what they actually are: gambling operations that should be treated as such.

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On The Radar

1. A Sunday night Wall Street Journal story delved into the SEC investigation of Mark Walter, the majority stakeholder in the Los Angeles Lakers, Dodgers, Sparks and the PWHL, and its origins from an internal whistleblower complaint. The probe is “examining how around $16 billion in loans extended to companies tied to Walter or his conglomerate, TWG Global, wound up on the books of insurance companies he owns after passing through a third entity.” Whether this type of activity is considered fraud could have a massive, wide-ranging impact on one of sports’ most powerful and influential figures. The full story is very much worth the read.

2. A major step may have just been taken in college athletes’ efforts to unionize. Stanford football players announced Monday that they’ve set up a chapter of the College Football Players Association, as the organization looks to set up similar agreements with other ACC football teams. Once the CFPA has organized the majority of players in a conference, then the plan would be to form a union. While past efforts from students at Dartmouth and USC didn’t quite materialize, getting ACC football players to a point where they could collectively bargain with the conference would represent a significant milestone in college sports history.

3. What a mess Italian soccer has become. Not only has the Azzurri not made the men’s World Cup since 2014, their proposed hiring of legendary player Andrea Pirlo as head coach was rescinded after government officials complained about his global ambassador role for Russian gambling company Fonbet. As a result, Paolo Maldini, the director of the Italian football federation, resigned after just 16 days on the job.

4. Less than a week after the Athletics sold a minority stake in the team to the Mark Cuban-led Harbinger Sports Partners, the team on Monday announced a $70 million strategic investment partnership with Team61, led by former MLB pitcher Chan Ho Park. The release claims it’s the first investment into an MLB team by a Korean group ahead of the A’s 2028 move to Las Vegas. Does majority stakeholder John Fisher need fresh infusions of capital to complete his ballpark on the Vegas strip? The timing of these investments is interesting to say the least…

5. Two years ago, Yan Diomandé was playing high school soccer in Florida. He attracted the attention of La Liga club Leganés, which placed him on their developmental B team. The Ivory Coast native wound up making 10 appearances with the Spanish club’s senior team, enough time to showcase his prodigious talents that RB Leipzig paid a $23 million transfer fee for his services. All he did in a full Bundesliga season was score 12 goals and dish out eight assists, enough to start all four matches for Ivory Coast in the World Cup. Now Real Madrid is paying a transfer fee of more than $130 million to acquire the 19-year-old phenom, whose improbable rise should become a movie.

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6. “Sorry that you were so consumed by hate and criticism that you missed it all.” That was on the second of a batshit crazy 15-slide Instagram post published Sunday by FIFA president Gianni Infantino, that at times seemed like a more coherent version of a social media storm his good buddy Donald Trump would write.

   

   Infantino went on to discuss Iran, Haiti and referee decisions while telling his supposed haters that “it might be time to set aside your pens and keyboards.” Likely referring to the rescinded red card suspension of U.S. forward Folarin Balogun, Infantino said “subsequent decisions not to ban players in certain situations are routine and and widely accepted in some of the biggest leagues worldwide.” He continued on, urging “those spending their time and energy hating us, please take a moment to reflect, meditate, pray…to the pens and papers, to all the screens, may you find love and peace where the people behind you couldn’t.” Just a truly insane manifesto from someone undeserving of the position he holds and power he wields.

7. On Friday, the NFL announced that Super Bowl 62 in Atlanta would be on Feb. 13, 2028, likely ending the possibility of an 18-game season being enacted for the 2027 season. The current collective bargaining agreement runs through the 2030 season.

8. A report Friday alleged that Providence Equity Partners would buy full control of The Team, formerly Wasserman, agency from Casey Wasserman. PEP already owns 60% of the talent and sports agency valued at $3.4 billion and would represent quite the payout for the embattled exec and 2028 LA Olympic committee chairman, who was found to have had inappropriate correspondences with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in the Epstein files.

9. The Big Ten flexed its muscles for months in not allowing Michigan’s men’s basketball team to play Duke on Amazon Prime Video neither at Madison Square Garden nor Miami’s LoanDepot Park, citing the conference’s strict broadcast rules. So the defending national champions ended its quest to take on the Blue Devils, who will instead play Texas Tech from MSG in December as part of a landmark separate TV agreement with Prime Video.

10. Starting next year, YouTube Premium subscribers will also get access to Peacock, the companies announced Monday. The deal will also include NBC broadcasting some of its sporting events on the network’s YouTube channel. The deal will also reportedly include NBC no longer producing Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football broadcasts, which Amazon will now take care of in house.

Honorable Mention

The war between the Blazers and the city of Portland continues, and the NBA team may have finally realized their losing the PR battle…Mike Vrabel bringing a puppy and his daughter to press conferences won’t make people magically forget about his infidelity…Hope you had a better weekend than Tony Romo…Major events coming to Lambeau Field…This year’s Bahrain Grand Prix will take place in Malaysia but will still be called the Bahrain Grand Prix…MLB x Lululemon…Barstool Sports managed to score zero points in a Family Feud episode…Mike Lombardi is on leave and UNC football is under investigation…They’re really gonna let Jon Gruden do play-by-play…Chicharito is a great first get for Dallas’ new USL team.

Watch: Netflix’s new season of Quarterback

Scott Friedman spent more than 20 years in ticket sales, including running operations at the University of Illinois. But he got tired of the corporate world, especially when they didn’t like him speaking his mind on social media. He then launched the Ticket Talk Network in 2024 with the intent to provide information on live event ticket pricing and networking through a Discord channel.

Over the last two years, Friedman heard constant complains about the StubHub ticketing experience, and began shifting his online show’s focus to righting the industry’s wrongs. In January, he told me earlier this week, things reached the breaking point.

“I got to do something about this,” Friedman said. “This is absolutely insane.”

His TicketTalk shows began featuring people who suffered bad customer experiences with StubHub. He corresponded with and got some help from Alix Anfang, the company’s former global communications director, to resolve some cases before she left the company in May. But there were still so many who needed guidance and assistance.

“I literally got hundreds of people DMing me to help them,” Friedman said.

Things hit the next level as the World Cup got underway. He said thousands of fans traveling to North America from all over the world didn’t receive their tickets purchased through StubHub because of a practice called ghost speculative ticketing. Brokers list tickets they don’t actually own at a certain price, hoping to later buy the seats lower than the listing price and then sell them for profit.

The problem with this strategy for brokers was that World Cup tickets only grew more expensive leading up to the tournament and then as the group stage began on June 11. So instead of fulfilling the orders for tickets they sold and taking a huge loss, brokers decided to lie and never tell the buyers that their tickets didn’t actually exist. This happened, Friedman said, to thousands of people during the group stage, where resellers didn’t fill ticket orders because prices skyrocketed.

“They said, I’m just going to convince StubHub to get out of the fine,” he said. “If you talk to them, they praise speculative and ghost ticketing for online events. Reps were telling these people that your tickets are coming. Wait until an hour before kickoff. They ruined thousands of families’ dreams for attending the World Cup. It was just nightmare after nightmare.”

Friedman embarked on a media tour as speculative ticketing became a more mainstream issue. StubHub, for its part, told the CBC earlier this month that it “does not allow speculative tickets, period.” He partnered with lawyer Bradford Clements to find these victims and file claims against StubHub through the American Arbitration Association, which takes less time to process than going through the normal U.S. judicial system.

To date, with Friedman’s help, Clements has secured more than $1.7 million in StubHub refunds, with interest, for clients wronged through the reselling process.

While other marketplaces have this issue of speculative ticketing, Friedman said 98% of the claims he sees come from StubHub, which is an even larger percentage than their already outsize market share. He believes StubHub engages in unethical practices at a larger rate than other ticket marketplaces with poor customer service and a sense of apathy toward those impacted.

All this is separate from a $5 million class action lawsuit filed last week against StubHub and its CEO Eric Baker, who also runs Andro Capital, a large-scale ticket reseller who uses the StubHub platform. The lawsuit claims that StubHub is not a neutral ticketing market due to this conflict of interest.

While Friedman has helped hundreds of victims, with a form to fill out if you are one, he knows he and Clements can do so much more in recouping money and spreading the word about the practices used by StubHub and other ticketing marketplaces.

“There's tens of thousands of cases that StubHub has wronged buyers and sellers in,” Friedman said. “There’s so much more work to be done.”

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On The Radar

1. The ESPN layoffs came fast and furious this week, with longtime MLB voice Karl Ravech, NFL analyst Ryan Clark, SportsCenter veteran anchor David Lloyd and NFL Network insider Tom Pelissero among the most notable names impacted. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said many of the layoffs were due to the recent NFLN acquisition. As the cable model continues to tread water, this week’s news comes as cuts are also hitting hard at Disney companies Pixar and National Geographic. “I am not happy about this decision one bit,” Stephen A. Smith, who’s making a reported $20+ million per year at ESPN, said about Clark’s ouster. “This is terrible,” said Pat McAfee, who’s reportedly negotiating a new contract worth $60 million annually and is releasing a music album nobody asked for. Unlike other outlets, layoffs won’t be celebrated here in this fraught time in the media industry. And one interesting angle from The Ringer’s “Press Box” podcast that Awful Announcing picked up on: Is ESPN eventizing who they’re laying off?

2. The son-in-law of billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal is reportedly leading a consortium of investors in talks to buy a 30% stake in Liverpool at a $6 billion valuation. Jeff Bezos has reportedly been contacted to join this group for a sale, which could free up more funds for Liverpool owner Fenway Sports Group to make a bid for a possible Las Vegas NBA expansion franchise. A potential huge winner in all this? Liverpool minority stakeholder LeBron James.
   

3. A month ago, MLB proposed a new draft model that would cut the number of rounds from 20 to 12, make high schoolers ineligible for selection and slash draft pick signing bonuses. In its labor fight with the MLB Players Association, its proposal laid out Tuesday isn’t just not on the same page with MLB; it’s not in the same Library of Congress. The PA wants more college draft eligibility, higher signing bonus pools— especially for small market teams— and the ability to trade picks during the first 10 rounds up until two hours before the draft.

4. One thing that could save baseball fans from an extended lockout next season is a reported provision in MLB’s media rights deal that pushes the contracts back an extra year if enough of a given season isn’t played. All of MLB’s current media deals with Fox, NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery, ESPN and Netflix run through the 2028 season specifically so that the league can sell everything, including potential local rights, at the same time for a premium rate. If the lockout goes on long enough, team owners would have to wait another year to get that extra revenue.

5. NFL national revenue eclipsed $14 billion last season, up 5% from 2024, meaning $450 million was distributed to each of the 32 teams. That’s reportedly more than the combined national revenue of the NBA, MLB and NHL. It is, indeed, good to be king.
   

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6. As the LeBron James free agency decision saga continues, combined trading totals on Kalshi and Polymarket on where he’ll go have reportedly reached $200 million. That’s a lot of money for people who have no idea what the outcome will be.

7. As NBA second apron rules limit how much James can make when he chooses his next team, every player is being impacted by these constraints. After 86.4% of the money in new contracts signed last offseason were guaranteed, that number has reportedly plummeted to 77.2%. Less money, more problems.

8. On to tennis. With prize money at the sport’s biggest tournaments not increasing at the rate they’d like, a group of top men’s and women’s players, led by men’s No. 1 Jannik Sinner, are considering boycotting the wildly successful, star-studded U.S. Open mixed doubles tournament that debuted last season and twice sold out the nearly 24,000-seat Arthur Ashe Stadium. Players are asking for a higher proportion of tournament revenues, which seems fair considering they’re the ones the fans are paying all this money to watch.

   

9. As new Portland Trailblazers governor Tom Dundon tries to use the leverage of a relocation to get more government funding to renovate the existing Moda Center or build a new arena, two local county commissioners proposed slashing funding toward the renovations’ projected $600 million price tag. And as Dundon increases Portland fans’ blood pressure, he also parted ways with beloved television play-by-play announcer Kevin Calabro, both radio announcers, studio host Neil Everett and analyst Tom Haberstroh in a series of cost-cutting measures similar to what Dundon carried out when he bought the Carolina Hurricanes in 2018.

Honorable Mention

Donald Trump wants Gianni Infantino to be the next UN secretary-general. FIFA should let him do it…Tommy Tuberville doesn’t like the Protect College Sports Act, which means it could be DOA in the Senate…Noah Eagle to call Rams-49ers season opener in Australia in September…Former NFL kicker Jay Feely won his Arizona congressional primary and will face Amish Shah, his former team doctor with the New York Jets, in the November election. It’s a rare case where a Jets-affiliated person will actually win something…Read this piece on the Rooney Rule being at a crossroads…MLS is investigating possible tampering in Casemiro’s Inter Miami signing…Megan Rapinoe’s new podcast…Read about the baseball spy…Netflix’s Untold series will have a new episode about Australian breakdancing legend Raygun. A MUST watch.

For nearly 15 years, DeMaurice Smith was the executive director of the National Football League Players Association. If anyone knows the ins and outs, the strengths and weaknesses, of the NFL, it’s De.

Last year when I was at Boardroom, Smith and I spoke on camera for nearly 90 minutes to promote his new book. The thing that I remember most from that conversation is what he thought the NFL’s kryptonite could be.

“Someone asked me the other day, is there a silver bullet that can jeopardize the unparalleled success of the National Football League,” Smith recounted. “Yes. That silver bullet is if someone believes that it’s not ‘any given Sunday,’ that this thing is truly rigged, and that someone is either making money off of prop bets or outcomes in a way that jeopardizes the integrity of the game.”

The concept of material non-public information centers around someone compromising a piece of information so precious that it could move markets or put the league’s integrity at risk. On Friday at 4 p.m. eastern, squarely in news-dump-we-want-you-to-miss territory, the league announced that Ryan Gold, the Arizona Cardinals’ director of college scouting, was suspended indefinitely for violating the NFL’s gambling policy. An investigation determined that Gold provided non-public, inside information about the Cardinals’ 2026 draft picks before they were announced, in addition to placing parlay bets on pro and college football games. The league also claimed that there were no signs that a play or game was impacted by this activity.

Gold’s lawyer denied the allegations and said he would be appealing the suspension, saying the longtime Arizona executive didn’t know who the Cardinals were picking and that it was his wife who was betting $10 a week on games with her friends from high school. Upon texting this news on Friday to Smith, he told me that there were likely more instances just like this in the NFL, where material non-public information was readily available and easily compromised.

“Many of those team rooms will have the first 10-15 plays scripted on a board because they want all the players to know it, understand it,” Smith told me last year. “That’s material non-public information. Who in these organizations are making sure that other executives in this business don’t have that information?”

All it takes is one person to leak a script of plays or a game plan for gambling information and the league’s integrity crumbles. Is Gold’s case a one-off instance, or a sign of things to come where the world of gambling the NFL readily embraces will come back to bite it?

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On The Radar

1. Following the 1994 FIFA Men’s World Cup in the U.S., our nation pledged to create a top flight domestic league, resulting in Major League Soccer’s debut in 1996. Thirty years later, with the most recent World Cup in North America in the books, how does MLS plan to capitalize on this edition’s commercial success? MLS gave a presentation at its corporate headquarters on Thursday to lay out its vision following a commercial campaign that told the world “we’ll take it from here.”

   “I’d rather be us than any other soccer/football league in the world,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber— who’s soon retiring as the league actively looks for his successor— told an auditorium of roughly 200 media members. After having just seven MLS players compete at the 2022 World Cup, that number increased to 45 this year, including, of course, Argentina and Inter Miami’s Lionel Messi. But the league’s success still hasn’t translated into a dominant U.S. Men’s National Team and a truly global American-born superstar, with Garber saying our current pay-to-play model isn’t working. “The dots are connecting,” Garber said, with Christian Pulisic, Alex Freeman and Cavan Sullivan listed as homegrown stars, “but we need 100 of them…We have to be able to win CONCACAF consistently and advance in the Club World Cup” to be taken more seriously on the world stage. The league is moving to a fall to spring schedule for the first time in 2027 and has all 30 teams with free club academies in place. Now it’s time to supercharge the developmental system, make the league more appealing for international stars in their prime and to relax arcane salary cap structures to promote spending on the world’s best players. The commercial model is there for MLS to thrive, now it’s time to take off the training wheels to elevate the league even further before the World Cup next returns to our shores.

2. Investment and financial advisory services firm Guggenheim Partners and insurance companies Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life are reportedly under investigation for financial improprieties. Those companies are owned by or founded by Mark Walter, the majority stakeholder in the Los Angeles Lakers, Dodgers and Sparks, the PWHL and Andretti Global, whose parent company operates the new Cadillac Formula 1 team. Walter also owns a roughly 12.7% stake in Chelsea, so any illegal activity that may have taken place under his watch could be seismic news in the sports business world.

3. Soccer game halftimes are always 15 minutes long. The halftime show on Sunday featuring Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, Shakira and Burna Boi was more than 27 minutes long. The halftime show was bland and boring despite the star power, but unlike the money-grabbing hydration breaks, I expect this to stick for World Cup finals moving forward.

4. After an embarrassing showing in the World Cup final defeat to Spain, Argentina’s players became violent on the pitch and in the stands. FIFA, which is reportedly investigating these incidents, needs to harshly discipline guilty parties to deter these kinds of actions in the future.

5. The Oklahoma City Thunder’s trade of Lu Dort to the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday kept the team under the NBA’s second apron and was the last in a series of cost-cutting maneuvers that will save the team $224 million in future monetary obligations. It means that no NBA team is projected to be above the punitive, prohibitive second apron threshold next season for the first time since the quasi hard cap rule went into effect in 2023. OKC needs the salary space for upcoming expensive contract extensions for its core trio of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren and Jaylen Williams, and is trying to set itself up to cycle around young role players on cheap contracts like Ajay Mitchell to complement its stars. It’s a model the New York Knicks are trying to replicate with young players like forward Mohamed Diawara while integral pieces like Mitchell Robinson play so well that they price themselves out of a championship contender’s long-term plans.

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6. It’s SEC football media week, and negotiations remain ongoing for what should be included in or omitted from the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act bill that could govern the future of collegiate athletics. A new provision would cap major conferences at 19 teams— the Big Ten is currently at 18— and require teams that move from one major power conference to another to first spend five years as an independent, perhaps to deter further future conference realignment and the formation of an SEC/B1G super league. SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey once again threatened to leave the NCAA and operate on its own if it doesn’t get the rulings or concessions it likes. Another potential major wrinkle includes an additional pool of money for schools to retain athletes to decrease the transfer portal’s impact.

7. Not only is Kalshi fighting with about 20 other states over whether its sports prediction market offerings are actually just gambling, it’s battling with Polymarket, its chief competitor in the PM space. A Sunday New York Times feature revealed that Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour’s company tipped off federal prosecutors about Polymarket, leading to a 2024 raid of company founder Shayne Coplan’s apartment. “By most accounts,” the article continues, “they also despise each other with a fervor that has seeped into how their companies interact at virtually every level.” Juicy stuff…

8. The fallout from the World Cup has already impacted other sports. NFL players rolled out a social media campaign on Friday called #WorthTheCost to promote teams keeping grass fields that FIFA mandates for its competitions instead of the more dangerous turf fields used in a majority of NFL stadiums.

NFL teams, however, will continue to choose revenue from concerts and other events over the safety of their players. World Cup venues have already switched back to turf and are even selling pieces of game-used grass to further maximize profits.

9. After President Trump successfully lobbied FIFA president Gianni Infantino to get USMNT star Folarin Balogun’s red card suspension pushed back— causing UEFA’s president to boycott the World Cup final— MAGA golf star Bryson DeChambeau reportedly asked for Trump to intervene after receiving a two-shot penalty in the weekend’s British Open. DeChambeau finished tied for 14th, earning him a little over $230,000.

10. Tensions are high in Portland as the city and the Trail Blazers fight over terms of a Moda Center renovation needed to keep the NBA team in Oregon. One proposal that would grant the Blazers $600 million in public funds was reportedly deemed “a non-starter” due to various objectionable provisions. If a deal isn’t reached this year, the chances the team could move when the arena lease runs out in 2030 would increase.

Honorable Mention

The Paramount-WBD merger is on hold and should never be allowed…Due to more games and ticket prices averaging $916, FIFA announced World Cup attendance records as the final drew 37-40 million on Fox and 22 million on Telemundo…Roger Goodell is expected to get a contract extension next March…After fighting with Logan Paul at Fanatics Fest, Tom Brady is expected to have a WWE character arc. Just go on vacation somewhere…Someone buy me this Swansea preseason kit with Death Row Records on the front to promote team minority stakeholder Snoop Dogg…Tim Tebow gets an ESPN contract extension as the network brings back The Ocho for four days next month and begins layoffs by telling NFL analyst Ryan Clark about it during an episode of NFL Live where he was an analyst…In the MLB automatic balls and strikes review era, the youngest umpires have had the fewest calls overturned…Gilbert Arenas’ podcast joins Playmaker after a messy split from Underdog…Happy birthday to the amazing Rachel Robinson, who turned 104 on Sunday.

Go listen to Steve Lacy’s new album

And go watch the amazingly shot, visually stunning The Odyssey and support cinema.

Adam Friedland, the comedian and podcast host whose “The Adam Friedland Show” has become a smash hit over its first two seasons, started getting into soccer in college in the mid-2000s.

“Being an American soccer fan is really embarrassing,” Friedland told me earlier this week, “similar to being a British NFL fan in the UK. I can’t be like the Ted Lassos, right? So I had to learn a bunch. I have a couple friends, some of which I don’t even like, that I talk to multiple times a day because they know. If my girlfriend found out how much I actually care, it’s a humiliation.”

The Los Angeles native started rooting for Arsenal while Americans’ accessibility to the English Premier League remained relatively limited.

“When I was first watching, I would have to go on like soccer.virus.ru to watch a second round of the EFL Cup against Southampton,” Friedland said. “Now, I get Champions League on Paramount+ and every Premier League game on Peacock. I think that coincided with my age cohort kind of getting into sports as young adults.”

Now, Friedland’s become such a Gunners diehard that he said his girlfriend once caught him wishing Arsenal star Bukayo Saka a happy birthday over DM. As the World Cup began in North America, Friedland signed an advertising and distribution deal with Spotify not just for TAFS’ upcoming third season but for a footy-themed show for The Ringer, “The Beautiful Pod.”

Friedland gained inspiration from Clive Palmer’s “ArsenalVision Podcast,” and admitted to watching tactical soccer videos on YouTube at 2 a.m. if he can’t fall asleep. His Ringer project coincided with soccer podcast listening increasing 380% in the U.S. since the World Cup began, per Spotify data. Soccer-related pods are currently three of the top five sports titles among Gen Z Spotify listeners, and “The Beautiful Pod” reached 14th on the U.S. comedy chart and 35th on Spotify’s overall podcast chart.

When Friedland started out in comedy, he began testing what was funny to his friends. Figuring out what works on a soccer podcast became an extension of that practice.

“It’s finding what’s funny and interesting but also talking about what you’re passionate about in a way that’s hopefully entertaining,” he said. “It’s something I don’t deserve to do, but somehow found myself doing it. And I’ve very much enjoyed.”

After a wildly successful run on the comedy podcast “Cum Town” alongside Stavros Halkias and Nick Mullen, Fiedland launched TAFS in 2022 and booked guests ranging from Gavin Newsom and Olivia Nuzzi to Shane Gillis and Chance the Rapper. Ringer boss Bill Simmons said Friedland reinvented the interview podcast. He’s currently taping episodes for the third season, which will remain mainly the same despite some small formatting changes.

But as he works on TAFS’ newest episodes, just know that Adam Friedland is actually just thinking about Arsenal football.

“It’s really just the thing that I like to waste my time on Earth doing,” he said. “And if you could do that in a podcast form and have people listen to it and then make money off of it, then that’s the dream.”

Listen to our full conversation below:

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On The Radar

1. MLB and the MLB Players Association had plenty to say over All-Star week surrounding the bitter and contentious collective bargaining agreement negotiations over a proposed salary cap. MLBPA interim executive director Bruce Meyer called MLB’s attempt to paint the game as broken and non-competitive as “perverse.” The payroll disparity, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said, between the most expensive and least expensive teams is $441 million. “It defies human experience to ask a fan to think that the bottom end of that gap has the same opportunity to win as the top end,” Manfred said. However, if the season ended today, the teams with the four smallest payrolls in the league would make the playoffs.

There was also an argument over whether MLB players would compete in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. MLB reportedly wants to make participation mandatory, with penalties for not playing including being placed on an unpaid restricted list from July 12 to Aug. 3 of that year. The PA reportedly wants a similar arrangement to what NHL stars had during the Milano Cortina Olympics from February.

2. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver loves making news at semi-annual press conferences like the one held each year at summer league in Las Vegas. Tuesday, he said many groups have made compelling offers to buy a potential Vegas expansion team, Moda Center renovation talks in Portland are not progressing as well as expected, NBA Europe talks with prospective team owners will continue this weekend as they visit New York for the World Cup final and Silver is very pleased about the state of the WNBA. He also said he’s hopeful a resolution to the Kawhi Leonard-Aspiration scandal will happen before the start of next season. Silver is also aiming for a local broadcast streaming hub for the 13 teams that lost its regional sports network contracts, following the collapse of Main Street Sports, to commence for the 2027-2028 season. YouTube is reportedly a leading candidate for those rights.

3. Speaking of Kawhi Leonard, my colleague Mike Vorkunov at The Athletic reported that the NBA is investigating a second suspicious sponsorship deal with a different company that may have also run afoul of league rules. ESPN reported that the NBA’s hired law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz met last week with Los Angeles Clippers governor Steve Ballmer last week to further discuss the case.

4. The NBA was hardly done making waves this week. An explosive Sports Business Journal report alleged that Silver “implored” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to suspend Phoenix Mercury guard Alyssa Thomas two weeks ago after her hard foul on Caitlin Clark, which the W denied. Silver is still Engelbert’s boss, and likely answers to him more than people think. In better news for the WNBA, Sunday’s game between Clark’s Indiana Fever and A’ja Wilson’s Las Vegas Aces drew a season-high 2.64 million viewers to ESPN. That’s a win for the network, which ditched MLB Sunday night baseball for a slate of summer women’s sports matches.

5. With Spain and Argentina advancing to Sunday’s World Cup final, the future of the hydration break in future editions now comes into question. FIFA is reportedly torn about the possibility, but some free advice is to scrap it unless absolutely necessary. And if FIFA wasn't extracting enough money from fans throughout the last five weeks, it’s reportedly charging fans $80 to attend Friday’s World Cup final press conference at Fanatics Fest in Manhattan.

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6. The German Bundesliga is reportedly leaving ESPN this fall for a five-year, $100 million American media rights deal with USA Network and Fandango, Versant’s free streaming service. Versant sees Fandango as a rival to free streamers Tubi and Pluto. ESPN realized that not as many people watch top European soccer leagues in America as people thought, other than the Premier League, and it can save money for other more beneficial rights deals coming up. Versant is betting that as fans have grown accustomed to watching the Premier League on USA, they’ll stay to watch teams like Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, too.

7. After the Premier League banned teams from paying gambling companies to be their front-of-shirt sponsor, Aston Villa inked a deal with Rwanda that could be worth up to $27 million per year. Is that kind of partnership any better?

8. SailGP released its five-year plan to grow its tech-forward, eco-friendly boat racing league co-founded by Larry Ellison by 2030. It aims to expand the number of events and teams, focusing on China, Japan, India, Mexico and South Korea.

9. While the Chicago Fire are privately funding a $750 million, 22,000-seat stadium south of the Loop, a city panel just approved spending $425 million in taxpayer money for the infrastructure needed to make the building reachable to the city grid. Isn’t the point of privately funded stadiums that taxpayer money doesn’t have to be used at all?

Honorable Mention

The New York Yankees are discussing taking $2-3 billion in financing from Apollo…Adidas is doubling the size of its college sports jersey patches as the ACC’s Cal-Berkeley became the conference’s first team with a patch sponsor, AI firm Dialpad…Miami Heat’s Mickey Arison now leads NBA’s Board of Governors…I’m obsessed with the new 73-9 NBA roster building game…Shouts to the retiring David Steele, the excellent longtime TV voice of the Orlando Magic…As of Tuesday, Fox Sports boasted 9.5 billion social media views during the World Cup…Fanatics Studios greenlit a documentary highlighting Suni Lee’s gymnastics comeback story…KeyBank is a founding partner of Cleveland’s WNBA team, which claims 9,000 season ticket deposits…Professional Bull Riding is coming to the CW and Fox Nation…the women’s volleyball World Cup is coming to Ion…I will not be taking my business to Clay Travis’ law firm.

Also, go see The Invite…

The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement calls for the players to receive 51% of revenue, or what the league calls Basketball Related Income (BRI). Total salaries and benefits to players from the 2025-2026 season totaled $6.27 billion, according to Kurt Badenhausen at Sportico. But that number is 53.6% of the $11.68 billion the league made in BRI last season.

Every year, the league takes a percentage of salaries in escrow, a reported $580 million last season, in case total revenue is higher or lower than expected. Due to factors including the collapse of the local regional sports network model and the New York Knicks’ playoff dominance cutting into revenue because of fewer postseason games, the NBA took back $317 million in player salaries from escrow to enforce the 51% BRI split as codified in the collective bargaining agreement. Because of that, negotiated player salaries for 2025-2026 took a 5.5% cut from what was initially agreed upon and reported, costing high-paid superstars like Steph Curry, Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic $3+ million.

This news piqued the interest of the Major League Baseball Players Association.

As All-Star week comes to a close Tuesday, the MLBPA is currently in tense, heated negotiations with Major League Baseball over the next CBA— the current one expires in December— where MLB wants to install a salary cap and salary floor used by the other major North American professional sports.

“Everything is subject to escrow. That means all of the numbers are not really guaranteed,” Bruce Meyer, the MLBPA’s interim executive director, told reporters last month. “If revenues are soft or they go down, then that means players at the end of the day won’t get the guaranteed money, so they won’t necessarily get the money that you see in the club-specific floor. All of a sudden nobody’s contracts would ever really be guaranteed, all subject to escrow.”

Both sides have dug in so deep on this salary cap issue that a work stoppage that cuts into the 2027 season is not only seen as possible, but a likely scenario. The last time MLB seriously threatened installing a cap, players went on strike in 1994 and no World Series was held. The MLBPA has for decades prided itself on sticking together in opposition of a salary cap, and is using this escrow system to drive home its point that a cap eliminates guaranteed money for its players.

In its CBA fact sheet, MLB points out that the escrow system works both ways. If player compensation turns out to be less than the 50% of revenue it’s proposing going to players in a capped system, MLB would be forced to cut a check to players to make good. That’s exactly what happened in the NHL this week, where a 50-50 revenue split required the league to send a reported $170 million back to the players from escrow, this time giving them a 5.5% raise from their negotiated 2025-2026 salaries.

“We are willing to discuss with the Union ways to minimize the impact of the escrow system on players,” MLB said.

But the impact on the players cannot be denied. Even if you’re making millions, seeing 5.5% of your salary being taken away is meaningful. As we’ve seen, it comes with its risks and rewards. Not surprisingly, it’s one of the many reasons why the MLBPA is fighting for its life to avoid a system in which the escrow system would become a significant part of its long-term future.

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On The Radar

1. Red Bull reportedly spends an estimated 25-30% of its annual revenue on marketing. Based on its $14.3 billion in 2025 revenue from its 43% share of the energy drink market, that would mean that the Austrian-based brand shelled out more than $3.5 billion last year for its marketing efforts. It’s how I found myself at a Blade heliport next to Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 7 a.m. Friday with more than a dozen media members to jet to a private strip of runway at the Westchester County Airport in White Plains. Upon landing following a breathtaking 15-minute ride with spectacular views of the Midtown skyline, we laid our eyes on the main event: A retrofitted DC6 plane built in 1958, naturally adorned with the Red Bull logo, that would take us on a leisurely 40-minute ride 1,000 feet above the Hudson River.

   Whether it’s two Formula 1 teams, numerous soccer clubs from Germany and Austria to New York and Brazil and a vast array of action sports sponsorships, Red Bull has mastered hyping themselves up to keep sales and awareness of their iconic beverages increasing. And sometimes that means hauling some journalists like myself out for an aerial adventure.

2. It took nearly eight years, but Paul Allen’s estate has finally fulfilled one of his dying wishes by agreeing to sell the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers. Over the weekend, the Super Bowl champion Seahawks agreed to sell to a group led by San Francisco 49ers limited partner for $9.612 billion, more than $3 billion more than the Washington Commanders were sold for in 2023. NFL franchise values are increasing at an astronomical rate. Will we see more team sales as a result?

3. Monday’s MLB home run derby took place on Netflix for the first time, with its $1 million grand prize more than the annual salary for four of the eight participants. Compare that to the $105,000 awarded to the winner of February’s NBA All-Star slam dunk contest and you wonder why the league has a hard time finding big-name participants. With All-Star weekend in Phoenix next year, Suns Governor Mat Ishbia said the dunk contest winner would also get $1 million. Will that help attract the top-tier talent the derby possesses?

4. As the money-grabification of the World Cup continues with absurd ticket prices and ad breaks disguised as hydration pauses, now FIFA is reportedly considering increasing the number of tournament teams from 48 to 64 for the 2030 edition primarily taking place in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. That would also allow FIFA to charge more for the next media rights deal, which may have to be split among networks based off the sheer potential tonnage of 128 total matches. In unrelated news, there’s now a reported shortlist of candidates to replace FIFA president Gianni Infantino.

5. Thanks to the NBA’s glacial pace in investigating the Kawhi Leonard-Aspiration scandal, which could lead to the voiding of the future Hall Of Famer’s contract, the Toronto Raptors’ offseason is now at a standstill. The Raptors, who won the 2019 championship a year after trading for Leonard, agreed to acquire him again from the Los Angeles Clippers earlier this month, but were told by the league office that they would incur all the risk by trading for him. So the acquisition is now on hold for the results of a case that’s now dragged on more than 10 months.

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6. Monday marked five months since David Kelly was promoted from the NBA players union’s managing director and general counsel roles to its executive director. He went on the record Friday criticizing the league for the length of the Leonard proceedings, but also the league’s second apron provision that’s proven effective at limiting team payrolls. San Antonio superstar Victor Wembanyama took $50 million less than the maximum in his contract extension Friday so his Spurs could build a more talented team. While fans may applaud such selfless charitable actions, union leaders like Kelly are paid to frown upon, and advocate against, them.

7. Speaking of Kawhi Leonard, the NBA has a decadeslong history of salary cap shenanigans between players and teams. Another suspicious contract was handed out over the weekend when the Milwaukee Bucks signed reserve wing Gary Trent Jr. to a flabbergasting four-year, $64 million contract despite scoring just eight points per game last season while posting -0.1 win shares, according to Basketball-Reference. The deal came after a two-year period in which Trent Jr. played for a more cap-friendly $6.4 million. It’s raised alarms that his new contract was a make-good for his previous fiscal sacrifices, which goes against NBA rules.

8. Was Conor McGregor hurt before stepping into the octagon in the main event of Saturday night’s UFC 329 against Max Holloway, a fight that had to be stopped after 69 seconds because McGregor was clearly too injured to compete? Both McGregor and UFC President Dana White denied any such knowledge leading into the polarizing Irishman’s first match in more than five years. But there was clear financial incentive for both McGregor and UFC to continue with the fight and made sure it was contested. It’s time for MMA to move on from McGregor’s scandal-ridden sideshow and gravitate toward up-and-coming superstars like Liverpool’s Paddy Pimblett, whose unique, likable personality also comes with brute strength in the octagon highlighted by his 52-second submission of Benoît Saint Denis on Saturday.

9. The college sports NIL world isn’t just for football and basketball. The University of Texas recently signed Croatian tennis player Matej Dodig, who’s currently 254th in the world in the ATP rankings after reaching a career-best 199th earlier this year. While most college students are in the middle of summer internships, the 20-year-old Dodig just lost a challenger tournament final over the weekend in Trieste. Rising young tennis stars like Arthur Fery and Michael Zheng have shown that college tennis is a proven pipeline for success on tour. Now thanks to NIL, some players can earn more money early in their careers in college than they would by traveling the world to compete in ATP.
   
   Honorable Mention

   Warner Bros. Discovery TV ad revenue is down 21% from 2025 in part thanks to the lack of NBA playoffs for the first time since 1994 as states look to block its merger with Paramount…Your federal tax dollars are paying for roadway improvements around the planned Cleveland Browns stadium…AT&T is offering existing wireless customers complimentary international calls from the U.S. to the countries competing in the World Cup semifinals this week…Kalshi users lost $117 million on parlays in just the first four months of 2026…Only one person decided not to suspend Folarin Balogun last week?…Jock Landale’s February revenge game…Tony Reali’s new podcast…Japan’s SoftBank Hawks made more money last year than 12 MLB teams…Adam Schefter’s ESPN contract extension will pay him more than the vast majority of NFL players he covers…RIP GMFB.

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A letter signed by 11 Republican members of Congress on Tuesday demands accountability from WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to address and prevent “multiple attacks” against Indiana Fever superstar guard Caitlin Clark, calling her “the face of the league” and “one of the most influential figures in the history of women’s basketball.”

Led by Texas U.S. Rep. August Pfluger, the letter decried “repeated acts of unnecessary physical hostility and violence” against Clark and called for a safe and professional environment “free from violence, discrimination, or retaliation.”

The letter then made quite the threat against Engelbert and the league, as far as one can get from keeping politics out of sports. “If discrimination or retaliation is occurring and creating a hostile work environment, we support any appropriate investigation by the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If true, such conduct could constitute violations of federal civil rights laws.”

The lawmakers demanded Engelbert answer three questions by July 24: 

1. What is your review mechanism for physical hostility and violence on the court?

2. How will you hold players accountable for overly aggressive actions on the court, including towards Caitlin Clark?

3. What steps are you taking to protect WNBA players from online harassment and off the court threats?

While the letter claims to champion the future of young girls everywhere in sports, the politicization of Clark and the league does a great disservice to the W and women’s sports. What are these lawmakers truly trying to accomplish? Extra protection for Clark? Is that something she wants? Something she asked for?

Having spoken with Clark for Yahoo a couple of months ago, I know that her being the center of attention in this way, as a distraction and a talking point off the court rather than being discussed and praised as her best self on it, is the last thing she’d want. Caitlin Clark is not a political football to be used to score points on Capitol Hill, social media or cable news.

During a June 24 game between the Fever and the Phoenix Mercury, Clark was on the ground trying to maintain a loose ball when Mercury guard Alyssa Thomas’ fist hit Clark’s neck during the scramble. While no foul was called at the time, Clark thought the action was excessive. The league agreed, assessing Thomas with a Flagrant 2 the next day, which warranted a one-game suspension. Thomas, who called the play “a complete accident,” said she faced death threats and racial slurs following the incident, the kind of harassment and hate Clark later said she doesn’t “want anyone to experience."

Is this letter going to lower the temperature in discussions surrounding the league, or will it make the rhetoric around the WNBA even more bitter and divisive? We have no choice but to wait and find out.

Zach Nunn, who represents Clark’s Iowa home town in Congress, points out that Clark the fourth most-fouled player in the WNBA and deserves better than “being punched, shoved and targeted while the WNBA looks the other way.” Going into Wednesday’s games, according to Fox Sports, Clark is now tied for fifth in that category with Atlanta Dream All-Star Angel Reese, trailing only Phoenix wing Kahleah Copper, Washington Mystics guard Sonia Citron, New York Liberty superstar Breanna Stewart and Las Vegas Aces MVP A’ja Wilson. If you break it down to fouls drawn per game, Clark is third behind Citron and Wilson. Somehow, those other players didn’t make it into the letter.

The Fever denied involvement in the drafting of this letter to Engelbert, saying in a statement that "our organization nor Caitlin has had any interaction with anyone in this congressional group and we were unaware of their letter.”

The WNBA is celebrating its 30th season this year coming off a newly-signed collective bargaining agreement that increases average player salaries fivefold and welcomed two new teams as the W plans to expand to 18 franchises by 2030. But the W has been plagued by issues with officiating leaguewide, with complaints from teams and players nearly everywhere. Yet these lawmakers singled out Clark when perhaps other athletes like Wilson, the four-time league MVP and three-time WNBA champion who’s fouled more frequently than Caitlin is, should’ve also been mentioned.

Why do you think they weren’t?

The lawmakers’ letter doesn’t benefit Clark, though they claim to be “committed to strengthening families and protecting opportunities for women in sports.”.

How does this letter strengthen families or protect opportunities for women in sports?

The letter doesn’t do any benefit for the WNBA. It doesn’t help or benefit women’s sports or the next generation of young girls aspiring to be the next Caitlin Clark. Clark has accomplished so much for the league and for women’s sports, yet she’s now being put on this pedestal by these politicians whose aims are not to unite, but to divide. What are the chances that this letter will ultimately benefit Caitlin Clark in any way?

When topics off the court like this are discussed more than what’s happening on it, the people who benefit the most are the politicians, not the players.

Using Clark to score points as a political football in an ongoing culture war simply holds women’s sports back. Do any of these politicians actually care?

On The Radar

1. Fox paid a reported $485 million for this year’s FIFA Men’s World Cup, a make-good discount for Qatar’s 2022 tournament being moved from the summer to the winter. At least half of that was probably made back from these silly and largely unnecessary hydration breaks every game has had during each half. The 2030 and 2034 media rights are currently up for bid in the U.S., and CNBC is reporting that FIFA is looking for $1.5 to $2 billion per World Cup for a combined English and Spanish language package. Telemundo is reportedly paying $600 million for this tournament. With Fox needing extra money to renew its NFL media rights deal over the next year and the network lacking a Spanish language counterpart that rivals Telemundo, this could be Fox’s last World Cup as broadcaster. Netflix, Disney and YouTube would all love to swipe the world’s biggest tournament away and make it one of their signature products into the next decade. With the MLB TV rights also up for Fox in 2028, can it afford to keep the NFL, World Cup and the World Series? I have my doubts.

2. On Tuesday, the Big 12 announced a polarizing advertising deal with Monster Energy worth a reported $20 million per year that, per the conference’s press release, will brand football and men’s and women’s basketball as Monster Energy Big 12 Football and Monster Energy Big 12 Basketball during the regular season. “A co-branded Monster Energy and Big 12 Conference logo will be featured on football and basketball jerseys, fields and courts, with additional integration across Conference digital and social media channels.” That seems like a lot of bang for the buck if you’re Monster, especially considering one of its members, Kansas, just announced a five-year jersey patch deal with crypto company Ripple’s XRP worth a reported $30 million. The Big 12 surely could’ve gotten more for the real estate it just sold, no? Plus, it’s going to be awkward for BYU when it has an energy drink on its jerseys and fields…

3. A federal judge dealt a serious blow to Kalshi in New York on Tuesday, ruling that the prediction market couldn’t block the state from enforcing its gambling laws against it. Analisa Torres said the federal Commodities Exchange Act didn’t override New York’s gambling laws and a preliminary injunction against the state’s cease-and-desist order it issued in October was denied. New York is now free to pursue legal action against Kalshi and likely other similar prediction markets with a hope to end sports betting on these platforms.

4. After the U.S. Men’s soccer team was embarrassed by Belgium on Monday, the issue of youth soccer in America inevitably resurfaced after another disappointing World Cup showing. The cost of youth sports is largely prohibitive across the board— and private equity’s growing role in the marketplace is only going to make this worse— but especially so in a sport whose pro salaries are dwarfed by those in the NBA, NFL and MLB. “Only 2% of kids playing organized soccer in America came from households that made less than $50,000,” USMNT legend Landon Donovan recently told Chad Ochocinco’s podcast. Current national team starter Chris Richards’ parents nearly went broke chasing their son’s dreams. “I’d love if soccer was free to all,” Alexi Lalas tweeted, “but who is going to pay for all this free soccer?” Unless something changes and youth teams are better subsidized for all, our men’s soccer team has already reached its ceiling.

5. The International Olympic Committee inexplicably lifted its suspension against the Russian Olympic Committee despite its continuing and ongoing war in Ukraine. Russian athletes will now be eligible to compete in the 2028 summer Games in Los Angeles. It’s almost as if the IOC saw FIFA’s corruption and felt a little left out. On the brighter side, the IOC announced more than a dozen new events for the 2030 Games, including synchronized ice skating. Sign me up to watch all of that.
   

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6. Speaking of FIFA corruption, more than 70 members of European Parliament sent a letter to the 27 heads of EU football associations to investigate the decision-making process by FIFA president Gianni Infantino that led to the suspension of USMNT striker Folarin Balogun’s red card ban for the Belgium game. As I wrote on Tuesday, it’s time for Infantino to go.

7. Philadelphia 76ers president Bob Myers appeared on Rich Paul’s Mind The Game podcast in the midst of Myers’ Sixers pursuing Paul’s client LeBron James in free agency, lobbying for LeBron to sign in Philly. The conflict of interest here is almost as entertaining as the content…

8. A study of 20,000 NFL players published Wednesday by Mass General Brigham, Boston University, and the Concussion & CTE Foundation found that they were four times more likely to suffer from neurogenerative diseases like dementia, ALS or Parkinson’s.

9. The finals of the Pro Padel League’s season-opening tournament will be broadcast on CNBC Sunday night in English and on Telemundo’s fast channel en Español. PPL CEO Mike Dorfman told me that the goal with CNBC is to reach “a business, finance audience that are largely the English speaking padel players today” in the U.S. If you’re in New York, the action is taking place at the Hammerstein Ballroom near Madison Square Garden.

Honorable Mention

The World Cup has had names on the backs of referee jerseys. All leagues should adopt this…The WNBA hosting All-Star events at the Obama Presidential Center…The New Jersey Fives’ fibermaxxing…My friend Ari Chambers’ new women’s sports show…Tim Bontemps joins Atlanta Hawks front office…The Sports Bra is coming to Las Vegas…Layoffs likely at LIV Golf…SMAC podcasts, including Michael Strahan and Terrell Owens…Seth Wickersham’s incredible inside look at the Denver Broncos’ playoff run.

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Welcome To The SprungStack

I’ve had a deep, obsessive love for sports ever since I could remember. In second grade, my parents passed up on a chance for me to show off my encyclopedic sports knowledge on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” And when I realized in high school that I had a love and a gift for writing, I knew a career in sports journalism was for me. I started blogging in high school and college and my year studying abroad, publishing regular newsletters and blog posts at SprungOnSports.com even before I realized what I was doing.

After a nearly five-year run at Boardroom publishing a weekly newsletter that amassed more than 200,000 subscribers discussing the inner workings of sports business with columns, profiles, features, news, insights and analysis, that hunger spark, drive and desire for storytelling and sharing my outlook and perspective still hasn’t left me. I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines, so now I’m here to bring my brand of newsletter writing directly to the people.

I’d like to write 2-3 times a week and get a regular cadence going, but you may have to bear with me until I get settled into a routine. I’m still trying to figure out the business model, whether it’s some pieces for free or everything behind a paywall. Regardless, I hope you like what I have to offer and I’ll do everything in my power to ensure that I earn your subscription with the dedicated, quality content I’ve put out for decades now.

In each edition, you’ll have a lead story/angle and some items on news and other topics I think you need to know about, which I’ll call “On The Radar.” Sometimes, I’ll even throw in some movie and music recommendations too. Let’s stay informed, engaged and have some fun in the process.

In short, welcome to The SprungStack!

This should be the end for Gianni Infantino

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has never had a sterling reputation of sparkling integrity during his decade leading sports’ most important and impactful governing body.

Though he didn’t award the 2018 and 2022 men’s World Cups to Russia and Qatar, that was his infamously corrupt predecessor Sepp Blatter, Infantino accepted a medal from Vladimir Putin, overlooked and defended human rights abuses surrounding the 2022 edition that he moved to the winter, facilitated and defended astronomically high prices during the current World Cup and paved the way for Saudi Arabia and all its human rights abuses to host the 2034 tournament. In 2017, Infantino spearheaded an effort to remove two independent co-chairmen of FIFA’s ethics committee who were actively investigating Infantino himself.

Yet Sunday’s decision to suspend the one-game red card ban of U.S. forward Folarin Balogun, allowing him to play in Monday’s round of 16 match against Belgium on American soil at the behest of U.S. President Donald Trump— the winner of Infantino’s first ever FIFA Peace Prize earlier this year— was brazenly corrupt even for FIFA. Trump admitted Monday that he directly spoke with Infantino about reversing the red card, which blatantly broke FIFA rules prohibiting “undue political or government interference” that have led to suspensions of countries like Nepal, Pakistan and India over the last five years.

The baffling Balogun decision, one that hadn’t been made in the World Cup since 1962, even before the red card suspension in the competition was codified by law, has made a joke and a mockery of FIFA’s yellow and red card disciplinary systems, with England and France already considering appeals of their own since it’s now open season on soccer’s rule of law. Every team that gets a questionable card now has proper grounds to ask if its disciplinary punishment can also be postponed. Infantino’s decade-long body of work has been riddled with graft, malfeasance, suspicion and ineptitude, but this stunning breach of law and ethics should lead to his removal from the position when the World Cup ends in two weeks’ time if he doesn’t resign on his own, which he won’t.

If anyone can put pressure on this necessary decision, it’s UEFA, Europe’s governing body and the sport’s second most powerful entity. One of its members, Belgium, was just victimized by this astonishing decision, though it didn’t prevent it from thrashing the physically and mentally overwhelmed U.S. team 4-1 Monday night.

“A minimum automatic suspension of one match following a red card is not a discretionary option and does not require the decision of a competent body to be enacted,” UEFA said in a statement Monday that called the decision crossing a red line. “It is a principle embedded in regulations, which cannot be made subject to exceptions, let alone in the middle of a tournament…When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined…We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.”

Newly appointed German national team head coach Jürgen Klopp added, “this is our sport, not theirs. If Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino really sorted this out between themselves, it is madness; it calls everything into question.”

Even Blatter, himself one of the most corrupt sporting executives to ever live, expressed his disbelief, tweeting that “red cards are not overturned by political phone calls” and “football must never become a playground for political power.”

London football journalist Martyn Ziegler put it well on why Infantino crossed the line here, which could and should lead to lead to his eventual ouster:

On The Radar

1. A couple of weeks ago in the shower, I wondered whether the World Cup would negatively impact MLB attendance. But since MLB doesn’t freely release these figures in one place, I went through every box score from when the tournament started on June 11 through June 30 of 2025 and 2026 and input the data into an Excel spreadsheet, which took way longer than I’d like to admit (there will be no further questions on this). What I found was that average attendance was slightly higher this year than last, 30,447 to 30,404. Teams welcoming foreign fans like Scotland’s amazing takeover of Boston’s Fenway Park likely helped because as the Tartan Army proudly sings to the tune of “Seven Nation Army,” “no Scotland, no party.” Baseball will try to continue this positive momentum going into All-Star week in Philadelphia.

2. Donovan Mitchell reportedly just received a four-year, $273 million supermax contract extension from the Cleveland Cavaliers that will see him earn $75.3 million on the last year of his deal in 2030. We’re inching closer to a player making $1 million per NBA regular season game. But as we’ve just seen with Boston’s stunning Jaylen Brown last week, teams are realizing they probably can’t win with two of these max contracts on their roster, constituting 30-35% of the salary cap per player. Next season, Mitchell and All-Star teammate Evan Mobley will earn 60.8% of the Cavs’ cap total, per Spotrac. That number is expected to balloon to 68.9% of the cap by the 2029-2030 season. Can teams win championships this way? The Celtics clearly decided that long term, they couldn’t.

3. NWSL champion Gotham FC announced Tuesday that it will be leaving Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, NJ for Queens’ Etihad Park for the 2028 season. MLS’ NYCFC will move into the newly-built stadium next to Citi Field in the fall of 2027, finally erecting a permanent home after a dozen nomadic seasons. Gotham announced will trade its New Jersey fan base for a potentially larger New York City one a week before it faces the Washington Spirit at Citi Field, where it’s reportedly already sold nearly 38,000 tickets. While it’s a positive move for the club, I do feel for local fans who will have to travel further to access their favorite sporting stars.

4. On The Ringer’s Game Over podcast last week, Klutch super-agent and entrepreneur Rich Paul brought over a whiteboard laying out potential destinations for his client and business partner LeBron James (you may have heard he’s a free agent).

   

   While five contenders made up a predictable inner circle led by the Cleveland Cavaliers, Philadelphia 76ers and Miami Heat, the Internet took notice of what it said under the Dallas Mavericks and its new lead basketball executive Masai Ujiri: “Oil, golf, Macau, Africa.” You may notice that none of those things are basketball players, but potential reasons to join as perhaps a business partner down the line. Items like this are why this section is called “On The Radar,” because interesting things are going on in sports that catch my attention and make my eyes and ears perk up.

5. NCAA President Charlie Baker told CBS’ Face The Nation on Sunday that he wants to “dramatically limit” prop betting in college sports and how it’s impacted the student athletes. Like the NBA, college basketball is facing a series of betting scandals that to some degree undermine the sport’s overall integrity. As college basketball and football become professional sports, what Baker shouldn’t be doing is hiding behind the facade that athletes are just kids and need to be protected. If they’re being paid millions like the pros, they should be equipped to deal with what comes with those responsibilities.

6. After partnering with them last year on its cup final in New York City, Kalshi announced a multi-year deal with the Pro Padel League as the rising league’s official prediction market. The league opens its five-event North American season from July 9-12 at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

7. MLB announced its All-Star starters and reserves on Saturday, and ESPN’s Jorge Castillo pointed out that as of right now it would be the first time there are no Puerto Rican players in the Midsummer Classic since 1988. Right now, the development of star players in PR, or lack thereof, is one of the many things currently on my radar.
   
   
   That’s a wrap for the first edition of The SprungStack. Go listen to the new Madonna album “Confessions II” if you haven’t listened yet, particularly “One Step Away,” and go tell your friends, family, acquaintances and frenemies to subscribe by using the link below!