Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. The NBA finals are over, the Stanley Cup playoffs, you're winding down, and the NFL season doesn't start until September. Summer is for baseball. But that's pretty much it, says Bloomberg's Bailey Lipshaltz.
It's kind of in a dead period for most sports, so there is a lot of filler and for when you're looking at a target demographic of primarily call it teenage two, late early forties on the male perspective, guys need something to do when they're watching sports.
Paul Rabel is hoping to convince that target demographic to start watching men's lacrosse.
What we're excited about as operators of one of the fastest growing sports leagues in the world year over year is that a lot more smart capital and institutional capital private equity is coming into pro sports.
Exactly.
Rabels started the Premier Lacrosse League in twenty eighteen. It merged with Major League Lacrosse in twenty twenty, but since then it hasn't been easy to break through.
It is a huge enterprise, requires a lot of investment, a lot of support.
So far, the PLL has attracted some big backers, including the owners of the New England Patriots and the Brooklyn Nets, and it signed multimillion dollar deals with some big TV networks. Bailey says those investors buy into Rabel's vision of the potential payoff of making lacrosse more popular.
I think the vision is if this is a league that can replicate the success of a number of other leagues. When you look at the funding that we've seen in the MLS, even in professional pickleball, there's a lot of money to be made in sports, and so the vision if they can build it into a much larger sport, a much larger league that can be more kind of in line with an MBA, MLS, MLB. The returns are lofty.
But the league faces in uncertain future and for athletes it's challenging. I'm David Gera and today on the Big Take, what the push to bring professional lacrosse into the mainstream can tell us about this particular moment when there's more interest than ever in all kinds of sports, yet it's harder than ever to break through.
I write about equities by day, and apparently Moonlight on the lacrosse beat.
Bloomberg's Bailey Lipshaltz says he got interested in the lacrosse beat because of where he went to college.
It's really a niche sport. I grew up an hour east of Los Angeles, and I didn't know lacrosse was really a sport until I went to Syracuse.
University regularly has one of the highest ranked teams in the US. Well recently, Bailey says he noticed that efforts to turn lacrosse into a proper professional sports business had been gaining momentum. The Premier Lacrosse League debuted in twenty eighteen, and at first it was mostly for hobbyists who played on the weekends.
Back in the founding days of twenty nineteen inaugural season. When it merged in twenty twenty with Major League Lacrosse, the pace still wasn't high enough, so guys were doing both a kind of day job and playing lacrosse. Now, at least when you talk to pl that number has kind of flipped, so more guys are going full time.
It helps that the compensation has improved. According to Bailey, it started around eight thousand dollars a season, and now.
The low end is load to mid thirty thousand dollars up to the seventy to eighty thousand dollars range.
Still that's not exactly enough to make you want to quit your day job. But something else that's attracting players PLL is it's a little bit different than say, Minor League Baseball.
Premier Lcross league's a travel based league. So while there are teams that represent cities the Philadelphia Water Dogs, New York Atlas, those guys don't live there necessarily. It's a travel based league in the sense that the league basically drops in on a weekend, normally Saturday and Sundays. We'll have two games on one day, two games on the other day, and that's just kind of how it goes, and they pack up and move back on.
One of those players is Jake Carraway. Bailey spoke to him on the sidelines of one of this season's first games in Albany.
Yeah, it's definitely a very busy summer juggling both, you know, working all week. We're up early to train, work out, get after it, then in the office and you know, traveling.
Either Hereaway is a twenty six year old investment banking associate at Barclay's. He'll spend the next few months balancing life as a pro athlete with a full time job in finance.
The East Coast game are pretty easy. It's a quick amtrack or a flight up and down. But San Diego, especially this summer, we're playing on a Sunday evening game. I think I don't know the exact time, but that's gonna be a tough one.
As Bailey says about what Carraway and many of his teammates are doing.
It's really two full time jobs.
One thing that's made it a little easier to juggle Wall Street jobs and matches on the weekend is the way work has changed since the pandemic.
That enabled some of these guys to keep playing where maybe they might not have been able to.
Like Ryan Conrad, Bailey also spoke with him on the sidelines in Albany.
That is the beauty of the world we live in with technological advancements and COVID.
He is a twenty seven year old associate at the private equity firm KKR who plays on the same team as Jake Carraway, the Philadelphia water Dogs.
They've made it super easy where you get essentially do your entire job while you're on the route with Chester Vonder.
Conrad says another thing making it easy is that his bosses at KKR are pretty encouraging of his dreams to play pro lacrosse.
I have a really really supportive group at KKAR, and you know what I've been able to do is just generally been working mostly in the evenings and in the mornings and in between sessions when I can.
But even as Conrad and Caraway make the chaos of juggling full time jobs with full time schedules work, Bailey says that the league's president, Paul Rabel, is hoping that more investment will make it possible for more athletes just to play lacrosse.
When you get a few rookie draft classes of guys who are full time, then that can change kind of the tenor of the league, where if you're coming up knowing that you're going to play full time lacrosse and at least to start your career, you can put off finance that's going to foster a higher level of play and therefore foster more guys to.
Do it coming up after the break. Paul Rabel's plan to turn the PLL into a viable career option and what success could mean for other fledgling sports from pickleball to cornhole looking to find an audience. Paul Rabel is behind the latest push to make professional lacrosse more popular and more successful commercially. Rabel was a midfielder on two national championship teams at Johns Hopkins and went pro after graduation.
He and his brother started the Premier Lacrosse League, the PLL in twenty eighteen, when the NCAA said its popularity was taking off.
It's a sport that has been growing faster than any other major team sport in North America over the last fifteen years. It's getting sanctioned at the high school and college level faster than any other team sport.
The Rabel brothers have spent years raising money from the likes of Robert Kraft and Joe ci who owns the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty. NBA star Kevin Durantz v C Fund has invested, and the Rabels have also brokeer deals with major TV networks, first with NBC and more recently with ABC.
Being on ABC eight times every summer and then another eight or ESPN and ESPN two and all of our games live stream on ESPN Plus, but getting the shareability across their live and daily programming across their social media that has north of fifty million followers per account, that over time creates a level of understanding between sports fans and lacrosse players and the pol much like what ESPN helped the UFC doing.
Week.
It might be counterintuitive, but Rabel cites the UFC that's the Ultimate Fighting Championship as a model for how lacrosse could take off. Bloomberg's Bailey Lipshaltz explains that's not as out there as it might seem.
When you look at what UFC was when it first came on the scene, it was people were confused. People who enjoyed boxing didn't understand why they'd want to watch mixed martial arts. But then you look at the branding because from that perspective, what the UFC did was it benefits ESPN if people watch, and that kind of what created a vicious cycle, and then you get star power
and people want to know what they're doing. That drives them to the ESPN platform, but also then increases the interest in advertising dollars, interest in paying to watch some of those fights. So when you look at what they were able to do with UFC, it completely changed, whereas now I think most people know what Ultimate Fighting Championship is.
The idea is that exposure could create stars, but first the league will need to enable athletes to play full time so they can unlock that potential. The PLL offers healthcare and equity in the league to players, many of whom are trying to score endorsement deals, but most of them simply can't pay the bills without working a day job. Here's Paul Rabel again, it's ultra.
Challenging because they're having to sort of burn the candle on both ends, from studying film and their works done to getting their workouts in early morning, sacrificing sleep. And we know the fountain of youth is nutrition and rest.
One consequence of this, Rabel says, is they're likely to have shorter pro lacrosse careers as a result, they're stretched too thin. That's why what Rabel wants is for the money in pro lacrosse to be good enough that these athletes can play without having to moonlight.
And as attention and revenue continues to grow for the league, so will total game allotment. What we call tonnage, which means more games, greater wages, more sponsorship dollars, more opportunity for fans to integrate.
Lidberg's Bailey Lipshalt says that expanding the pool of potential players will be critical to its future success.
The interesting question is, as they think about expansion, if you go from the current eighteen format and hypothetically make it ten, twelve, fourteen, then you're kind of stretching that pool of guys who can play full time lacrosse.
Growing the number of teams means more games and potentially more advertising dollars as well as more exposure which can help create star lacrosse players and enthusiasm for the sport.
And one of the interesting things from the league's perspective and trying to get more guys to go full time, is that they want to lean into marketing. So they want these guys to be if they're interested, social media marketers, advertising, So they're partnering with different league sponsors who maybe aren't the ticketmaster who's named in the league, but Jude Wifes are other companies that can kind of lean into the target demographic that these guys cater to.
It's a lot of threads that will need to come together to make lacrosse into the multi billion dollar business Rabel is imagining. But if it does work, it could be potentially a roadmap for other sports, some more athletic than others. I'm interested in sort of what's making this possible culturally, So we're seeing in the US kind of the death of monocultures. You can seek out what you're interested in. You older have to watch the thing that's
on TV. And I wonder if you've thought about how that's fueling, yes, interest in professional lacrosse, but also just kind of a wider variety of sports and the possibility there could be more professional sports leagues.
When you look at what sports leagues like the Cornhole League have done. When you look at the viewership related to darts, it takes you back to the early early days at ESPN where they were showing completely random sports just because they had to fill time with sports. And if you're twenty four seven sports network, you need content. When you look at to your point, the fact that people are leaning more into some of these niche opportunities,
it draws greater advertising dollars. You can better target your viewers if you know who's going to watch corn hole on a Saturday afternoon. But I also think it does drive interest in the sport as a whole. If you didn't grow up knowing that lacrosse was a sport, and now it's on ESPN every weekend, it becomes more appetizing. If you didn't care to play cornwall and you see it on TV, maybe you're more interested in it.
What will be most important, Bailey says, is time. How long will athletes and investors and advertisers be willing to wait to see if professional lacrosse can grow a fan.
Base, Whether or not it succeeds or fails. It's tough to call or really think about because it still is growing. Are they going to overnight be able to build the next NFL? That took a long time. When you look at the success we've seen with the WNBA or the MLS to an extent, it took a long time and was very gradual growth.
And they're the exceptions, just as the founders of Pro rugby or Major League Ultimate or Roller Hockey International. This is the Big Time from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera. This episode was produced by Alex Sekura and Jessica Beck, who also fact checked it. It was edited by Stacy Vanix Smith and Tim Annette. It was mixed by Veronica Rodriguez. Our senior producers are Kim Gittelson and Naomi Shaven, and our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beamster Boror is
our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you get your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll be back next week.