Djokovic lost in the first round for the first time ever at the US Open but instead of on the field this article will focus on how IBM helps the fans in Flushing and who are watching on TV.

IBM has been partners with the US Open for some time but as fans look for new ways to engage with the game, they have increased what they capture and how it is visualized.

From “who’s winning” to “why”

For years, the fan-data conversation was a race to be first: fastest score, fastest stat, fastest alert. That era is ending. The new bar is accuracy and depth, and IBM’s 2026 features are built around explanation rather than speed.

Serve Quality is the clearest example. Running across all 254 singles matches, it uses limb-tracking technology to capture 21 data points across a player’s body and racquet, 50 times per second — roughly 1.2 billion data points over the tournament. The output is a near-real-time score for the mechanics behind every serve: efficiency, accuracy, consistency, ball toss. It turns something fans could only feel — “that serve looked filthy” — into something they can see and understand.

IBM has developed a new tennis metric called “serve quality,” which measures the efficiency and effectiveness of the tennis serve. The team used IBM Bob to rapidly develop an AI-powered solution that analyzes the exact x, y, and z coordinates of the ball, racquet, and joints of a player during their serve, capturing more than 21 different positions, 50 times a second. It then evaluates complex physiological movements – like knee inflexion and shoulder rotation – across eight distinct phases of a player’s serve, producing an unprecedented look into the biomechanics of modern tennis.

Key Moments takes the familiar “Likelihood to Win” projection a step further. Instead of just telling you a player has a 78% chance to win, it explains why the momentum shifted — which points mattered, and what changed. That’s the difference between a scoreboard and a story.

Match Chat, IBM’s AI assistant, lets fans interrogate a specific match on demand — ask a question, get a data-backed answer in seconds. And Live Updates reorganizes the entire home experience around personalization, letting each fan prioritize the players, matchups, and storylines they actually care about.

“Whether you’re taking the 7 train to Queens or watching from home, the US Open app and website serve up AI-powered insights for every kind of fan. The USTA does this by working closely with IBM to drive value from massive amounts of US Open data, using AI to transform it into features that entertain and engage more than 14 million people around the world.”

If you’re building in this space and thinking about how to turn your data into fan experience — or commercial partnerships around it — that’s exactly the work we do at Sports Tech Atlanta. Reply, or find me here.

It looks like a premium travel company, but it’s actually a blueprint for the future of sports sponsorship.

The Shift: From Logo Placement to Access

Traditional sponsorship relies on jersey logos and branded banners. ExperienceXI shifts the model toward high-value access by capitalizing on Nike’s massive global network.

The platform organizes its offerings into five main pillars:

• Domestic Elite Experiences: Utilizing top-tier facilities like the Arthur M. Blank U.S. Soccer National Training Center.

• International Academies: Direct integration with Nike-aligned European clubs.

• Global Match-Day Activations: Major event access and match-day experiences.

• Leadership & Coaching Education: Professional development for directors and staff.

• Custom Club Pathways: Tailored immersion packages for individual youth organizations.

Why It Matters for the Sports Economy

Youth sports has evolved into an experience economy. Parents aren’t just paying for field time; they are buying development, exposure, and memories.

TRADITIONAL SPONSORSHIP:   Sponsorship ➔ Product ➔ Transaction
THE EXPERIENCE XI MODEL:   Sponsorship ➔ Access ➔ Experience ➔ Long-Term Brand Loyalty

When a 13-year-old trains inside a professional European academy through their local Nike affiliate, the brand becomes far more than a pair of cleats—it creates an emotional tie that competitors cannot easily displace.

Beyond Soccer

Soccer is just the test case. ExperienceXI’s operating model is built to scale into basketball, golf, baseball, and football.

The real innovation isn’t travel logistics or tech—it is organized access. By acting as the connective tissue between global sports brands and local youth ecosystems, ExperienceXI is shifting sponsorship from simply putting a logo on an experience to creating the experience itself.

About Sports Tech Atlanta

Sports Tech Atlanta is a boutique sports technology and business advisory focused on helping companies, brands, teams, leagues and emerging sports-tech businesses identify opportunities, build strategic partnerships and navigate growth.

Through a combination of industry relationships, market intelligence and hands-on business development, Sports Tech Atlanta works at the intersection of sports, technology, commerce, sponsorship and strategic partnerships.

Our focus is simple: connect the right people, companies and opportunities to create measurable growth.

Whether it’s helping a sports technology company identify potential customers and partners, supporting a brand’s sports marketing strategy, developing sponsorship opportunities, or advising organizations on emerging technologies and new business models, Sports Tech Atlanta operates as a boutique, hands-on extension of its clients’ teams.

As the sports industry continues to evolve, we believe the greatest opportunities increasingly sit at the intersections — sports + technology, brands + experiences, athletes + commerce, and startups + established industry leaders.

info@sportstechatlannta.com

For an audience that watches how athletes convert on-court leverage into off-court equity, that last detail is the whole story.

Why this isn’t the usual athlete-equity headline

The standard athlete investment cycle is well documented: a minority slug in a fast-casual chain, a logo on a venture fund’s website, a splashy crypto or apparel bet timed to a contract year. Most of it is passive, illiquid, and structured so the athlete carries brand risk without operating control.

Barnes did the opposite. He didn’t take a minority position in something adjacent to finance — he bought the institution outright, through a holding company he controls, in a regulated sector with real barriers to entry. Community banking is not a place you can buy your way into on hype. It requires regulatory approval, a credible operating plan, and a management team that examiners and depositors trust. That Barnes cleared that bar while still logging NBA minutes tells you this was built deliberately, over years, not opportunistically over a summer.

The signal for the sports-capital market is precise: control ownership of durable, cash-generating infrastructure is a more sophisticated play than the equity-for-clout deals that dominate athlete portfolios. It just doesn’t photograph as well.

How you actually buy a bank

To understand why this deal is impressive, you have to understand what it takes to do it. Buying a bank is not like buying a restaurant or a stake in a startup. It is, first and foremost, a regulatory process — the commercial deal sits inside the approval, not the other way around.

Here’s the shape of it:

You buy through a holding company. You almost never acquire a bank as an individual. You form or use a bank holding company, and Barnes did exactly that — the acquisition ran through Barnes Bancorp, Inc. (also referred to earlier in the process as Barnes & Company). The Federal Reserve regulates that holding company under the Bank Holding Company Act, so the structure itself is a supervised entity from day one.

Taking “control” triggers approval. Regulators define control as owning 25% or more of a bank’s voting shares, having the power to elect a majority of directors, or otherwise exerting a controlling influence. Cross that line and you need prior approval — from the Federal Reserve for the holding company, and, for a state-chartered institution like Community State Bank, from the Iowa banking division plus the bank’s primary federal regulator (the FDIC for a state non-member bank). Multiple regulators, running in parallel, each with their own filings and fees.

They vet the buyer, not just the deal. This is the part that stops most would-be owners. Regulators weigh the buyer’s financial resources and capital, the managerial resources behind the bank, competitive and antitrust effects, the institution’s Community Reinvestment Act record, and the strength of its anti-money-laundering controls. They also assess the character, competence, experience, and integrity of the acquirer — a genuine “fit and proper” test that includes background checks and fingerprinting for owners above set thresholds. Your source of funds gets examined. Your business plan gets examined. You get examined.

Then the paperwork clears and the owners vote. There’s a public comment window, and — in this case — a formal vote by Community State Bank’s 40-to-50 existing shareholders. Start to finish, bank acquisitions typically run six to eighteen months. Barnes’s deal moved from early-year discussions to a completed close in roughly that window.

And the obligations don’t stop at closing. Once you own it, the bank faces ongoing examinations, must hold regulatory capital above “well-capitalized” thresholds, and operates under continuous Bank Secrecy Act and AML supervision. Under the Fed’s source-of-strength doctrine, the holding company is expected to stand behind the bank financially if it runs into trouble.

That entire gauntlet is the point. It is precisely because banking is this hard to enter that owning one is a more defensible position than the deals athletes are usually offered. Barnes didn’t find a shortcut — he cleared the actual bar, while still playing.

The thesis behind the deal

Barnes has been circling this for a while. He has served on multiple bank boards — a two-time bank director by his own account — using each seat to compare his outside read of a franchise against how the business actually runs from the inside. That’s not passive board tenure; that’s due diligence conducted over multiple years and multiple institutions.

His conviction traces back to the pandemic. Barnes has described watching community banks operate as economic first responders during Covid, doing the unglamorous work of pushing PPP loans out to local businesses faster and more reliably than larger institutions. That’s a specific, operational thesis — not a vibe. He identified a category that proved its value under stress, understood why it worked, and then spent years positioning to own a piece of it in the state he’s from.

He also built the right bench. The acquisition was advised by career community bankers, including counsel with decades of Iowa banking leadership and regulatory experience. Athletes who buy into complex sectors and win tend to have one thing in common: they hire operators who’ve done it before and let them run it. Barnes retaining Community State Bank’s existing team is the same instinct applied to the asset itself.

Has an NBA player done this before?

Rarely — and the one clear precedent makes Barnes’s move look even more distinct.

The standout is Magic Johnson. In 1998, Johnson acquired a majority interest in Founders National Bank, a Los Angeles institution, as part of a broader strategy to move capital into underserved urban communities. He later built a genuine financial-services footprint beyond that, taking a controlling stake in the insurer EquiTrust — a multi-billion-dollar business he grew substantially — alongside ownership positions across the Dodgers, Commanders, Sparks, and LAFC. Johnson is the template for the athlete who converts a playing career into serious, sector-spanning ownership.

But note the timing: Johnson bought his bank in retirement, years after his playing days, as a full-time businessman. That’s the norm. The athlete-owner story almost always begins after the final buzzer, once there’s time, liquidity, and a second career to build around it.

Barnes is doing it in uniform. He turned 34 during the process, remains on an NBA roster, and closed a controlling bank acquisition while still competing at the highest level of his sport. Other active players engage with banking around the edges — SoFi is the NBA’s official banking partner, and stars like Jayson Tatum front financial-literacy initiatives — but engaging with banking is not the same as owning a chartered bank outright.

For contrast, the most business-minded NBA alumni have historically built their empires elsewhere: Junior Bridgeman in restaurant franchising and Coca-Cola bottling, Dave Bing and Vinnie Johnson in manufacturing. Barnes chose the harder, more regulated lane — and entered it before his career was even over. On the specific question of an active NBA player taking controlling ownership of a community bank, there isn’t an obvious peer.

What it means for the sports-capital market

Three things stand out for anyone advising athletes, properties, or the capital that flows between them.

First, the ownership frontier is widening. The most interesting athlete capital is moving away from consumer brands and toward infrastructure — the boring, regulated, recurring-revenue businesses that compound quietly. Banking is the clearest example yet, but the logic extends to any category where control and patience beat visibility.

Second, “home state” is a strategy, not sentiment. Barnes framed the purchase as a significant and permanent investment in Iowa. Rooting a deal in a place where the athlete has genuine standing lowers reputational risk, earns community trust, and turns philanthropy and capital into the same motion rather than competing line items. It’s an underused model, and it travels.

Third, the platform is the underwriting advantage. Barnes didn’t need this deal to be loud to make it work — but his profile lowers the cost of trust with regulators, depositors, and a small-town customer base worried about an outside owner. Used well, an athlete’s platform isn’t just a marketing asset; it’s a de-risking mechanism for exactly the kind of institution that lives or dies on local confidence.

The takeaway

The Harrison Barnes deal is a case study in doing the patient, unflashy version of the athlete-owner story correctly: build the thesis over years, earn the operating credentials, hire the operators, root it where you have standing, and buy control of something that generates cash whether or not anyone’s watching.

The athletes who build real, durable equity in the next decade won’t be the ones with the most logos. They’ll be the ones who — like a small bank in Paton, Iowa — quietly own the whole thing.

STA advises athletes, sports properties, and sports-tech companies at the intersection of commercial strategy, technology, and capital.

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As the 2026 season gets underway, college football is becoming one of the most interesting technology laboratories in American sports. AI, computer vision, player tracking, wearables, biometrics, smart equipment and real-time data are increasingly being woven into how teams prepare, play, protect and evaluate athletes.

From Film Room to Football Intelligence

Video has always been at the center of college football. What is changing is what computers can do with that video.

AI and computer vision can increasingly identify formations, personnel, player movement, defensive structures and situational tendencies without requiring an analyst to manually tag every play.

Instead of an analyst spending hours searching for every third-and-medium situation against a particular defensive coverage, coaches can increasingly ask the system to find those situations for them.

So What Does the NCAA permit

No one wants an Astros or Red Sox dilemma….

1. Real-Time Replay Moves Into the Coaching Booth

Perhaps the most significant new technology development for the 2026 season is also one of the simplest.

The NCAA approved an experimental rule allowing conferences to provide instant-replay video output in real time to both teams’ coaches booths during conference games in the 2026 regular season. Conferences can choose whether to implement it. For nonconference games, the visiting team can opt out.

That matters because coaches are no longer limited to the traditional broadcast feed when trying to understand what just happened.

A play can happen, the replay can become available immediately, and the coaching staff can begin analyzing it while the game continues.

The potential applications are enormous:

• Formation identification

• Defensive alignment

• Personnel changes

• Penalty review

• Play development

• Opponent tendencies

• Immediate halftime and between-series adjustments

The bigger story is the speed of information.

College football is moving closer to a world where the time between an event occurring and the coaching staff analyzing it continues to shrink.

2. The Sideline and Tablets

This transformation actually began before 2026.

Since 2024, FBS teams have been permitted to use up to 18 active tablets in the coaching booth, sideline and locker room. Those tablets were initially limited primarily to video and could not provide analytics, data access or outside communications.

At the same time, coach-to-player helmet communication became available in FBS football.

Those technologies are now becoming part of a much sports tech evolution.

The evolution looks something like this:

Film → tablets → real-time replay → tracking → analytics → AI

3. Performance Technology Guidance

Another major shift is happening on the player.

GPS, accelerometers, cameras, sensors, heart-rate monitors and other performance technologies are increasingly being used to collect information about athletes.

The NCAA’s 2026 performance technology guidance defines these systems broadly, including wearables, cameras, sensors, mobile apps, software platforms and other tools used to collect biometric and performance-related data.

For football programs, that can mean information about:

• Distance traveled

• Acceleration and deceleration

• Workload

• Movement patterns

• Training intensity

• Recovery

• Physical demands

With the portal and transfers the way it is. Teams with the best tech stacks and ability to utilize these to their advantage are going to be the ones playing in December and January.

There is more research surrounding mouth guards, helmets, etc. but nothing that will impact the 2026 season. This comes on the heels of research showing that 25% of NFL players will develop CTE in their lifetime and lifespan of playing football.

New technology is looking into sensors embedded in mouthguards can measure head impacts and help researchers understand:

• Force

• Direction

• Frequency

• Acceleration

• Rotational movement

With regards to the helmet, the NFL has already conducted university research using instrumented mouthguards to collect head-impact data.

The long term opportunity is creating a much more sophisticated individual head-impact profile. Research in 2026 continues to show improvements in helmet performance, particularly in reducing translational and rotational acceleration. University of Cincinnati researchers tested newer Riddell and VICIS models and found substantial differences in protection depending upon impact location and helmet design.

What’s particularly interesting is the movement toward:

Position-specific helmets

For example:

• QB helmets

• Lineman helmets

• Skill-position helmets

However, the science is not settled. The same Cincinnati research found that position-specific helmets did not necessarily outperform traditional designs in every impact scenario.

As an IU fan and Alum I am excited for the season. I will update you on any new technologies that impact college football as I see them.

If you are in sports technology or sports business. Check out Sports Tech Atlanta the boutique advisory I run. Within the advisory I built a sports tech matchmaker and we have a podcast that serves as a way for founders and companies to tell their stories and great way to interact with the sports business and sports tech ecosystem.

The STA read: where the hiring is

Tech, data, and product are hiring hard. The clearest signal on this board is demand for engineering and data talent inside sports properties and the betting ecosystem. The Tampa Bay Rays want a Database Engineer/DBA, the Golden State Warriors a Data Engineer, US Soccer a Data Scientist, and the Detroit Lions a Quantitative Research Intern. On the operator side, DraftKings, FanDuel, and Underdog are collectively hiring software engineers, product managers, and reliability engineers — a reminder that the fastest-growing headcount in “sports” is often really in software.

Partnerships and commercial roles are everywhere. If your lane is sponsorship and revenue, there’s a lot here: Bay FC is hiring a Senior Partnership Sales Director, the Atlanta Falcons a Brand and Digital Partnerships Manager, US Soccer a Partnership Development & Strategy Manager, the Baltimore Orioles a Corporate Partnerships Manager, and the Carolina Hurricanes a Partnership Solutions Manager.

AI discovery makes the list. Worth flagging for anyone tracking how properties are adapting to AI-driven search: CBS Sports is hiring a VP of SEO & AI Discovery. Discoverability inside AI systems is quietly becoming a named function.

The Atlanta angle. Three roles are open at the Falcons (Operations Project Coordinator, Brand and Digital Partnerships Manager, Groundskeeper), plus an Accounts Payable Accountant with the Atlanta Braves and a Chief Engineer with the Atlanta Hawks.

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The Feature — FirstTouch Fuel

The most interesting hydration story in sports right now isn’t a formula. It’s a distribution decision.

FirstTouch Fuel is a hydration product built for the way soccer is actually played — the 90-minute grind, the back-to-back tournament weekend, the August heat that turns the second half into an attrition contest. Plenty of brands can say that. What separates FirstTouch is where founder Steve Schmidt is choosing to sell it.

Most of the “clean hydration” wave has gone straight to the consumer: shelf space, subscriptions, an influencer and a QR code. FirstTouch is going the other direction — into the team, club, and federation channel. Youth soccer clubs. USL sides. National governing bodies. That’s a harder sale and a slower one, but it’s also the moat. Win the club and you win the sideline, the parent, the roster, and the renewal — all at once. Owning that channel is worth more than any single retail placement, because it’s the one incumbents built for the grocery aisle keep leaving on the table.

The category math backs the bet. Youth sports hydration is enormous, fragmented, and still dominated by legacy sugar-heavy drinks that were never designed for a performance sideline. There’s a genuine whitespace between “sugar water in a cooler” and “adult DTC electrolyte brand,” and it’s team-shaped. That’s the lane FirstTouch is running.

The early signal is real: a growing pilot pipeline, sample shipments landing with warm clubs and USL programs, and conversations moving from “what is this” to “how do we stock it.” That’s the phase where a category challenger either earns its distribution or doesn’t — and this one is earning it.

Listen: Steve laid out the whole thesis on the show. Full conversation here.

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MatchPoint is the AI-powered RFP engine built by Sports Tech Atlanta for the teams, leagues, and organizations that buy technology — and for the vendors trying to reach them. You describe the problem. MatchPoint matches it against a curated pool of vetted vendors and returns a ranked shortlist in about sixty seconds. That’s the entire pitch, and it matters because of how sports organizations buy tech right now.

The way sports orgs buy tech today is slow and blind

Most technology decisions in sports still run on relationships and luck. A GM asks a peer at another club who they use. A director remembers a booth from last year’s conference. Someone forwards an intro, three vendors get looped in, and the org spends the next two months in discovery calls and demos — most of which confirm the vendor was never the right fit in the first place.

The core problem is information asymmetry. Buyers can’t see the full landscape of who’s actually good at the specific thing they need, so they evaluate whoever happens to be in front of them. Vendors, meanwhile, burn their entire go-to-market budget trying to get in front of the handful of buyers who are ready to spend. Both sides lose time, and the best-fit match often never happens at all.

That’s the gap MatchPoint closes.

What MatchPoint actually does

The workflow is deliberately short:

1. You post an RFP. Describe what you need — ticketing, fan engagement, performance analytics, streaming, sponsorship measurement, CRM, whatever the category — along with your constraints, budget range, and timeline.

2. The engine matches. MatchPoint reads the brief and scores it against a curated pool of vetted vendors, ranking them on fit rather than on who paid for placement.

3. You get a shortlist in seconds. Instead of a blank search bar and forty tabs, you get a ranked, defensible list you can act on immediately.

The output isn’t a directory dump. It’s a shortlist — the three, five, or eight vendors most likely to solve your specific problem, ordered by fit. You go straight to the conversations that matter and skip the ones that never should have started.

Why “vetted” is the whole point

Plenty of platforms will hand you a long list of vendors. A long list is just the problem again, moved online. The value in MatchPoint is the curation layer underneath it — the pool is vetted, so the shortlist you get back is one you can trust enough to move on.

That vetting is where Sports Tech Atlanta’s positioning earns its keep. STA sits at the intersection of sports properties, technology, and capital, and spends its days in the deal flow between buyers and builders. MatchPoint productizes that vantage point: the judgment a good advisor applies to a shortlist, delivered in the time it takes to read this sentence.

Who it’s for

Buyers — teams, leagues, federations, venues, and rights holders — get a faster, more honest sourcing process. You replace weeks of relationship-mining and demo scheduling with a ranked shortlist and a clear rationale for it. That’s easier to run, easier to defend to a budget owner, and far more likely to land you the right partner.

Vendors get the other half of the equation: access to real buyers with real briefs and real timelines, matched on fit. Instead of spraying cold outreach and hoping, you show up when an organization has already described a problem you’re built to solve. The introduction happens at the moment of intent, not six months before or after it.

Why now

Sports-tech spend keeps climbing, and the vendor landscape has fragmented accordingly — more categories, more entrants, more overlap, and far more noise than any single buyer can track. The old sourcing model, built on personal networks and conference season, doesn’t scale to that reality. The organizations that win are the ones that can survey the field quickly and get to the right conversation first. MatchPoint is built for exactly that moment: it compresses the discovery phase from months to minutes and puts the fit decision back at the center of the process, where it belongs.

Try it

If you’re a team, league, or organization with a technology problem to solve, post an RFP and see your shortlist. If you’re a vendor who wants to be in the matches that count, get into the pool.

Either way, start at matchsportstech.com — and stop sourcing sports tech the hard way.

MatchPoint is built by Sports Tech Atlanta, a commercial advisory firm working at the intersection of sports properties, technology, and capital.

AI is changing how teams operate. Data is changing how decisions are made. New investment is changing who owns sports properties. Media rights are being rebuilt around streaming and digital platforms. Sponsorship is becoming increasingly measurable. And the fan experience is rapidly becoming a technology business.

But there is another piece of the sports technology equation that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Where are the people actually building all of this?

While code is written on keyboards, the sports business ecosystem is still built in rooms. For the rest of 2026, the global sports tech calendar is stacked with key summits, marketplaces, and innovation forums. Here is where the global sports business gets done, and where Atlanta sits at the center of it all.

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Key Event Highlights by Month

September: Strategic Momentum

• World Football Summit (Madrid | Sept 15–16): Focuses on global football operations, investment, and tech innovation.

• SportsPro Investment Summit (Thessaloniki | Sept 15–18): Centered on capital allocation and shifting financial models.

• SBJ AXS DRIVE (Indianapolis | Sept 22–24): Prioritizes venue management, digital ops, and modern fan experience.

• EPSI Annual Conference (Piraeus | Sept 23–25): Concentrates on EU innovation frameworks, startup matchmaking, and funding.

• SVG Remote Production Forum (Atlanta | Sept 23–24): Offers a deep dive into live production workflows, including a look inside Warner Bros. Discovery’s Atlanta hub.

• SportsPro AI + Tech (London | Sept 29–30): High-priority gathering linking tech architects, engineers, and execs to deploy AI and data solutions.

October: Dealmaking & Rights

• Leaders Week London (London | Oct 5–8): High-level networking at Stamford Bridge for top-tier sports execs.

• SportBiz Europe (Barcelona | Oct 6–9): Cross-disciplinary focus spanning analytics, connectivity, fan tech, and Sportech investments.

• SPORTEL Monaco (Monaco | Oct 19–21): The premier global marketplace for media rights, OTT infrastructure, and broadcasting tech.

November: Capital, Content & Regional Anchors

• ISPO 2026 (Amsterdam | Nov 3–5): Encompasses sporting goods innovation, smart materials, and consumer tech.

• GENEXSIS (Atlanta | Nov 9–10): Georgia’s flagship Sports Innovation Summit, merging industry, academia, and government across athlete wellness and fan engagement.

• PrimeTime Sports Management Conference (Toronto | Nov 12–14): Canada’s focal point for sponsorship, media, and executive leadership.

• SBJ Media Innovators & Dealmakers (New York | Nov 17–18): Back-to-back essential sessions covering broadcast disruption, M&A, and venture capital.

December: Emerging Tech & Future Formats

• Sports Tech Nation (Munich | Dec 1–2): A startup-heavy ecosystem featuring 200+ founders, 180 investors, and direct B2B matchmaking across AI, computer vision, and wearables.

• SEG3 (Los Angeles | Dec 8–9): Examines the intersection of sports, gaming, entertainment, and digital assets.

STA advises properties, brands and founders at the intersection of sports, technology and capital. If you’re thinking about athlete IP, women’s sports commercial strategy, or building around a rising property, let’s talk.

Women’s sports fans engage with sports content daily at a rate of 72% — 14 percentage points higher than men’s sports fans — and they stay engaged long after the final buzzer. That’s the headline from new research by The Trade Desk Intelligence and GoodQues, which finds this audience maintains a diverse media diet and actively seeks out ways to connect with the teams and athletes they follow.

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The momentum behind women’s sports has been easy to read through viewership numbers. This data goes a layer deeper — into how the audience behaves once the broadcast ends.

The data debrief

A few things stand out.

The audience is nearly split by gender. Women’s sports fans are just as likely to be male (51%) as female (49%), and they skew younger than fans of men’s sports — a profile that undercuts the assumption that “women’s sports audience” is a niche demographic.

When it comes to live sports, they show up consistently. Ninety-one percent watch sports content live, with connected TV leading as the primary viewing channel for 71% of the audience. But the live game is only the entry point. Beyond it:

• 66% watch highlights online

• 34% listen to sports podcasts

• 31% read sports articles

• 23% follow fan blogs

Their broader digital behavior reflects the same pattern. Seventy-two percent of their digital time is spent outside of walled gardens — meaning the majority of their attention lives beyond the major social platforms. They also spend 8% more time on CTV than the average American and 32% more time on podcasts.

What it means

The takeaway is that women’s sports fans are not passive viewers. They seek content out, return to it often, and keep up across multiple formats and platforms — highlights, podcasts, articles, blogs, live.

For brands and rights holders, that reshapes where the opportunity sits. The value isn’t confined to the game window; it’s distributed across the full week and across channels most sponsorship strategies still under-index on. The properties and partners that earn lasting attention here will be the ones that show up with the same consistency and commitment that define this audience’s fandom.

Source: The Trade Desk Intelligence and GoodQues, “Women’s Sports Fans: The Audience Brands Can’t Afford to Miss.”

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For most of the 2026 season, the National League MVP race has felt less like a competition and more like an inevitability.

Shohei Ohtani was the obvious answer.

The Dodgers superstar entered the season carrying the rarest advantage in modern sports: he isn’t simply one of the best hitters in baseball. He is also a legitimate starting pitcher. That two-way equation gives Ohtani something no other MVP candidate can replicate.

But with the calendar turning toward the final stretch of the season, the race has become considerably more interesting.

Pete Crow-Armstrong and Matt Olson are making a case that Ohtani may actually have to earn this one.

And that is where the numbers get interesting.

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The Ohtani Problem

Let’s start with the obvious.

Ohtani remains Ohtani.

As of August 17, he is hitting .289 with 27 home runs, 75 RBIs and a .928 OPS. Those numbers alone would put him squarely in the MVP conversation.

But that is only half of the equation.

Ohtani has also returned to the mound in 2026, adding another dimension to his value that traditional offensive statistics cannot capture. His pitching has been good enough early in the season to generate legitimate Cy Young discussion.

That is the problem for everyone chasing him.

If Ohtani were simply a designated hitter, this would be a much more conventional MVP conversation.

He isn’t.

Every time he takes the mound, the value equation changes.

But he hasn’t pitched since around the all-star game with a sore arm and no timetable from the Dodgers on when he will return. Does that or should that change how voters view the MVP race this year?

Enter PCA

Pete Crow-Armstrong has become one of the most fascinating players in baseball because his MVP case isn’t built around one statistic.

He’s a 4 level player (has everything but a great a great arm)

Power.

Speed.

Defense.

Center field.

Add a little swag.

MLB noted earlier this month that PCA has hit .340 with 19 home runs and a 1.167 OPS since the beginning of June. During that stretch, he has the highest OPS in the majors and had pushed his season bWAR to 7.0, the best mark among MLB position players at that point.

I’m not the biggest War, Bwar guy but he has been on a tear.

As of August 17, PCA is hitting .276 with 28 home runs and 75 RBIs.

And then there is the part of his game that doesn’t show up neatly in the home-run column.

Speed.

Defense.

Range.

Position.

PCA can change a game in ways Ohtani simply cannot because Ohtani doesn’t play defense. He may need to play RF the way Tucker is going but PCA is having one of the better defensive years in the last 15 years.

The question is whether his total value can become so overwhelming that voters decide the MVP should belong to the player doing more things on more parts of the field.

And Then There Is Matt Olson

If PCA represents the future of baseball, Matt Olson represents something much more familiar.

Production. Matt Olson is a back of the baseball type of guy. Home runs, RBI’s and plays every game.

Olson has quietly put together one of the best offensive seasons in the National League.

As of August 17, he is hitting .264 with 36 home runs and 77 RBIs. His 36 home runs are tied for second in MLB, while his OPS sits at .893.

But Olson’s story is bigger than the current numbers.

Earlier this season, he was already drawing comparisons to his historic 2023 campaign, when he led MLB with 54 home runs and 139 RBIs. In the first 35 games of 2026, Olson was leading MLB in doubles, extra-base hits, RBIs and total bases while ranking second in OPS.

Now he has entered the MVP conversation again.

For me, (a little biased as a Braves fan). If Olson reaches 45 homeruns and 100 RBI’s in a year where the average hitter is at .220 and plays every game with above average defense at first. Coupled that with the Braves being the 2nd best team in the NL. The race will get really interesting.

The MVP Race Is Really Three Different Arguments

This is what makes 2026 fascinating.

Ohtani: The most unique player in baseball.

PCA: The most complete emerging position player.

Olson: The most traditional offensive force and the current Cal Ripken of the MLB.

How Do You Actually Beat Ohtani?

This is the million-dollar question.

PCA probably has the most interesting path.

He needs to continue hitting.

If the Cubs center fielder finishes somewhere around 35-plus home runs, 90-plus RBIs and 30-plus stolen bases while maintaining elite defensive value, his argument becomes extremely difficult to dismiss.

Especially if Chicago is playing meaningful baseball in September.

PCA doesn’t have to beat Ohtani at being Ohtani.

He has to demonstrate that his total contribution to the Cubs is greater.

Olson’s path is different.

He needs a monster finish.

Thirty-six home runs is already an enormous number with roughly six weeks remaining in the regular season. If Olson turns that into 45-plus, pushes toward 100-plus RBIs and continues to anchor an Atlanta lineup fighting for October, the narrative could move quickly.

He has an outside chance.

The Ohtani Factor Is Also the Ohtani Fatigue Factor

There is another element nobody wants to talk about too much.

Ohtani fatigue.

Not physical fatigue.

Narrative fatigue. It’s like in the NBA--Lebron could have won the MVP 10 times but that’s how you get Derrick Rose in 2011.

At some point, voters may start asking whether the most valuable player should automatically be the most spectacular player.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Ohtani has already won multiple MVP awards. He has already changed the way baseball thinks about player value. He has already made the impossible look routine.

That could actually make the door slightly more open for someone else.

Baseball is just heating up as the weather begins to cool. We will update this story as we get into September on what should be an exciting race.

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Top News From The World Of Sports Tech & Biz

• ⚽ LALIGA EA SPORTS became the first national professional football competition to roll out Connected Ball technology across all matches, pairing PUMA and KINEXON’s system with VAR and SAOT to sharpen accuracy, transparency, and trust in officiating.

• 🤖 Robot fighting arrived as a spectator sport in Tokyo, with human-piloted robots battling in a sold-out live event that blends AI, robotics, and audience entertainment.

• ⚾ Apple and MLB unveiled the September Friday Night Baseball schedule alongside the first live Apple Immersive baseball broadcast on Apple Vision Pro, starting with Red Sox vs. Yankees on August 28.

• 🏎️ Disney+, ESPN, and Formula E signed a multi-year media rights deal bringing all Formula E races to Disney+ and ESPN+ in the U.S. and Disney+ across most international markets from the 2026/27 season.

• 🏈 NFL valuations hit a combined $299 billion in 2026, per Sportico — the Cowboys leading at $15.5 billion and average team value up 31% year-over-year.

• 💸 Sports Boulevard Development Company established a real estate investment fund of more than $186 million with Rikaz Properties to build a luxury hotel in Riyadh’s Sports Boulevard project.

• 📺 SportVot (a Playmakers member) secured exclusive India streaming rights for European football’s 2026 summer club friendlies — 22 clubs across the Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, and Primeira Liga.

• 🤝 Arsenal extended its Emirates Stadium naming rights partnership with Emirates in a deal reportedly worth £70 million, carrying the club’s longest-running sponsorship through 2033.

• ⚽ The Confederation of African Football forfeited more than $1 billion in secured income over eight years after moving the Africa Cup of Nations from a biennial to a four-yearly event.

• ⚽ FIFA was accused of breaking trust through deception in an open letter from UEFA, Concacaf, and the Asian Football Confederation.

• 🏀 Project B said it will follow IOC and FIBA gender eligibility guidelines when it launches its global basketball league in January, with a roster including WNBA stars Nneka Ogwumike, Jonquel Jones, and Sophie Cunningham, aiming to give players and stakeholders consistency and confidence.

Money Talks

• 💸 LIV Golf secured a funding agreement with an unnamed lead investor for the 2027 season after Saudi Arabia’s backing was withdrawn earlier this year, with plans for a restructured league model and continued operations next year.

• 💸 Miraidoor invested in inclusive e-sports company ePARA via the Saitama Shibusawa MIX Innovation Creation Support Fund, backing disability-focused e-sports services and regional industry development in Saitama Prefecture.

• 🤝 Brookfield completed its acquisition of Oaktree for an undisclosed sum, taking full ownership of the credit platform that controlled Inter Milan.

• 🤝 Fenway Sports Group acquired a WTGL team for an undisclosed amount, expanding into the women’s team golf league backed by TMRW Sports and the LPGA.

• 💸 Yankee Global Enterprises secured $2.6 billion in financing from Apollo Sports Capital — combining credit and equity to fund the franchise’s growth and refinance existing debt, with the Steinbrenner family retaining full control.

• 💸 Josh Kushner and Bob Iger agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers in a deal valued at $12.5 billion — a record valuation for a North American sports franchise — pending NBA board approval and due diligence by Kushner’s Thrive Eternal.

• 💸 The Lewis family, owners of Tottenham Hotspur, explored a bid for a London NBA Europe franchise as part of a consortium with two other sports investment families.

Get in touch — Sports Tech Atlanta works at the intersection of sports, technology, and capital. If any of the above maps to what you’re building, let’s talk.

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The deal

FSG which bought Liverpool for £300M in 2010 and owns the Boston Red Sox sold about a third of the club to a group called 1892 Holdings. It’s a minority sale with an attached option on majority control. FSG retains control and has said football strategy doesn’t change.

Who’s in

Amit Bhatia manages the consortium and becomes vice-chairman. A former QPR co-owner and son-in-law of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, his firm already holds positions in TGL, the tech-forward Woods/McIlroy golf league, plus family stakes in the Rajasthan Royals and Boston Celtics.

Jeff Bezos invests through the K5 fund as lead investor; K5’s $1B-plus is the single largest piece. It’s his first direct pro-team investment. He takes no board seat though as K5’s Bryan Baum does.

Eduardo and Elaine Saverin invest via their family office EE Capital. Elaine joins the board.

When the Family Name Leaves the Front Office

In our latest Field Notes, we discussed the changing of front offices in sports. Bezos has been knocking at the door of the Seahawks and Commanders, but none worked out. The question a lot of people are asking is could this be a conflict of interest with Amazon as a broadcaster of the league?

Why Bezos Can Purchase Liverpool

Amazon, via its branding as Prime Video, had live broadcast rights in the UK for 20 Premier League games each season for six seasons until the winter of 2024. The streaming giant then opted out of a bidding war with Sky Sports and TNT Sports for the next four-year cycle, which is worth £6.7bn to the Premier League.

They backed out after the Premier League changed the broadcast packages available to purchase, getting rid of the smallest 20-game per season one. Amazon had paid around £30m per season for that package, using it as an incentive to try and drive subscriptions to Prime.

Amazon customers in other countries still watch top-flight matches via Prime Video, but they do not currently have a direct relationship with the Premier League itself. This is because Amazon are sub-licencing the rights from Viaplay in the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark.

That means there is a degree of separation between Amazon, Bezos and the Premier League. And there is another: Bezos relinquished day-to-day control of the tech giant in 2021. However, the 62-year-old is now the executive chair of the company, is still the largest shareholder and is involved in decision-making a the top of the company.

A scan of the Premier League handbook, which sets out the competition’s rules and regulations, shows that Bezos should not have any other trouble passing the Owners’ and Directors’ Test, should the deal for Liverpool go ahead.

The Takeaway

The takeaway isn’t about trophies. The smartest platform capital in the world just priced a Premier League club near $7B as a technology-and-media asset a fairly direct instruction about where the value, and the decision-making, is moving.

Sources: ESPN, CNBC, Sky Sports, Forbes, Variety, France 24, Insider Sport (Aug 10–15, 2026). Valuation figures vary by outlet; ranges reflect that.

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For generations, professional sports franchises were more than businesses.

They were family names.

The Mara family and the New York Giants. The Rooney family and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Halas family and the Chicago Bears. The Buss family and the Los Angeles Lakers.

These families didn’t simply own teams. Over decades, their identities became intertwined with the identities of the franchises themselves.

Fans didn’t just know the owner.

They knew the family.

They knew the history, the traditions and the stories.

And they believed the people sitting in the owner’s box understood what the team meant to the city because the team had become part of their own family history.

That model is beginning to look increasingly fragile.

The Mara and Rooney standard

Few families better represent the old model than the Mara family.

Tim Mara founded the Giants in 1925. Ownership eventually passed through his sons, Jack and Wellington Mara, and ultimately to John Mara, who remains the team’s president and CEO. The Giants have been a Mara institution for more than a century.

The Steelers offer another extraordinary example.

Art Rooney founded Pittsburgh’s franchise in 1933. His son, Dan Rooney, eventually took over, followed by Dan’s son, Art Rooney II. Even when the Rooney family restructured its ownership in 2008 and brought in outside investors, the family worked to preserve substantial ownership and control. Dan Rooney and Art Rooney II specifically arranged financing to keep the family substantially involved in the franchise.

That distinction matters.

The Rooneys understood that they didn’t necessarily have to own every share to preserve the family’s role in the franchise.

They needed to preserve continuity.

The Giants have followed a similar path. In 2025, Julia Koch and her family purchased a 10 percent, non-controlling stake in the franchise. John Mara remains president and CEO, and Steve Tisch remains chairman of the board.

That may be the best version of the new ownership model.

Bring in new capital.

Increase the value of the asset.

But preserve the people who understand what the franchise means.

Because there is a difference between selling part of a team and selling its identity.

Then came the Lakers

The Los Angeles Lakers may be the clearest example of where this could be heading.

For decades, the Lakers were associated with the Buss family.

Jerry Buss didn’t just own the Lakers. He helped define the modern Lakers identity. After his death, his children, led by Jeanie Buss, continued that legacy.

Then the family sold controlling ownership to Mark Walter at a reported $10 billion valuation.

And now, roughly 14 months later, Walter is selling the Lakers again.

Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger have agreed to acquire the franchise for a reported $12.5 billion, the largest transaction in sports history.

That is an extraordinary sequence.

The Buss family.

Then Mark Walter who is an owner of the Dodgers and minority owner of Chelsea. So there felt like there was sports continuity

Now enter Josh Kushner and Bob Iger.

A real estate mogul with ties to Trump and the former Disney CEO.

The Lakers are still the Lakers, of course. The banners are still hanging. The championships still count. The purple and gold still mean something.

But something has changed.

Sports franchises used to feel like royalty. The palace were the domes and the stadiums and now franchises feel like a investment banker wet dream. An asset to be plucked, picked and sold to the next highest bidder.

This is Just Getting Started

The Lakers aren’t an isolated example.

The estate of Paul Allen has agreed to sell the Seattle Seahawks to an ownership group led by technology entrepreneur Vinod Khosla for a reported $9.61 billion.

The San Diego Padres are also changing hands, with the Seidler family’s ownership moving toward a reported $3.9 billion sale.

And across professional sports, valuations continue to climb as media rights, sponsorships, stadium economics and the scarcity of major franchises make teams extraordinarily attractive investments. Reuters described the Lakers transaction as the latest example of a broader sports “gold rush.”

That changes the equation for legacy families.

If your family owns a franchise worth $500 million, $1 billion or even $2 billion, holding onto it can feel like a responsibility.

If it is worth $10 billion or $12 billion, the conversation becomes very different.

What happens when the next generation doesn’t want to run the team?

What happens when family members disagree about the future?

What happens when taxes, estate planning and competing business interests enter the equation?

And what happens when somebody offers a number so large that selling becomes almost impossible to resist?

As a sports fan and someone who works at the intersection of sports and technology.

I think fans are becoming worried and I think owners who have been in the game a long time are worried too.

If a fan sees the Giants and thinks: “That’s my team.”

A new owner, PE Firm, or new billionaire may see: “That’s a $10 billion asset.”

There isn’t room for those two thoughts to exist. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not clamoring for every owner over the past 100 years got into sports because they cared about athletes or the game or some confluence of that.

But we are lying to ourselves if this new asset class of sport doesn’t have underlying issues.

The fan thinks about childhood memories, grandparents, parents, rivalries, championships and heartbreak.

The investor thinks about media rights, sponsorships, stadium economics, revenue growth and appreciation.

Neither perspective is inherently wrong.

But when the financial perspective becomes dominant, something important can disappear.

The idea that a franchise is a public trust.

Not legally…well tell that to Lakers fans and we will see what happens to the Dodgers with Mark Walter’s financial issues.

But emotionally.

The danger isn’t new ownership. It’s detachment.

The problem isn’t that wealthy outsiders buy sports teams.

Sports has always had wealthy owners.

The danger is when ownership becomes so detached from the culture of the franchise that fans begin to feel like customers rather than members of a community.

Sports fandom is irrational by design.

You don’t support your team because it produces the highest financial return.

You support it because your father took you to games.

Because your grandfather watched them.

Because you remember where you were when they won.

Because your favorite player became part of your childhood.

That emotional connection may be the most valuable asset a franchise has.

And ironically, it may also be the asset these new owners a la a Kushner can damage the quickest.

The Lakers may be the warning sign

The Lakers are particularly fascinating because the ownership changes happened so quickly.

A franchise that spent decades associated with the Buss family changed controlling hands, then changed again.

Eventually, the question isn’t simply who owns the team.

It’s whether ownership still matters to fandom.

Imagine a future where franchises routinely change hands every five or ten years.

A technology billionaire buys one.

An investment consortium buys another.

A family office buys a third.

A media executive buys another.

The franchise remains.

The logo remains.

The stadium remains.

The players eh some may be there.

But the ownership history becomes a revolving door and is that even a bad thing if the sports that we love are untouched? Can these new money people not meddle and how will the governing bodies and existing owners treat these new owners?

When you can buy a franchise for $10 billion or $12 billion, are you buying a team, or are you buying a piece of someone’s childhood?

I will leave us here. The financial asset belongs to the owner, but the emotional asset belongs to everyone.

You can’t buy legacy and you can’t buy fandom

And if sports forget that; the biggest risk as sports becomes an asset that is valued by the billionaire class isn’t that fans will stop watching.

But fans will stop caring and if you lose the emotional tie, you lose sports.

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There are sports marketing campaigns that are carefully planned, meticulously executed and forgotten within a few weeks.

And then there is the missing diamond at the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix.

The campaign had everything a marketer could want: Formula 1, Hollywood stars, luxury, a major motion picture, an iconic location and a story built around a jewel heist.

There was just one problem.

The diamond actually disappeared……And nobody ever found it.

It started with Hollywood coming to Monaco

In 2004, Jaguar Racing needed attention. The team was Ford-owned, underfunded, and losing tens of millions a year, and its future was already in question. It needed a moment.

At the same time, Warner Bros. was preparing to release Ocean’s Twelve, the sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and a marquee cast.

Monaco was the obvious meeting point. The Grand Prix was already shorthand for wealth, celebrity and luxury. Ocean’s Twelve was built around elaborate international thefts in glamorous European settings. Jaguar’s head of communications, Nav Sidhu, saw a way to put the two together.

The partnership was ambitious. Ocean's Twelve branding appeared across Jaguar's cars, team apparel, driver uniforms and garage. Jaguar Racing described it as a groundbreaking Hollywood-F1 partnership designed to reach Formula 1's global television audience. Clooney, Pitt and Damon were in Monaco to promote the film. Hollywood meets Formula 1 at the most glamorous race on the calendar.

Then the idea got bigger.

Put a real diamond on the car

Jaguar brought in diamond house Steinmetz, which supplied two genuine 1.4-carat white diamonds — one for each car, driven by Mark Webber and rookie Christian Klien. Contemporary valuations put each stone at around $300,000, with some reports higher. Predictably, no one would insure them.

Sit with that for a second.

Two Formula 1 cars, running the tightest street circuit in the sport, threading between concrete barriers at speed — each carrying an uninsured six-figure diamond on the single most fragile part of the car.

From a marketing standpoint, though, it was almost perfect. A film about jewel thieves. A city built on luxury. A diamond. Speed. All compressed into one image. The campaign was the story.

Until the story rewrote itself.

Lap one

On the opening lap, Klien — a rookie in his first Monaco Grand Prix — put his Jaguar into the barriers at the Loews hairpin, one of the slowest and most unforgiving corners on the circuit.

Klien walked away fine. The car was damaged. And the wrecked Jaguar sat trackside for roughly two hours before the team could retrieve it — a long, unsupervised window with a fortune sitting in a broken nose cone.

When the car finally came back to the garage, the diamond was gone.

Suddenly the question surrounding Jaguar’s Hollywood promotion wasn’t “how will the movie do?” It was “where is the diamond?”

The most ironic campaign in sports marketing

A movie about sophisticated thieves comes to Monaco. Its stars promote it at the Grand Prix. A real diamond is placed on a race car as part of the bit. The car crashes. And the diamond disappears.

It sounds like the cold open of another Ocean’s film.

The theories arrived immediately, and none has ever been closed out. Maybe a spectator pocketed it in the chaos around the crash. Maybe it shook loose on impact and lodged in the barriers. Maybe it was swept up with the debris. Maybe someone found it and understood exactly what they were holding.

And here’s the detail that makes it stranger: there were two diamonds. Webber’s car later retired with a mechanical problem, but its stone was still in place when the team recovered it. One diamond came home. The other never did.

Formula 1 itself still lists the stone as missing and has gone back to the mystery in its own

F1: Beyond The Grid / On The Edge storytelling. More than 20 years on, it’s unrecovered.

As Sports Partnership and Sponsorship are Rapidly Evolving

The campaign isn’t remembered because of the advertising. It’s remembered because something happened.

That distinction matters more every year. Brands no longer just compete for impressions. They compete for attention, engagement, conversation, sharing, earned media, and cultural relevance — the things you can’t buy on a rate card.

Jaguar and Ocean’s Twelve built a live event with genuine stakes, and then the unexpected happened. A promotional activation turned into a mystery that generated its own media cycle. The campaign became content.

And it did all of that with none of today’s infrastructure. No TikTok. No Reels. No X amplification. No Shorts. People are still telling the story anyway — because the story is irresistible on its own: Hollywood plus F1 plus Monaco plus a real diamond plus a crash plus an unsolved mystery. That’s an engagement formula humans understood long before the platforms named it.

The Monaco diamond mystery is a reminder that the future of sports marketing isn’t about putting a logo in front of more people. It’s about creating experiences people remember, discuss and pass along.

Whether you’re a global automaker, a sports-tech startup, or an emerging brand, the question is never only how many impressions will we get?

It’s what’s the story?

Because the story is what lasts.

And Jaguar’s diamond? Still missing.

About Sports Tech Atlanta

Sports Tech Atlanta is a boutique commercial advisory firm operating at the intersection of sports properties, technology, and capital. We help rights holders, sports-tech companies, brands, and investors turn positioning into revenue — across sponsorship and partnership sales, investor relations, go-to-market strategy, and outreach-as-a-service for early-stage teams. If you’re building something in sports and technology and want a partner who can open doors and close them, let’s talk.

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From renting airtime to owning the narrative

For most of modern sports media, a league’s business was selling access to live games — the rights fee is the product. The Netflix relationship started there too: MLB and Netflix signed a multi-year partnership covering live events from 2026 through 2028, including this year’s Opening Night game, the Home Run Derby, and the Field of Dreams game. Then came documentaries — the two sides had already collaborated on Red Sox docuseries.

The scripted series is a different category entirely. Wakely secured the rights from MLB and built the concept, and MLB Studios sits in the producer’s chair. That means the league isn’t just cashing a licensing check — it’s a creative and equity participant in a piece of durable, franchise-able entertainment IP. Live games expire the moment they end. A scripted drama about DiMaggio, Mantle, and 27 championships is a catalog asset that keeps earning.

Why the Yankees specifically

The choice of franchise is a commercial decision, not a sentimental one. The Yankees carry 27 World Series titles — more than any team in North American sports — plus 52 players and 11 managers in the Hall of Fame. That’s not a team; it’s a library of pre-loaded, globally recognized narratives with built-in audience familiarity. When you’re greenlighting scripted content, that recognition is de-risking. You’re not building an audience from zero — you’re monetizing a brand that already has one.

A-Rod traded via Text

For a streamer, that’s the whole thesis. Aggregate Films is a proven Netflix partner — the shop behind Ozark and the recent limited series Black Rabbit, which pulled seven Emmy nominations. Pairing a bankable production company with pre-existing IP is exactly the low-variance bet platforms want in a tighter content-spend environment.

The STA read

Three takeaways for operators watching this space:

For leagues and teams: your history is an underpriced asset. Most franchises think of their archive as a marketing tool — highlight reels and anniversary nights. This deal reframes it as licensable, ownable entertainment IP with a real equity position attached. The teams that inventory their stories, secure their rights cleanly, and structure for participation rather than flat fees are the ones who’ll capture the upside as more platforms come shopping for franchise narratives.

For brands: scripted sports IP is a new integration surface. A multi-era Yankees drama is a premium environment for brand integration, period-authentic placement, and adjacent campaign activation — reaching a fandom in a narrative context, not a 30-second interruption. The brands that get in early, while the format is fresh and the inventory uncrowded, buy attention at a better rate than they will once every league has a prestige series in development.

For sports tech: every league that moves into owned scripted content needs a rights, archive, and IP-management layer that most don’t have built. Cataloging a century of footage, clearing likeness and rights across eras, and managing participation economics is infrastructure — and infrastructure is where durable, recurring businesses get built. The demand signal here isn’t one Yankees show. It’s every franchise realizing its past is a product and needing the tooling to sell it.

MLB just demonstrated that a team’s history can be packaged, produced, and owned as premium entertainment. Expect other leagues to notice fast. The window to build ahead of that — as a team structuring the rights, a brand buying the integration, or a company building the rails — is open right now.

Sports Tech Atlanta is a commercial advisory firm working at the intersection of sports properties, technology, and capital. Field Notes is where we think out loud about the market.

The gap is closing where the returns are

For the first four years of the NIL era, the earnings table looked exactly like the revenue table: football and men’s basketball on top, everyone else fighting for scraps. That’s shifting. Women’s basketball now ranks third across all sports in NIL activity, and softball has pushed into the top five, sitting just behind baseball. Learfield’s head of NIL, Solly Fulp, framed the shift plainly — it’s not just an emerging market anymore, it’s accelerating.

The reason matters more than the ranking. This isn’t charity spend or box-checking. Brands are following engagement. Female athletes are, in Learfield’s read, strong content creators with genuine enthusiasm for the brands they work with — and that authenticity is showing up in campaign performance. When you’ve spent years buying media against ROAS targets, that sentence reads differently: it’s not a values statement, it’s a channel-efficiency finding. The engagement rates are doing the persuading.

What the deal structures tell you

The type of activity is the part most recaps skip, and it’s the part an operator should read closely. The most common partnership formats were production shoots, social content, ambassador programs, public appearances, and autograph sessions. That’s not a merch-and-jersey business — it’s a content and access business. The inventory being sold is reach, story, and authenticity, which is exactly the inventory that performs when it’s matched to the right athlete and the right category.

And the categories are instructive. Restaurants led all sponsor types, followed by financial services, healthcare, and professional services. Notice what’s not dominating: this isn’t sneaker-and-apparel money. It’s local and regional service businesses plus regulated national categories that live or die on trust. Those are advertisers who need authentic third-party credibility, and they’re finding it here at a price point that still clears their return threshold.

On the national side, 22 brands — Geico, SeatGeek, State Farm, EA Sports, Uber, AT&T, and Marriott among them — ran campaigns featuring 260-plus athletes across 69 schools. That’s the top of the funnel maturing. When State Farm and Marriott are running multi-athlete, multi-school programs, the category has moved from experiment to line item.

The STA read

Three things worth sitting with if you’re a brand, a property, or a technology company operating in this space:

For brands: the arbitrage window is real but narrowing. Women’s sports inventory is still priced below its engagement value, which is precisely the condition that produces outsized ROAS. That gap compresses as more advertisers pile in — which the 123% figure says is already happening. The move is to build authentic, passion-matched programs now, while the efficiency is still favorable, rather than waiting for the category to price itself correctly.

For properties and athletes: the deals that performed were the ones catered to an athlete’s actual interests, not generic logo placements. The winning inventory is specificity. Programs built around what an athlete genuinely cares about humanize the partnership and drive the engagement rates that keep brands renewing. Repeatable revenue comes from fit, not reach alone.

For sports tech: every one of those 4,772 athletes is now a small media business that needs matching, measurement, and deal infrastructure. The 123% jump isn’t just an athlete story — it’s a demand signal for the tooling layer underneath it. The market that matches the right brand to the right athlete, and then proves the return, is the market that scales with this curve.

The women’s side of college sports spent five years being treated as the emerging story. The buy-side numbers say it’s stopped emerging and started compounding. The operators who move on that gap before it closes are the ones who’ll look prescient in two years.

Sports Tech Atlanta is a commercial advisory firm working at the intersection of sports properties, technology, and capital. Field Notes is where we think out loud about the market.

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So the interesting question is not whether they overpaid. It’s what they think they bought. Because the buyer list tells you they weren’t pricing a cricket team at all.

What’s actually on the ticket

The Spirit’s home is Lord’s the ground English cricket calls the home of the sport, owned and operated by Marylebone Cricket Club, the 239-year-old institution that still serves as the guardian of the Laws of the game. That last detail is the one that reframes the whole transaction. MCC doesn’t just own the most storied address in cricket; it writes the rules the entire global game plays by.

A 49% stake in the Spirit, then, is not really an equity position in a mid-table franchise. It is the entry ticket to a commercial relationship with that institution and, through it, a line into cricket’s global fanbase north of a billion people, overwhelmingly concentrated in South Asia, and structurally under-monetized on exactly the axes Silicon Valley knows how to attack: direct-to-consumer, data, digital rights, and platform distribution. You don’t pay a control premium for the team. You pay it for the address and the option value attached to it.

That’s the mispricing that isn’t. Priced as a franchise, £295 million is absurd. Priced as call option on the global digital monetization of the world’s second-most-followed sport — anchored to its single most trusted brand — it starts to look like a rational entry into a market these operators believe is a decade behind where it should be.

Why these buyers, specifically

Sports-vanity money looks a certain way: a hedge-fund principal buys a Premier League club, a private-equity shop buys a stadium’s worth of cash flow. This isn’t that. The consortium led by Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks, with Silver Lake’s Egon Durban and Times Internet’s Satyan Gajwani in the mix alongside Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Shantanu Narayen reads as a platform-and-distribution roster, not a trophy cabinet.

Arora ran a decade at Google before Palo Alto. Gajwani is the tell most people miss: he’s a co-founder of Major League Cricket and vice-chairman of Times Internet, which means the consortium has a direct operational line into both the U.S. cricket build-out and India’s digital media machine. Heavy Indian-American representation across the group isn’t incidental. It’s an alignment with the two markets that decide whether cricket’s next decade of value gets captured — the enormous domestic Indian audience and the diaspora demand that MLC is trying to convert in the States.

The unlikely alliance is the whole story

Which brings us to the friction, and to why the deal is genuinely novel rather than just expensive. You are grafting Silicon Valley operating culture onto a 239-year-old members’ club — an institution defined by tradition, waiting lists, and a self-appointed duty to protect the game from exactly this kind of disruption. The cultural distance between “move fast” and “guardian of the Laws” is the entire risk, and the entire point.

The governance is engineered around that tension. MCC kept 51% a gift from the ECB it chose not to sell down and retains control of the board, while the tech consortium takes the minority stake plus real operational influence. That structure is doing something specific: it lets the institution keep its hand on the wheel and its identity intact while importing operator capability it could never build in-house. It is, in effect, the sports-M&A equivalent of a strategic acquisition where the acquirer promises to leave the founding team in charge. Whether that promise survives contact with a P&L is the thing to watch.

One year on: what operator money actually changed

The first season under the new ownership is the tell on execution, and the early evidence is exactly what you’d predict when operators take over a heritage asset. The visible change came in the brand, not the batting order: a full rebrand run through VCCP and SomeOne, the new identity projected onto Lord’s Media Centre, a rebuilt site and social presence, and a blue-chip commercial stack assembled fast — Barclays as a partner, Nike on the kit in what’s reported as Nike’s first deal in The Hundred.

That’s the pattern worth internalizing. The money did not buy a better XI overnight. It bought a brand reset and a commercial reset the two things operators can actually move quickly while the sporting product stays on its own, slower clock. The women’s side carries the pedigree here, as 2024 Women’s Hundred champions; the men remain the unproven half of the asset. The commercial thesis and the sporting thesis are not running on the same timeline, and pretending otherwise is how ownership groups talk themselves into disappointment.

The signal

For anyone underwriting deals at the intersection of sport, technology, and capital, London Spirit is a clean case study in four things:

Price the address, not the team. The sharpest capital in sports right now is increasingly paying for access, distribution, and heritage IP — option value on a fanbase — rather than for franchise cash flow. The multiple only makes sense once you reprice what’s being bought.

Pair heritage with operators, and engineer the governance. The most sophisticated version of this deal isn’t a takeover; it’s a structured alliance that keeps institutional trust intact while importing capability. The cap table and the board seats are the strategy, not the paperwork.

Follow the value migration. The upside sits in direct-to-consumer monetization of large, under-served fanbases. Whoever controls the trusted brand and the distribution layer controls the return. This consortium is trying to own both ends.

Culture is the integration risk. Same as any platform acquisition. The question is never whether Silicon Valley can build the commercial machine — it’s whether a 239-year-old club lets it, and for how long. That’s the one line item no model prices, and the one worth watching most.

STA Field Notes tracks commercial signals at the intersection of sports, technology, and capital. Reply or reach out at @stemack.

What you’ll find in this list:

Commercial, Partnerships & Premium / Ticket Sales (129) — partnership and premium/ticket sales — corporate partnerships, suites, group and membership sales, business development, and account roles across the leagues and agencies.

Marketing, Content & Creative (143) — marketing, content and creative — brand, social, video and production, graphic and motion design, communications and PR, and the seasonal-assistant content pipelines.

Data, Analytics, Engineering & Product (77) — data, analytics, engineering and product — data scientists and engineers, CRM and systems, product managers and designers, business intelligence and IT.

Retail, Marketplace & Merchandising (11) — retail, marketplace and merchandising — product line and footwear/apparel design, buying and assortment, e-commerce, and wholesale at the brands.

Betting, Gaming & Prediction Markets (31) — betting, gaming and prediction markets — DraftKings, FanDuel, PrizePicks and Underdog, staffing engineering, trading/compliance, analytics and growth.

Performance, Player & Academy (22) — performance, player and academy — sports science, dietitians and therapists, academy coaches, player development and team operations.

Operations, Finance, Legal & People (168) — operations, finance, legal and people — facilities and security, event and stadium operations, finance and accounting, HR/talent, and legal/compliance.

A few signals worth noting: the betting operators are staffing like consumer-tech companies (prediction-markets, trading and compliance roles are multiplying), the front office keeps hiring engineers, data scientists and product managers who now sit inside team org charts, and women’s sports keeps building brand-new commercial and performance staffs — Boston Legacy and the NWSL sides are hiring from the studs up. The full board follows.

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It looked like a party. It was a product roadmap.

For anyone in the business of reading commercial signals, the tell wasn’t Drake holding a racket. It was the racket itself: an early, unreleased, Nike-made padel paddle, surfacing at a curated event where a marquee professional just happened to be on hand. That is not how celebrities take up a hobby. That is how a $50 billion apparel company incubates a category.

The Nocta mechanism

Nike has a specific, repeatable playbook here, and Nocta is the instrument. The streetwear sub-label it runs with Drake has become Nike’s low-risk laboratory for sports the mothership doesn’t currently service. The logic is clean: Nocta operates at a lower profile than Nike proper, it releases in limited drops rather than full lines, and it carries cultural heat by association with Drake and his circle. When Nike wants to test whether it belongs in a category — or signal to that category that it’s coming — it runs the idea through Nocta first. It did exactly this with golf and with cricket, both categories Nike had formally stepped back from, both of which got Nocta drops anyway.

Nocta Manor is that mechanism operating in daylight. And the category it’s incubating now is racket sports — specifically the fast-growing enclosed-court game that has already conquered Spain, Argentina, and the Gulf, and is now, finally, moving on the United States.

The infrastructure is already shifting inside Nike to receive it. “Nike Court,” a label that used to mean tennis and nothing else, now formally spans padel and pickleball. Earlier this year Nike signed its first pickleball athlete, world number one Anna Leigh Waters. Tapia’s presence at Nocta Manor reads as a preview of a first marquee padel signing. Read together — a repositioned category label, a flagship pickleball endorsement, a top-ranked padel pro at a Nike event, and a prototype paddle in circulation — this is not exploratory. It’s a launch sequence.

There’s a defensive logic underneath it, too. Nike’s tennis business has spent the better part of a decade absorbing criticism for underinvesting since the Federer–Nadal–Serena era. Rebuilding credibility on court is easier when you arrive with the whole racket-sports category — heritage tennis plus the two fastest-growing paddle games — than when you try to relitigate tennis alone.

Why padel, and why now

Strip away the celebrity and the numbers still make the case.

The 2026 Playtomic Global Padel Report — the most-cited data source in the sport — logged nearly 5,000 new clubs and almost 8,000 new courts added worldwide in 2025 alone, pushing the global total past 20,900 clubs and 58,300 courts. Padel’s equipment market has compounded at roughly 34% a year since 2019. Deloitte pegged the sport’s trajectory toward a $6 billion market by 2028. There are more than 30 million active players across 130-plus countries.

The U.S. is the interesting part, because the U.S. is still early — which is precisely why the smart money is moving now. American court counts jumped from a couple hundred in 2023 to well over 600 by early 2025, with credible forecasts running to five figures by the end of the decade. The consensus among people who build these facilities is that 2026 is the ramp and 2027 is the “real acceleration.” Nike isn’t arriving at a saturated market. It’s arriving one to two years ahead of the inflection, which is the only time being early is worth anything.

The pattern behind the paddle

Drake at Nocta Manor is not an isolated data point. It rhymes with a larger pattern of culturally fluent capital piling into racket sports before the mainstream catches up.

Drake himself is already on the cap table of Major League Pickleball’s Brooklyn Aces — the franchise owned by Durant and Rich Kleiman — alongside Michael B. Jordan and Translation’s Steve Stoute. Frances Tiafoe, a top-20 ATP player, bought into a New York padel franchise in a round that valued the team north of $10 million. Qatar Sports Investments consolidated the professional game by absorbing the World Padel Tour into its Premier Padel circuit. Franchise operators are running eight-figure U.S. expansion raises structured as private-equity offerings, courting investors on the pitch that a padel court is one of the more space-efficient, high-utilization sports-infrastructure assets you can own.

When the athletes, the entertainers, the sovereign funds, and the franchise operators all move into the same category inside the same eighteen-month window, that is not a trend. That is a consensus forming in real time — and the celebrity events are the most visible, least substantive layer of it.

The STA read

For operators, sponsors, and vendors, the Nocta Manor photograph is worth more as a timing signal than as a culture moment. A few takeaways we’re carrying into client conversations:

Category incubation is now a brand strategy, not an accident. Nike didn’t wait for padel to prove itself in the U.S. before positioning — it built a low-risk vehicle (Nocta) specifically to move early and cheaply into unproven categories. Brands with real ambition in emerging sports should be asking what their Nocta is: the smaller, cooler, lower-stakes property they can use to test a category before committing the flagship.

Endorsement supply is thin, which means it’s cheap — for now. There are a handful of bankable padel names globally, and the U.S. market has almost no established padel endorsers. The window to sign athletes, title events, or anchor a domestic property at pre-inflection pricing is open in 2026. It closes as the 2027 acceleration prices everyone in. Sponsors who wait for the audience to be obvious will pay for the privilege of arriving late.

The infrastructure layer is where the durable money is. Paddles and apparel get the headlines, but the compounding value sits in courts, clubs, booking platforms, and the tech stack that runs them. For sports-tech vendors, the relevant question isn’t “how do I sell to padel?” — it’s “which layer of a rapidly-building physical footprint do I want to own before it’s built out?”

Cultural proximity is doing real commercial work. The reason Nike ran this through Drake and not through a tennis-marketing memo is that the U.S. racket-sports opportunity is as much a lifestyle and hospitality play as an athletic one — social, aspirational, built around the club as a venue rather than the sport as a competition. That framing should sound familiar to anyone building curated, capital-adjacent activations around premium events. The audience for padel and the audience for a well-run hospitality convening are, increasingly, the same room.

The party in New Jersey was the surface. Underneath it, a global apparel brand, a music mogul with a real investment portfolio, and a wave of institutional capital all placed the same bet within the same window. The tell is the timing — and the timing says this category gets crowded fast.

STA Field Notes is published by Sports Tech Atlanta. We advise sports properties, technology providers, and commercial capital operating at the intersection of the three. If you’re building — or investing — in the racket-sports category, we should talk.

The home runs he never hit had nothing to do with talent or health. The 1994–95 strike ate about 36 games out of the middle of his career, and for a hitter of his caliber, 36 games is worth seven home runs and change. He wasn’t robbed of a season. He was robbed of a threshold — and a threshold, once missed, doesn’t come back.

That is the cost of a work stoppage that never makes it onto a bargaining table. With the current CBA expiring at 11:59 p.m. on December 1, 2026, a lockout treated around the game as a foregone conclusion, and early March as the point of no return for 2027 games, the question isn’t whether baseball loses a summer. It’s who gets frozen when it does.

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