Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're practicing our moves before the big audition tomorrow. Valkyries are hiring a mascot, and our patented combination of the Elaine into the Splits is a show stopper. It's Thursday, May twenty second, and on today's show, we'll be chatting with Eben Noby Williams, Sportco's deputy editor and co host of the Sportacast podcast.
We talk about the Connecticut Suns potential sale and relocation, the relationship between sports team valuations and revenue, and how the complicated WNBA ownership structure affects investment and expansion. Plus, Game two of the PWHL Finals is on deck, and our show Soccer Side plays its first home match. It's all coming up right after this welcome back slices. Here's
what you need to know today. Let's start with the PWHL Finals, where Emily Clark scored two minutes and forty seven seconds into overtime to lead the Ottawa Charge to a two to one win over the defending champion Minnesota Frost on Tuesday night in Game one. Minnesota has yet to win a season opener across four series in their two seasons of playoff action. Meantime, Ottawa is a perfect three to zero on home ice in this year's playoffs. They host again tonight Game two, a seven pm Eastern
puck drop at TD Place. More Hockey Team USA legend Hillary Knight says the twenty twenty six Milan Courtina Olympics will be her final games. Knight, who turns thirty six in July, is currently tied for the most Olympic medals of any American hockey player. A fifth medal in Milan would make her the sole record holder, a ten time world champ and the career leader in points, goals, and assists at the World Championships. Knight has been one of the most influential women in hockey for over a decade.
She talked a friend of the show, Nancy Armor at USA Today Sports about the decision to make Milan her last games, saying, quote, it's time. I have grown up in this program and it's just given me so much. I'm at peace. I just have this feeling that it's time, and I'm grateful that hopefully I can stay healthy and everything, I can go out when i'd like to be done that is such a privilege that only a handful of
competitors get end quote. Night isn't retiring just yet, though she does plan to play in the PWHL after Milan to Soccer. The US women's national team officially announced the twenty four player training camp roster for its upcoming friendlies against China and Jamaica. Defender Naomi Germa is back in the fold after missing every contest this calendar year due
to injuries. She returns after winning the Women's Super League title and FA Cup with Chelsea FC, the side that made her the first ever player in women's soccer with a million dollar transfer fee. Seattle Rain forward lynd Biandolo also makes an appearance after missing. The squad's April games. Also had coach Emma Hayeses granted a few players their first ever senior national team call ups, including Orlando Pride defender Carriabello and Kansas City current midfielder she of the
iconic twerk celebration Low Labanta. If thirty two year old Leabonta plays in either of the matches, she'll become the oldest player to debut for the US women's national team program ever. In its forty year history. I heard friends of the show sam Us and Becky Sowerbrun on the women's game advocating for a Grandma seally if Lebonta scores, so here for it, fake Caine limping walk the whole thing, Let's see it. We'll link to the full training camp
roster in our show notes. The US women's national team will face China on May thirty first at Alion's Field in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and then Jamaica June third at Energizer Park in Saint Louis. That second match, we'll also see a pregame retirement celebration, including bobbleheads for Soerbrun, Saint Louis Native and US Women's national team legend. More soccer slices. We want to let you know that our show side, Minnesota Aurora FC, plays its home opener tonight, facing off
against Rochester FC. Kickoff is at eight pm Eastern, and we are so excited to cheer them on as they try to dominate the USLW league. Thanks again to everybody who bought a slice of this community owned team, and we hope you're taking as much pride in them as we do. Also, some more details to come on my visit to Aurora FC, but it's almost certainly going to be the June twelfth game against the Chicago City Dutch Lions.
There also might be some cool Aurora good game merch to look forward to, so we'll keep you updated on that as well. Moving on to a different pitch, we're approaching the tenth weekend of women's Elite rugby action. The Denver Onyx are leading the league with a perfect six and zero record, followed closely by the Boston Banshee's at five and two and the New York Exiles at four and three. My Chicago Tempest are, how shall we say, suffering from a bit of a drought, oh and seven,
y'all zero wins. To quote Billy Shakespeare's The Tempest, Hell is empty and all the devils are here. We'll keep an eye on the standings as the league championship, the Legacy Cup is just a little over a month away, and we'll link to the full league schedule and to where you can purchase tickets in our show notes to hoops. The wa NBA's opening weekend was a smashing success, and
one game in particular had incredible viewership. The Indiana Fever's home opener against the Chicago Sky on Saturday averaged two point seven million viewers, making it the most watched WNBA regular season game since two thousand. Per Sports Media Watch, the game peaked at three point one million viewers, good for the second biggest average audience for any league event,
behind only last year's WNBA All Star Game. No official numbers on how many dumbass talking heads who don't say shit about the w until there's some sort of Fracice just had to chime in on Angel versus Caitlin all week, but it feels like three point one million. The Fever looked like world beaters in that game against the Sky, but they came down to Earth pretty quickly. On Tuesday night, the Atlanta Dream got the best of them in Indy,
winning a nail bier ninety one to ninety. Britney Grinder led Atlanta with twenty one points and eight rebounds before she fouled out. Ryan Howard put up twenty points and three assists, and Brianna Jones posted a dominant nineteen point thirteen rebound double double. Indiana had some bright spots two in the loss in the form of some more broken
records for Kaitlin Clark and Dewana Bonner. Clark notched her tenth career game with more than twenty points in tennisis, tying Courtney Vandersloot for the most such games in WNBA history. And get this, Clark did it in forty two games. Slute achieved the milestone in three hundred and ninety four.
Caitlyn also recorded her sixth career twenty five plus point tennisist game, passing Sabrina and Nascue for the most in WNBA history, and she became the first player in WNBA history to open a season with back to back twenty plus point ten plus assist games. Last, but not least, Clark is now the first player in WNBA history with multiple games of twenty five plus points, ten plus assists, five plus rebounds, and five plus three pointers made. Who
She is off to a hot start. Meanwhile, de Wana Bonner moved up a spot on the league's career rebounds list, leaprogging Tina Thompson to secure sole possession of eighth most boards all time. She's now got three thousand and seventy
one eighth and rebounds third in points. Bonner is leaving her mark more basketball news On Monday, Minnesota Linkstar and if He Sikalier appeared on ESPN's NBA Today alongside Boniever frontman Justin Vernon, who announced that he's collabing with the Links franchise on a first of its kind partnership focused
on gender equity and community impact. The team offered more details in a release, noting that the multi year collaboration starting this season, will quote focus on addressing gender inequities as a result of domestic and sexual violence, sex trafficking, health care disparities, and barriers within education and leadership end quote. Vernon, a longtime Links fan with family ties to both Minnesota and Wisconsin, has been a big advocate for gender equity.
He assisted in creating Boniver's two a Billion campaign, which raises support and awareness and creates interpersonal connections in an effort to end gender inequity, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. Now, Boniyver's two AB and the Links will collaborate on a variety of things, including shining a spotlight on local nonprofits
and activations throughout the season. The two AB campaign will also donate two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in total grant money to ten Minnesotan and Western Wisconsin nonprofits and shelters. This partnership packs even more of a punch than what we've said, so we'll link to the Lynx's full release explaining all the details in our show notes. Also a link to Fee and Vernon's five minute segment on NBA Today. In that links release, Vernon summed up why he's so
excited to get involved. He said, quote, basketball is exactly like music. It's a group and individual improvising to create moments of vision, excitement, and joy. Simply said, the Minnesota Lynks team is my favorite band in the world right now. As Boney Verra, we also saw an unprecedented opportunity to not only support this band of incredible women on the court, but by combining forces to more urgently support the communities of women in the Upper Midwest end quote. As if
I didn't already love him enough, What a mention. Finally, in hoops, Seattle Storm players Dominique Maloga and Gabby Williams have announced that they'll skip this summer's EuroBasket competition, which is slated to begin June eighteenth. Both players were part of the French national team that earned a silver medal at the Paris Olympics, but they'll stick around in the
States to help build with Seattle. Williams hasn't play. I had a full WNBA season since twenty twenty two, and staying in the US offers her a chance to do so. Malonga spoke about her own choice on Monday, saying, quote, it was a difficult decision because the French jersey is very important for me. I decided to stay here because I think my rookie season is really important and I wanted to leave it all with the team end quote.
This is great news for Seattle, who started the year a little shorthanded because of the league's hard salary cap and because of unfortunate knee injuries to Nica Mule, Jordan Horsten and Katie lu Samuelson, who suffered hers just weeks before the regular season tipped off. The French team will also be without Marin Johannes, who shared that she'll skip euro Basket as well to focus on her time with the New York Liberty. We got to take a quick
break slices when we come back. Evan Novie Williams explains a bunch of stuff to me like I'm five, stick around joining us now. He's sport of Ghost, deputy editor and co host of sport a Cast podcast. Prior to joining Sportico, he was at Bloomberg News for almost a decade, covering everything from media deals and team sales to e sports and the Olympics. He played sprint football for the Princeton Tigers, and when we wrote this bio was the first time Alex ever heard that there is a sport
called sprint football. It's Evan Noby Williams.
Hi, Evan, Hey, Sarah, how are you good.
I'm quite familiar with sprint football because was the sprint football team at Cornell, But for those who don't understand, give us a brief synopsis.
Sprint football is varsity football. Had a few institutions in the Northeast, Cornell being one of them with a weight limit, so everybody on the field when I played was weighing in at one hundred and seventy two pounds. It feels like the vestiges of a very privileged people who could not play full weight football but got to college and were likey, I want to keep doing this. How do we structure something so that my one hundred and sixty five pound body can still be competitive. And they built it.
And I will say I played on I played on a Princeton team that was went twenty years without winning a game and was losing games by very, very large sums. Cornell Army and Navy are in the Sprint League, and you can imagine they've got one hundred guys that are one hundred and seventy two pounds exactly and are quite athletic, and we were losing games like seventy to nothing or like eight to five and things like that. So it
was amazing. The guys were great. It was very fun for me, and it was a good learning life lesson that sometimes you know you're gonna lose before you take the field.
You know. We were pretty nice about it. I don't remember there being and maybe there was between the football guys and the sprint football guys. Maybe there was like beef about, like you're not real football, but we never we never like heard that. We definitely knew who was on the football team and who was on sprint football, but we accepted everyone. We loved everyone. I also love how men always come up with the best names like euphemisms for their sizes, Like you know, if you're in
a heavy set man, your suit is called executive. Did you know that that that's the name of the size, Like, oh, you must be very important because you're larger. And then like sprint football, like you're not sprinting the whole time, Like, but you didn't want to call it like small ball or like tiny man football, so they had to go with something that sounded impressive.
The I do. I do triathlon sometimes, and there's a triathlon category for larger people. And I think it is like Clyde Gale and Athena. I think to your point of money, like choose. I love that choose terms that we call the main Princeton team the heavies. The heav differentiate them from the sprint folks.
Well, you were not here to talk football, though it seems we could. We're going to talk a whole bunch of stuff, and I want to start with the news you recently broke about the Connecticut Sun. What is the latest, if anything after the report you released about the team being engaged in talks about potentially selling Yeah.
I think this is a fascinating one because it comes in the middle of the WNBA's expansion talks also, and there's very few people that I have talked to that think that that team is going to stay in Connecticut
if it is sold. It's certainly possible, but you can see a world where someone who pays hundreds of millions of dollars to buy this asset decides that, hey, maybe Uncasville, Connecticut is not the market that I want this team to play in, and maybe playing in a venue owned by the former owner is not the situation that I really want. So if this team is indeed sold, then the person who buys it is looking to potentially move it. What does that mean for the already ongoing expansion talks?
And there were dozens of I'm sure you know this Thereah, there was more than a dozen different groups and different cities that really wanted and put together bids and offers for WNBA expansion. My understanding is that a lot of those groups that learned they were not getting expansion are now in talks with the Sun as well. So I think it all kind of comes together at a critical time for the WNBA where they're deciding how many new
teams they want to add. How many is too many because there's only so much talent, right, and you can expand to quickly. It's certainly a possibility. And then they've done it before exactly. So in the middle of all that, also this team that's on the market that could move to any one of these other cities as well, So a lot going on behind the scenes from a team sales and expansion standpoint.
For the W couple things there. I assume that the league still has to approve a sale. So these expansion groups that are looking to buy both have to convince the Connecticut Sun ownership group that they have the best offer and have the Mohegan suntribe want to take their offer. But then the W also has to approve. Will they have to approve where the buyers take the team.
I'm sure that's all part of the conversation. The other interesting aspect here is price, and from what I understand, the conversation around expansion got up to, at least in Cleveland's case with Dan Gilbert, two hundred and fifty million dollars cash for expansion. It seems inconceivable to me that the Sun would sell for two hundred and fifty million dollars.
So in some ways you now also have an expansion opportunity on the market that costs less than the actual ex expansion that the league is selling, which again creates a kind of interesting dynamic there.
But we'll probably benefit the Sun and it will go for more than it's worth because it will be the only way for someone who wasn't awarded a team to get the team that they want in the place that they.
Want totally, and just to go one step further. Perhaps even let's say that w decided on three expansion teams, maybe the league tries to push and I should say Allen and Company, the bank is doing both these transactions, Maybe they push one of the ones they wanted for expansion just towards the Sun. Right. There's a whole bunch
I think possible iterations. But this process has been going on for a very long time in the W As you know, there are new teams that have been announced, new teams that have joined, new teams that are going to join. I think a lot of people in the league are looking forward to this being in the rearview mirror, having set the expansion conversation and then trying to figure out the fun stuff about how these teams join. What
the player situation looks like. There's a labor deal looming in the background as well, which is obviously a big piece of the business puzzle for the double. So there's a lot going on and a mid rapid change. This league is going to look very different in a few years.
How does the fact that there's expected to be a new CBA and eighty percent of the league's contracts and in twenty twenty five affect the conversations around expansion or even buying, because what exactly are you buying? What players, who plays for whom right? All of those things are kind of going to be tossed in the air at the same time.
I think this is such a good question, and it's something that I am also kind of confused about. The traditional way that most leagues have looked at expansion is you do your media deals, you get your labor piece, and then you hit the market with expansion. When you know that there's a certain amount of you know the rules of the game for player contracts and the relationship with the union, you know what the basically contracted revenue is coming in from media, that's the time to strike.
And if you listen to Adam Silver, over the past few years, every time he was asked about NBA expansion, he was like, we're going to get our media deals done, We're going to get our labor piece locked in, and then sometime around literally right now, we're going to start talking about expansion. Formally, you would think that that is when your teams are most valuable, when there's that kind
of comfort in the marketplace about long term revenue. But the W has done something differently right that W has had the expansion talks. The media deals are done, but the W had expansion talks before before the labor deal at least was signed and executed. And this is a potentially thornier labor deal than most other men's leagues at
least have seen in the past few years. I can't tell if that says something about the way both the NBA and the WNBA think this labor deal is going to pan out, that they think that maybe selling a
team teams now and expansion now is better. But I do think it's definitely interesting that the kind of traditional way you think about maximizing your value as to do labor first, and instead in the W we see teams hitting the market and expansion conversations happening before that labor deal gets signed.
A couple more quick things about this Sun team. We did see them play a sellout game in Boston at the Garden last summer. It was a huge success. It had a lot of Sun fans nervous about the potential of them taking the team elsewhere, and of course den Risotti said no, no, we're very committed, and the Mohiget suntribe is very committed. And then here we are today
talking about how they're taking calls about potentially leaving. Does it seem like Boston would have any priority or that there'd be any feeling about the existing fan base and not taking the team so far away that current Connecticut Sun fans couldn't root for whatever team it becomes in the same general area.
I think it's certainly it's a great question, and I'm sure it's something that will come up. My understanding is that of the let's just call them twelve expansion groups that were really interested in this process, Boston was not a name I heard very often, and my understanding of the three kind of leading horse finalists right now, Boston was certainly not one of them. So not to say never, and who knows, the W could announce it's three expansion teams and then the Sun are not part of that.
The Sun gets sold to a group in Boston. There's an NBA transaction obviously that is in the works potentially and in Boston at the same time, which either makes that more complicated or makes that potentially easier, depending on who the group is. But it would not be the first place that I would have thought, even given the proximity and obviously the fact that, as you said, they've
played games there and have had good, good crowds. The interesting thing about the W to me is that the league is so small that there's so many good markets that don't have teams. And when you think about like baseball expansion, they're talking about like Portland, Oregon and maybe Nashville, and not to say those are bad markets, but there's just so many massive markets that don't have WNBA teams
right now, right Philadelphia. So yeah, in some ways the competition is way fiercer because the options for the W in terms of huge markets, big sports cities that they can go to. It's just way wider than we see in these thirty or thirty two team men's leagues.
You mentioned that there are three front runners.
Give them to us, Yeah, I mean the three that I think are in the best place right now. Cleveland's been written about. Philadelphia seems very likely as well, particularly given that Adam Silver basically broke he to an agreement between the hockey and basketball teams there for their for their stadiums, and when they announced that agreement, they made it very clear that W was their priority. Wanda Sykes and her wife were on the stage when they announced it.
She has been a very very vocal proponent of bringing w to Philadelphia, and then Detroit, I think is an interesting one as well, backed by both Tom Gores, who owns the Pistons, and then a whole host of local business women, businessmen, celebrities, athletes in the Detroit area. Detroit had a WNBA team at one point. Obviously, Adam Silver has set on the record before that he could totally see that team getting revived at some point. So if I was a betting person, those would be those would
be the three that I would I would expect. But what everyone keeps telling me is that nothing is final, final, final, and everyone's kind of still waiting for the final decision. So I guess take that with a little bit of a grain of salt.
You mentioned that Adam Silver is very clear in the way he's doing business on the NBA side, what needs to be in order before expansion, etc. That the W does things a little differently. Now this might be in part because the W has a very unique ownership structure. And as we get into this next topic, I want to get into it and do like an almost comically accessible way. Some real explain it to me like I'm
five years old. Shit, because not just for me, I think I am someone who definitely loves to skip the math portion of assignments and isn't particularly interested in the business side, which is why it's great that I got into ownership and didn't know much about the place I was investing in, which explains why a lot of things went the way they did. But also just for listeners who are maybe learning this stuff for the first time.
So when we talk about the WNBA and its ownership, we've got the WNBA, the NBA, and an independent investor group that are all three a part of this larger ownership. So can you tell us, and you just recently wrote a story about this, can you explain the three ownership groups and how expansion and decision making affects them differently.
Yeah, you nailed it. Essentially. When the WNBA launched, it was essentially fifty percent owned by the NBA, which put up a lot of the money in the working capital to get the league off the ground, and then the other fifty percent of that equity pool was divvied up among the owners. Some of them are NBA owners, some of them are independent owners. And then three years ago, I think twenty twenty two, they did a capital raise from a group of and it's a who's who of
important people in sports. A lot of them are also NBA owners, some of them are investors in sports. Nike is one of them, right, So there's companies in there as well. They raised a bunch of money. They sold sixteen percent of the equity in the league, diluting both the NBA portion and the owner's portion equally. So right now, from my understanding, the NBA owns forty two percent of
the league. This investment group owned sixteen percent of the league, and then the WNBA owners as a collective, own the other forty two percent of the league. And interestingly, and this surprised me when I heard it. When the W expands, they are only diluting that forty two percent piece that are owned by the owners. The NBA will continue to own forty two percent, these investors will continue to own
sixteen percent, which is obviously different when the NFL. If the NFL were ever to expand, owners would go from having a thirty second of the slice to a thirty third of the slice. Right, that's how most of the
leagues work. But because the equity structure in the W is so different, and because of the way they raise money, which was essentially to protect these people that gave the money and and to protect them from dilution, yeah, you end up with a world where the W going from fourteen to sixteen or if it's ever a twenty, you're not an owner owning one to twentieth of the league. You're an owner owning way, way, way way less than that.
So when money comes into the league, for it's not split thirty two ways like it is in other leagues. The revenue sharing obviously is different because you have the NBA sitting there, you have these other owners sitting there, So it's definitely a more complex structure. I would imagine some people of the WNBA would maybe have done things
a little bit differently in retrospect. But this was a league, as you know, that spent twenty years kind of trying to get a foothold and trying to kind of break into both the thing that fans wanted to talk about and fans wanted to pay to see. And the glow up has happened very quickly, right, and some people in the league would say, yeah, we knew this was happening all along. I think some people were surprised by how fast it took.
Well, it started out really strong, and then there was some intention from some folks to vary it in ways that really affected the numbers that it started out with. I mean, it was huge when it started.
The first two years. The numbers are bonkers. You're right, the attendance and viewership numbers are. We kind of always have to remind ourselves here that when you see a huge number from an attendance or a TV ratings, which we just saw for the the opening game of the Fever versus the Sky, Yeah, it's probably not a record because there's probably a record from two thousand or nineteen ninety seven or what right or a I did exactly? Yeah,
that that that that broke it. So, yeah, the first couple of years, and I would say that despite the fact that numbers may have been higher back then, the league isn't a way healthier right business place right now? Yeah, it's not a new novelty, it's a It is a real thing that people really want to see and want to watch, and that companies are finally coming around to.
Yeah, you mentioned that investment group. I was not a part of that. I got invited and now I'm thinking, what a bit a good time to get involved, but a good investment I was. I was otherwise engaged with the with the red Stars now color neutral Stars, and you know you mentioned that group though coming in. One of the things that's interesting about the Connecticut Sun ownership is that there are teams that it feels like are not capable of continuing on the pace that the league
is growing at. And that's one of them, right. The size of the venue, the investment required, the practice facility that we meet make fun of where kids are having birthday parties while they're trying to practice for a playoff game, Like, there's an inevitable growth that some people won't be able to keep up with So that investment group was partly to help shoulder the load and to carry things and growth things while the original owners had invested years earlier
and were continuing to put a ton of money in. Do you see that happening more across the league where there will be old owners that either have to do a capital race to bring in new folks to help, or will choose to sell at this moment while the league is blowing up.
Yes, I think it's a great question and a great point. And this is the and the NWSL is going through this in the same way, and it's just way more further along because they have essentially turned over their entire league from an ownership structure in the past five years.
But there's no question, as valuations sore, it's great for all the older owners, but a lot of the older owners bought into a league that was not this, didn't have a forty million dollar practice facility requirement right, and didn't whatever the new CB says, wasn't expecting suddenly salaries to be at this point, And there's often a lot of ten You see it in men's leagues too. MLS
has dealt with us for the last twenty years. There's often a lot of tension between older owners who got in at a very small price and have just have gravy on their valuations glow up and no matter what, they're making money and they don't feel they need to
spend a ton. And you have young owners who came in recently paid the recent sticker price and they're like, look, if I bought this team for an NWOSLF, I bought this team for eighty million dollars or one hundred and ten million dollars in San Diego, I want to make that money back, right I. I Am not going from one million to a hundred million. I'm going from one hundred million to whatever it looks like next. So there's definitely tension in ownership groups. And yeah, I think both
these leagues are are looking to turn over. The owners that look at a forty million dollar practice facility and don't say, heck, yeah, I want to do that right now, say I'm not sure if that's in the budget or that's yeah, I'm not sure if we want to do that. So the WNWSL, very of the situation players have been in the past, they're very aware that the fans care about it, because that's not true in every league WNBA
and really care about the way players are treated. And it's going to impact the w labor talks for sure,
just like it impacted the NWSL ones last year. But all of that comes together to say, yeah, absolutely WNBA owners, some of them would like nothing more than to have a whole bunch of deep pocketed owners who bought it at high prices and really want to make that league soar in all the ways, as opposed to having this mix of people who came in at high prices, or people who bought these teams for thirty years ago for five hundred thousand dollars and they've lost a lot of
money in the past twenty years and are just kind of trying to get their money back out of that and capture the appreciation as it happens. So there's a really interesting dynamic there, which again exists in MLS less so I think in other leagues, just because valuations have been so high for a while. But certainly something that's happening at the w level and certainly something that happened at the NWSL level for the past five years.
You mentioned valuations. Let's talk about it pro sports team valuations. Let's start with the basics of like what goes into when you see that team is worth X million dollars? What are they using to calculate that?
Yeah, it's it's part of it is science, right, and is like looking at a P and L sheet and seeing how many season ticket holders do they have, how long are those contracts, what does their local media deal look like, what does the national media deal look like for the league? And what shared does the team get.
Some of it is that, and then some of it is kind of this more ephemeral idea of how many people want to own these teams and when one hits the market, how rare is it and how much kind of how much ego is involved in it, and and how many teams are their period because they're scarcity value
involved in all these leagues. So at Sportco we do these valuations and we like to say it's like part art, part science, and the science part in some ways is the easier part because you do have a sense of what these teams are making and what the economics look like. Kind of the harder part is is that is that
other stuff? It's that it's the the w and NWS are hot right now right, and when one one team goes for sales, it's okay, great there, I may not have an opportunity to get into this league for another three years, or when I do have an opportunity again, the price may be five x now because they've ten x in the past, uh in the in the past two years. That stuff is is a little bit harder. But the biggest thing that helps us in our valuations is that every time a team sells and we know
the price, we have a new data point. So every time there's a new sale, you now have like an anchor price with which to kind of hinge every team above and below it on in some kind of way. So yeah, all of that, I guess to say that leagues like the NWSL actually quite easy to value because every team sells. So again, every team is sold in the past, in the past five years, so so every time that happens, it's like, okay, great, we can now it. Just all these numbers.
Accordingly, so evaluation. You mentioned most of these, but revenue streams, so that's media rights, licensing, merchandise, tickets, corporate sponsorships, market size comes into play. How much growth could they have based on where they are? Brand value, how do people know their logo, their stuff, whatever, assets, stadium facilities, intellectual property. That comes into play to what do they own? What do they already have built? So we kind of get that.
That makes sense to me. Where I get lost sometimes and you kind of articulated a little bit you started is the relationship between valuation and revenue and how we can have leagues and teams losing money valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think the scarcity,
the vibes, all of that is part of it. But can you walk us through that because it is sort of fascinating to me, And the lack of transparency, especially in the WNBA in terms of financials, makes it very hard to argue with people who are like, look at how much money they lose every year, and you want to be like, look at how valuable they are, and
you're like, how do those go together? And how do you have a thoughtful and smart conversation about why you could lose money and still be very valuable.
You're totally right, and American business, business worldwide is littered with companies like this, right, Uber lost money forever, right, Draft Cacks, Netflix. Right, there's a very and a lot of people who give you that argument that, oh, we lose money are doing that knowing that they're kind of it's smoking mirrors to a degree, right, because yeah, if your team pick an NWSLF team goes from two million dollars to one hundred million dollars of net worth in
in in five years, right of valuation. Yeah, that's ten years of ten million dollar losses operating losses every year, right, just captured in that appreciation. So a lot of people who make that argument, I think are know what they're doing, right, and are trying to kind of rhetorically shift the conversation. I think the other side of that is that the NBA has lost a lot of money on the w in the past thirty twenty five thirty years, Right, It's
hundreds of millions of dollars. But yeah, I think the easy answer is, like some of this is just sports economics. Manchester United loses money. It's one of the most valuable sports teams in the world. It's worth four or five, six billion, whatever you want to call it. It's worth billions of dollars. Yeah, that team loses money. Angel City, the most valuable NWSEL team, loses a lot of money a year. This is the thing that maybe scares me about Nwoslifi was an investor, is like, this team is
like the paragon business wise. Everybody points to them. They're super valuable, even they're not making money, right, They're making so much in revenue, but they're also spending so much.
But you just said that about Manchester United. Are you worried about them?
Honestly? Yeah, I think the economics of European soccer for an investor terrifying. There's no cap on pay right right?
So do you think there could be a bubble burst? Because it feels to me and this is something I said ten years ago. I think at ESPN they did a survey of like would what's a good idea you think someone should do it? Deep dive on? And I was like, will the bubble ever burst? Like how is it possible that it's the only market that seems to grow exponentially every single year?
Yeah, I think there's I've been saying a resets coming for a while. I wrote a column last year called Divest from Sports that a lot of people criticize me for yeah, the changes in media are the big thing that I would point to, right, that's so much of and in a way kind of the w and NWSL are not. They're valued on something that's more than just the media, whereas, like you look at the NFL, like
the media deals are are the central thing. But the way that local media is changing, and a lot of teams in baseball and in the NBA and the NHL are cashing a much smaller local media check than they were, and who knows what that looks like. And then the layer on top of that the fact that every league now is talking increasingly with Amazon and Netflix and Apple, and in ten years when they are the bidders and the local traditional broadcast cable networks are doing less of
the bidding. That would really scare me if I'm a league, because Amazon doesn't need the NFL and Netflix doesn't need the NFL, Fox needs the NFL, CBS needs the NFL. The companies that used to bid for sports rights the big deals were companies that they're essentially livelihood depended on
them getting these deals. We wrote something a number of years ago, right after the previous NFL deals were signed, someone at Fox told us my priority the day after these deals are signed, are extending my NFL deal in eight years, right, Like, that's still my priority. There's no rest. Yeah, but when you're talking to Apple and Amazon, these companies don't need you, right, and that gives them a leverage at the negotiating table that kind of flips the dynamic
a bit. So Yeah, I am I bullish on sports team valuations long term. I honestly I'm not again because I think that there's a root awakening coming for one of the biggest revenue streams.
It's complicated because everything you just said is accurate, and also when we have a divided attention where almost nothing has brand recognition anymore because there's eight thousand pieces of content. The few things we do rally around watch live care about, sit through the commercials for our sportsndred percent and so it has this elevated presence in a much more bifurcated landscape. But it also is, you know, still affected by all the changes that you just mentioned.
And there's scarcity, just real quick, They're scarcity. So there may be thirty four NFL teams in twenty years, but there's probably going to be thirty two maximum there's going to be thirty six, right, Like, we're not going to create a ton more of these things and for the men's side, and that really that drives it, right that that is one of the things the NFL has going for it is that there's you can't just create a football team and eventually hope to be the Dallas Cowboys.
We know what they are and they only sell once every five years. And that's the thing.
Yeah, Okay, so couple follow ups for you. And this might be a dumb question, but I did tell you I prefer to skip the math portion of the assignment as often as possible. So, if the teams are losing millions of dollars every year, and they have been for some time, how are they operating? How do you pay your bills? How do you pay your employees? How do you So they're just it's like the US government, We're just incurring debt until we like, do we have a clock somewhere?
For women's sports, most teams are not just like occruing this in debt. Most teams are just paying the losses, right. I think I think if you were to ask anyone who's buying into an NWSL team now, yeah, they're thinking about, yeah, I know, I'm going to lose X million dollars a year hopefully for the next five years and not the next thirty five years. But they understand that there are losses associated.
So it's essentially another investment, but not an investment because it's gone immediately to pay off.
Yes, and as we said, if things continue to grow valuation wise for these women's leagues, these owners are going to get their money back. Right. The five million or ten million dollar annual loss is going to kind of wash out in the the LP stake that you can sell or when you sell the team in the future.
And this is why it's so important and perhaps why the NWSL and it was criticized at the time and part because it pushed out a lot of women that
were interested in ownership. But they changed their policy and required that the majority owner be able to shoulder all of the financial load buying a new team, and that they had to be a billionaire, which is like, we're down to like Oprah, whichever jen or is currently selling a lip kit from then life on, that's really it, right, And so that sucked when there were groups of women who wanted to come into ownership and operate the way that women's sports have promised and want to instead of
it always being dependent on one super rich dude and the culture and toxicity that sometimes follows. But you also understand why they do that because essentially, not only do you have to have enough to buy it, but you have to have enough to keep pouring in when you're not making anything back year after year for the foreseeable future.
We had an interesting conversation with Jess Berman, the NWSL commissioner after Sixth Street bought the essentially was the control owner of the the Bay Area expansion team, and asking some of these questions about why are you comfortable with a kind of nameless, faceless institutional fund as the person and her What she said is that they basically put in guardrails to make six Street more like a person, and they wanted Alan Waxman, who runs Sixth Street, they
wanted him sitting on the board, and they wanted him personally tied to the money decisions so that instead of if something were to if COVID were to happen again and suddenly like the league shuts down for a year and now every owner has to there's capital calls and every owner has to put in twenty million of their own money just to float the league to the next year. That that's a one person's decision. That's Allen's decision. That's not the cow fund that at Sixth Street kind of
deciding as a board to make those decisions. So in some ways, yeah, they are treating some of these institutional funds like individuals for a lot of the reasons that that that that you're talking about.
It's like the corporate personhood argument totally. And that is super PA.
And you mentioned earlier the kind of the rhetoric around losing money. It's one of the main things that a lot of these groups use in their labor talks, right and it's central in the NBA labor talks right now.
But right so, I want that was one of my other follow ups is when Adam Silver talks about losing money publicly in a way that most other leagues, like the MLS otherwise won't offer up. Is he doing that to be intentional about lowering their costs and getting leverage, but also doesn't it hurt the product he's ultimately trying to sell.
I think it's maybe a little bit of both. The w is slightly. As I said, it's kind of a different situation that the NBA has like really lost money, right, They've really lost money, and their owners, the ones who owned teams, have really made money from at least from evaluation standpoint, in the last few years, right. And I think the W is in this place where things are really strong right now. I think a lot of fans
think it stronger than it is financially. And the opposite is also true that like the rhetoric around the way some NBA owners talk about what they've lost, et cetera, is maybe underselling just how strong things are right now.
And this is what all labor negotiations are. It's like trying to meet in the middle, right and trying to figure out And someone told me once that that basically all of these labor talks you basically know where they're gonna end the minute you start, and sometimes they take years, and sometimes you lose preseason games or you lose parts of seasons, and it like kind of ends up roughly
in the middle. So I yeah, my feeling on the W labor is that like they're gonna get players are gonna get a great deal, everyone's gonna get paid a lot, a lot more, which they very much deserve. It's going to be less than what players I think probably think they want or what they deserve right now. It's going to be more than what the league right now wants
to give them, I think. But they're gonna meet in the middle, and I think they're gonna do so because this is just such a moment, right and it would be such a catastrophic shame and also business mailpractice, I think, to lose games at this moment when nobody is there's never been more talk and more conversation about the league. I will say that within that context, WNBA players have more leverage and more power than any modern men's union.
Why are the valuations in the NWSL so much higher than the WNBA Angel cities at two hundred and fifty million, the aces I think are the current highest at one hundred and forty million. What contributes to that?
I think there's a few things. I think we've talked about some of them. One, the equity structure of the WNBA is different than it is in NWSL, so I think that's one. I think, in some kind of long term tail, if both these leagues become insanely popular. Let's say the fan base doubles in the next five years. The WNBA teams are going to be playing in fifteen thousand seed venues, right. NWSL teams can play in way bigger venues, Right, So there's upside economics. I think they're
to a degree. I think the NWSL's getting through its its labor talks and also a totally different structure than we've seen in any other major American sport at all, but of hewing its way more towards the way that that labor exists in European soccer, both men's and women's. I think that's a big opportunity.
Getting rid of the draft, putting themselves on.
Yeah, I think all that stuff I think gives gives a lot of upside. I wouldn't be shocked to see the w NBA numbers continue to tick up. And who knows it is? It is funny to me. I've talked to it Kurt, who does our valuations about this that for a while they were like basically the same numbers.
You could like interlace the NWSL and the w NBA like this, And I was like, that doesn't like all they have in common is that they're just women's leagues, like, doesn't doesn't make sense that they're basically all worth the same. And you're right that the NWSL has has ticked upwards. Yeah, again, I also think that if in a world where like the NWSL, the W NBA ownership turns over and it can't happen in the full way because there's NBA owners involved here.
But right, that's part of it too, is it gets bigger by virtue of just the resale.
Of exactly and and the and the NWSL ownership meetings right now have very impressive, powerful people like Willow and Michelle Kang and Alan Waxman, and people who have made a lot of money both in other sports and also in other parts of business, and that's really valuable. Yeah. So yeah, I think there's a there's a few things that at play there. But again I wouldn't I wouldn't be shocked to see w numbers continue to tick up. The power of Caitlin Clark and and Angel Rees and
others as well. There's nothing like that in in the NWSL, right the name.
Recognition the individual players yep.
So and more people watch on TV the W than watch NWSL at least right now. So there's definitely some business levers that are interesting. But if you're looking to buy a w NBA team, again, the fact that that that you're only buying into a forty two percent pool of the league and not one hundred percent pool of the league which you are in NWSL, Yeah, I think that also serves as kind of a not a cap, but it's definitely pressuring down valuations to a degree.
I learned a billion trillion, Evan. Thank you for saying it in a way that even I could understand, and hopefully our listeners to thank you so much for the time.
We'll do the Lightweight Football Pod next time, right, Okay.
Yes, yes, we got to take another break. When we come back, I bid farewell to the show that gave me my favorite job ever. Welcome back, slices. We always love to hear from you, so hit us up on email good game at wondermedianetwork dot com or leave us a voicemail at eight seven two two four fifty seventy and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. It's real easy.
Watch the final episode of Around the Horn, airing tomorrow, rating zero out of zero stars to whoever canceled this legendary show review The Show that Changed My life will air one final time tomorrow after twenty three years on ESPN. Some of you may be around the horn, diehards watching since the early days of Woody Page, and others may be newer fans just catching the recent days of still
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watch tomorrow five pm Eastern on ESPN. There are some pretty awesome surprises planned. At least one of them is someone you're gonna really really like. Now it's your turn, rate and review. Thanks for listening, See you tomorrow. Good game, Eban, good game around the Horn, you whoever decided to cancel Around on the Horn. Good game with Sarah. Spain is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You could find us on the iHeartRadio app,
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