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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio. We've got an incredible duo with us right now, Ted leonsa scoder, chairman, managing partner and CEO of Monumental Sports and Entertainment. Here's a little bit of what they have. Home to the Wizards, the Washington Capitals, the Washington Mystics, Capital one Arena, eight teams,
five venues, one media platform, and more. Once again, Monumental Sports and Entertainment ted with us along with Gary Bedman, longtime Commissioner of the NHL, former longtime General Council for the NBA. Both join us here on set at Power Players, New York. Welcome to both of you.
Great to be with you.
Well, we got a little bit of the panel earlier. We were able to take some of it and broadcast it to our audience across YouTube, radio and Bloomberg Originals. You're up there with Scarlett Food talking about the new fan experience. You've both been involved in the world of sports for a long time. A lot has changed streaming, sports, betting, Nil Carol, which I think is like the backdrop to
everything that's happening here, the role of tech alone. What is this moment that we're living in right now?
Well, I think AI is really the next big thing with sports.
Oh yes, totally.
How well, right now we're redoing our building and all we're talking about is physical AI.
How do we collect data?
How do we with three million people to come into our building? Where are they coming from? How old are they, who are they married to? How long have they had the tickets? What are they like when they eat? What do we what can we do to be anticipatory with our building? It's not just smart buildings anymore. It's build the intelligence and the data right into that experience.
You know, I just want to ask you, Ted, because you were at AOL in the early days. I mean this is before you were in sports, you were in technology, so you understand the space is. Are we in a moment now that is is like when AOL brought us the World Wide Web?
Well, I think the league's it seems like it's been a long time, but it's been a quick pivot to go from analog and bricks and mortar and linear distribution and local to be a global digital power plant if you will that we look at our teams. Obviously they have high fan avidity, but it's IP and how do we digitize everything that we're doing from the start and distributed over our own channels.
That's why we bought our RSN.
Everyone was running out of the burning house. We said, let's run in. It'll never be a better time to buy and reinvent the distribution model than there is right now.
Gary wants you to come in on the role of technology. I think all of us were watching sports. I love it, whether it's tennis, whether it's golf, whether it's baseball, the statistics that hockey. Sorry, sorry, I was getting there.
I was getting there.
Sorry, Sorry, Well that's what I wanted to get to, though, like you know, how fast the puck is going or something like how much fans love that engagement.
I'm going to respond to that, but I want to add on to what head says.
So you know I have four brothers and growing up being an ice skating pond that they dug out of the woods in the back and would play hockey.
I knew I liked you and your family, but you grew up with it. Sports tends to focus people at an instant, at a moment in time, the score of the game, what's the result. I don't think we're at a moment of time. I think we're on a journey, and we've been on a journey for decades. And the speed limits change on the road, road conditions change, there
are curves, there are hills. But at the end of the day, it starts with the authenticity of sports and how important sports are in people's lives, and how it brings people in communities together, and take has enabled us to connect better with our fans. So AI we're like any other consumer business. It's going to help us do business better, but also it's going to help us make
sure that our games stay true to themselves. It's I always tell particularly my tech and strategy guys, we're not going to change the game to make it more tech savvy or a tech you know favorable. What we're going to do is use technology to make the game more consumable, more connected, and so pucking player tracking at hl edge
is a function of that. We're gathering millions of data points a minute, but it's enabling us to take people inside the game, maybe even people who don't know the game and understand it and let them say, wow, that pup you know, traveled fourteen miles with averaged eighty eight miles an hour. This player can skate as fast as thirty five miles an hour, and he's already skated six
miles in this game. This gets people to understand and feel more connected, and it's going to let us give them the game on their terms, because with all the streaming platforms, you're going to be able to sit at home and decide how you want to watch the game, not the way we've done it from a linear standpoint since I was a little kid, and people my age are used to sitting on the couch and doing it. But we used to get in.
Front of my dad and be like, you know, get down, get down, because good rewinded.
But if you're a gen Z or a Jena and you want to focus on a particular player and you want Dana simultaneously and you want to place a bet, you're going to be able to do all that and buy a jersey all at the same time. In addition, what fucking player tracking has enabled us to do is use the metaverse. We use animated versions of our game in real time. We were the first sports league to do that, and it works really well and it engages young people and their parents.
You know, I'm thinking about this all this, and I'm thinking about the technology and thinking about the investment that's being made, and it reminds me of the way that we've seen sports turn into this premium experience now in the premiumization, this idea of it being a luxury good, And I'm wondering how you think about that, Ted, and how you know it's not like you go to the ball ball Well, I guess ball games are still affordable. But apart from that, I mean, some tickets just end
up being so expensive. How do you think about that for your customers.
Many of us have run big public tech companies, and.
When you come into sports, you say, oh, the model is like a software company. We have nothing but blue chip clients, naming rights, sweet sales, big sponsorships, media deals with the biggest companies in the world, Amazon and NBC, Comcast and ESPN, and they pay us over ten years or longer with escalator. So the model looks just like Salesforce, dot Com or Oracle. Those are very valuable companies. It's why they're valued and a multiple of revenues, not a
multiple of ebita. Okay, so that's what's happened.
To sports teams.
It's this where six times eight times, ten times twelve times revenues.
Right.
But for those of us who came in from public companies and tech companies that go, we don't have an R and D budget, think about that.
We didn't have a CTO.
We were one of the first teams that I mean, we made a major high.
We have software developers. There's like those software.
Developers in these teams. That's a big part of the pivot. Right, If you're going to be digitized or die, if you're going to try to get your products and services out, build brand and build audience on a global basis, it all starts with, you know, taking a a pixel and digitizing it. And we're now you know, I've owned the team twenty six years. But there's now a lot of the big markets and more innovative companies that have said, yeah, we are we're not We're not just a hockey team.
You've got to have the hockey team as the ethos, you know, for the competition for the fans. But as a business, these have become big businesses. We're going to be doing two years from now billion dollars in revenue.
You were valued at about four billion dollars back in twenty twenty three with the Victoris.
Meant we've been valued now close to seven.
It's big growth in three years.
Good business, it's good bus.
But we're doing seven and fifty million dollars in revenue.
But the landscape, and it relates to everything that's going on with the distribution of content. No matter what platform you're talking about, sports is the most compelling, most valuable content and that's what's driving a great values that you're seeing, right.
Because there's so much stuff out there, But you're right, people tune in can be something.
It's it's reality TV.
I mean it really is, right, But I think one thing that people miss to the world's in chaos and it's not going to get more calm. But there's something about you. You go to a game and you know it's the puck's going to drop at seven oh six. You know where the game is going to be televised, you know where your seats are. The players know if you make the wrong pass, it's you know it goes over the blue line. They know what penalties are, there's referees and while there's people will boom guardrail.
I'm saying that that there's there's structure, right. Yeah.
I was amazed that at the World Cup you have countries fighting each other, at war with each other, yet they get on the pitch and it's I know this line is out of bounds, that this is a boundary. I think we crave that we want a level playing field, and you want meritocracy and you want to see how people can compete.
And yet politics, geopolitics have played gotten their way into sports. And I think about the NHL being kind of the most international and Canadian of all US pro sports, and yet geopolitics coming from the White House, weather it was ever trading terror policies.
We saw that play out, certainly it did during the Four Nations in February. Canada was playing the US in two games, including the final game. But what's great about sports and it transcends geopolitics because sports brings out people's passion and it brings people together, even if their rivals, their interest in seeing the game in the outcome, and even within a particular country. You know, no matter how diverse a country is on whatever basis, you're figuring out
what the diversity is. People come together, It brings communities together. And when you have assets franchises like TED has in Washington, they make a difference in people's lives, their outreach in the community, their youth programs using sports to teach young people life lessons. That's as important as anything else that we can do in sports, and I think monumental of what Ted does in Washington is a great example of being outward facing in the community and making a difference.
So we helped the White House have the inaugural at our arena recalled the world's most important arena, and that same week there was a study out on who is the most popular and best athlete in Washington sports history and it's a Russian alex Ovechkin. Right, he broke Wayne Gretzky's record last year and he is beloved in Washington, d C. Yesterday we announced the naming rights deal with Coupon, No South Korean company e commerce company. We're we're global, right,
we are exporting our ip around the world. We have these icons, these great global brands. Advertisers want to reach those fans and so you know, it's just ironic.
Here we are in Washington, d C.
As I said, I could see the White House, and while they're churning on on things, sports is the great United.
And then that poll will also say that you were the most popular owner.
Let the record show ten did not answer the question.
To be bother, it's good to hear that. It's good to hear that that sports really kind of brings people together. We do see that over and over, gentlemen, Thank you so much.
Thanks for harding.
Ted Ley Ownes's founder, chairman Managing Partners ATUO of Monumental Sports and Entertainment. Gary Bettman, Commissioner of the NHL.
Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Business Week Daily coming up after this.
This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
College is under a lot of pressure right now. Just this afternoon, Northwestern University president and Michael Schill resigned after a three year tenure marked by controversy over protests on campus, conflict with the Trump administration over research funding, and a hazing scandal in its football program. College athletics not immune to all this pressure either, fair to say, Nil also known as name image and likeness has completely changed college athletics.
There have also been labor challenges that have come along with.
This makes it interesting on college campuses. View from one campus, we have my charity with us Haldeman Family Director of Athletics and Recreation over at Dartmouth College. Also with us A Bloomberg News Higher Education finance reporter Janet Lauren, both here at Power Players, New York, and they were both up on stage, weren't you. College athletics going through a lot. We were just talking about the ability for college players to move around and kind of, you know, find the
best deal. Tell us what it's like to be an athletic director in today's environment. And you're also a lot of colleges and administrations, I mean a lot of academic administrations are also catching the attention of the White House. So what's it like to do your job?
YEA, just a few things going on, Just a few things. First of all, thank you for having me honor to be here. You know, at Dartmouth and in the IVY League. We're really distinct as it relates to everything going on nationally in terms of the House settlement with revenue sharing, name, image and likeness we have real nil as it was originally intended. That means an athlete can can you know, have a sports camp using their name, or be an
entrepreneur and start their own business. But any kind of pay for play, that's that is not something that we that's you know, aligned with our values and our presidents have made it clear in the IVY League that that is not something that we're going to do.
So that's an IVY League rule or a art myth rule.
That's an IVY League role, okay, yep, and voted on by all the presidents in the IVY League and certainly supported by the athletic directors. So but having said all that, you know, we're still very competitive nationally. The Learfield Director's Cup, which measures postseason success in NCAA Championships, there's a power four. Those are the top four conferences when you measure that, we're the fifth. When there was a power five, we
were six. So competing at the national level, and you know, the sport sports across the across the board has been a really really shows that we can have the primacy of academics and also you know, pursue excellence and athletics and those things are not mutually exclusive.
Does it make our harder to recruit though athletes?
I think it actually makes it easier in today's world, and that our value prop is has always been different. In the IVY League, we do not give athletic scholarships. It's always been need based financial aid. That has not changed. So that was a differentiator between scholarships and that, and
now we can we're doubling down on our distinctions. And what we're finding is as powerful institutions are emphasizing certain sports, primarily football, basketball, maybe one beyond that, the Olympic sports are being de emphasized, reduction and scholarships, reduction, opportunities compete and we're sitting right there to benefit from that, and we already our coaches are telling me that we already are. So that's really exciting.
So take us back to what happened last year with the men's basketball team. There was a vote of thirteen to two. I believe it was to unionize and then they pulled back earlier this year. What was that like being in the athletic director's chair.
Yeah, there's no playbook for it. You know. When I took the job and start in July of twenty twenty two. If you would have told me that Dartmouth men's basketball was the first union in college athletics history, I would have called you crazy, but a lot. Dartmouth has a
long history of supporting unions, including student worker unions. We just fundamentally believe that student athletes are not employees for many reasons, one of which is one of which is the athletic endeavor itself we view as an extension of the educational core mission of Dartmouth, and so our presidency on Bilock, a phenomenal leader, was public and saying that we would appeal that all the way up to the
Supreme Court. They did withdraw their their unionization effort right around New Year's Eve, and I'll note that the team went on to have the best on court season and twenty five years after that.
Pretty impressive.
Well, so, what is the greatest challenge for you today when it comes to college sports?
Yeah?
For us, you know, we're always thinking about how do we best deliver on the promise that we make to the recruits who come to our institution. You know, Dartmous mission is to attract the whitest swath of really motivated you know, students and send them off into the world as responsible leaders, and we play a key role in that. So we have thirty five varsity sports, we have over nine hundred varsity athletes. They're roughly twenty two percent of
the undergraduate enrollment at Dartmouth. So I wake up every day thinking about how do we better support them to strive for their aspirations and help support their holistic development as students, as people, as athletes. And I know that sounds really lofty, but everything we do from driving revenue philanthropy. We landed the biggest gift in dart athletics history from the Lewinstein family two years ago. All that goes back into supporting their health, wellness and overall development.
So earlier in the conference today, we were talking with some athletic directors who are writing very big checks to their students. Could you talk a little bit about the difference in what's going on on your end where you have to approve or you have to attest to nils that are two thousand dollars short.
And I just want to clarify for everyone, Janet Jenet, what you're saying is these the school they're actually the ones that are funding these.
Athletes, right, they have to pony up.
Okay, if you're at a power for a conference twenty point five million dollars a year.
Two athletes, Okay, sorry, go ahead, We do not. But what I'll say is we have a variety of rules that ensure that the presidential direct the president's are a presidents have directed that there is no pay for play. So with that, yes, every deal two thousand dollars and above,
I review personally to evaluate that. And also we attest as athletic directors that we are not in any way directly or indirectly, you know, asking a donor alum to give money to somebody as a recruited inducement or if they want to go in the transfer portal, as a retention inducement. So so we're and it's really the spirit of it that that we as ads have all really committed to in our conversations because I believe our distinction is a strength in today's world women's sports.
Yeah, what's changed?
I mean, we feel like there's been such an explode, getting a lot more attention. Yeah, the media rites a viewership, certainly on a professional level, but for you guys, in terms of college sports.
It's exciting. It's so exciting. Mean though, well, I'll tell you I was at Notre Dame when when women's basketball won a national championship, and I saw how it mobilized that community in a way that I hadn't seen before in my then twenty years in college athletics. It's amazing. Here what I'm mostly concerned about, Yes, that is all true. And also as the power for the revenue sharing happens, there will be the emphasis on Olympic sports, which would
include both men's and women's sports. But so when you're focused on football, maybe men's and women's basketball to be de emphasis on the swimmings, the tennis is, the golfs, the you know and so on. So that's an advantage.
It isn't being committed that coming in for those Olympic sports.
And I think you know a lot of presidents in athletic orcus have been public about sharing that that's a reality of that they're they need to pay you know, some sec an sec Schoo announced, for example, eighty five percent of their twenty point five million was going to football. The other fifteen percent was split amongst basketballs and maybe
one other sports. So the opportunity for us in a broad based program in the IVY League, which we believe strongly in, is that we'll always have those opportunities for them. We're not cutting sports. We're we're very committed to the broad based program and that includes women's sports. As a as a father of two daughters fifteen and twelve, who were gymnasts and soccer players, it's really exciting.
I just can't believe it's so different at the IVY League versus I know, and we still compete at national level, don't forget that. Yeah, we're still lining up and winning. And it's also just completely different in just a few years. I mean, this was all unheard of. A lot of it was happening. Look, a lot of this was happening, was it.
I I went to a party at here we go, Yeah, like at a car dealership owner's house during a tournament, and saw a lot of players from a basketball team there.
This was all before nil and it was like they're like, oh, yeah, they just hang out, you know. It was like an official sort of like I don't know if they were getting a car, but they were very comfortable and they knew him very well and like he wasn't a part of the school. It was very interesting. Let's just say that.
Just last questions, So do you when you think about your career and I know you obviously sound like you like where you're at, but with that shape, you do you want to stay kind of being an athletic director within the ivy league community because it does seem a little bit more pure.
Well, well said, I appreciate the question. I love it here. My family loves it here. We have a fantastic presidency on Bylock. The trustees are very supportive of what we're doing.
I think also to be president of my alma ma oh.
Barnard, yes, oh, so you know how great she is. She's incredible and a huge sportsman. I believes in the power of athletics. And what I'd say is, I have a lot of friends who are power for athletic directors and I'm right where I would I would I'd love to be during this time.
That's so interesting game, I really.
Is okay, good stuff.
Thank you both of you.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Mike Party, he's huld him in family Director of Athletics and Recreation PG. No yeah, no, Why does he say PGA of America.
It's that he's a Darmit. I wish I could play. Also, Jennel, it's been a long day.
Thank you, good luck at you playing.
Appreciate it, Yeah, really appreciate it.
Green Yeah, exactly.
M