Polymarket's sucker pipeline; Sport is a business run by laywers, for lawyers; When mum owns the IP; Truth for sale; WSL and the company you keep; Mamdani is a Gooner

Overthinking the sports business, for money

Run by lawyers, for lawyers

I’ve just finished Dan Wang’s Breakneck. Strong recommend (no affiliation).

Why can’t we build things anymore?

Wang’s book tackles this lament, which runs through the political conversation from pot holes to HS2.

The lawyer vs engineer framing (Warning, contains nuance).

Blaming lawyers for blocking progress is a trick beloved of populists the world over. They do it because it works. Lawyers are unpopular, until you need one on your side.

So, let’s be careful with the lawyer-engineer binary; I admire China’s bridges but don’t want to live there etc.

The flip of the CCP’s engineering mindset is a chilling disregard for personal liberty, a tendency to social control, treating citizens as raw material to be shaped by policies like one-child and zero-COVID. The results are cataclysmic if you live in the way of the next train line.

With that caveat…Wang characterises the US (and by extension ‘the West’) as a ‘lawyer society’ at the political level, focused on process, rules, and regulatory arbitrage. We reward the mastery of process over achieving results. We incentivise blocking, vetoing and weaponising rules to protect existing interests over risk and building new things.

When in doubt, commission a report.

Sport is an industry run by lawyers for lawyers. Discuss.

If that’s an argument you want to build, it’s not hard to find supportive evidence from the daily news agenda.

Even the sainted Parkrun doesn’t get through Whitehall without yet another feasibility study (from The Times this week).

This next one is from Ed Warner’s Sport Inc newsletter:

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When Mum owns your IP

More law…a lovely snippet on the Brand Beckham shitstorm, via Level Law’s Rachael Somerset and Jonny Harris:

It is worth noting that BROOKLYN BECKHAM is registered as a UK trade mark for various goods from aftershave, bags and clothing through to entertainment services. Intriguingly, the trade mark is owned by “Victoria Beckham as parent and guardian of Brooklyn Beckham”. Who knows how that wrinkle is likely to be resolved? The situation is not dissimilar to Chelsea Football Club being the registered owner of trade marks for JOSE MOURINHO right up to the end of last year – even though Mourinho left the club in 2007.

Hear also: our conversation with Michael Beloff KC, who Chambers describes as ‘the man who more or less invented sports law’.

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Truth as commodity

DAZN’s deal with Polymarket is one of several signs that the prediction market is on a bubblicious brand building zag.

This is usually a good news story from a sponsorship sales point of view.

Nice line in the FT’s Alphaville blog:

“The other thing everyone knows by now about prediction markets is that they’re not for gambling: they’re offshore exchanges for trading derivatives in the commodity of truth”

What’s a bit different is the way news outlets are being targeted as a brand platform. CNN and CNBC have done deals with Kalshi, and Yahoo Finance with Polymarket.

While discussing the strain of tariffs, anchor John Berman teed up Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, for a Kalshi plug, asking if Americans expect to receive stimulus checks from the government. “One of the best ways we can look at this is [through] the prediction markets,” Enten replied, “because they give you an indication of where people are putting their money where their mouth is.” The screen behind him showed that bettors on Kalshi peg the likelihood of checks arriving by next August at twenty-five per cent. Throughout the segment, a ticker displayed a stream of unrelated odds, including whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would be the first person to depart from this Administration’s Cabinet (thirty-one per cent), and whether Timemagazine’s Person of the Year would be Pope Leo XIV (twelve per cent) or A.I. (forty-seven per cent).

Given Trump Jnr’s involvement in Polymarket, it’ll be fun to see where this goes (thanks to Sanjit Atwal for the link):

Short term gain

The problem for the prediction market category is what we might call the sucker pipeline:

‘What’s easy to overlook in the prediction market hype is that gambling is a branch of the entertainment industry, not a financial service. To attract new customers, gambling needs to seem fun. Winning is fun. Losing to a gamma-neutral Sequoia market hedging algorithm that snipes for mispricings and whittles away every inefficiency is not fun. Neither is it fun to lose to insider traders who’ll flush any market that benefits from an informed view. No one volunteers to be sharkbait.’

QED, DAZN were right to get in quick, the prediction market sponsorship money might not be around long.

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The company you keep

Worth pausing on something from our podcast with Nikki Doucet, CEO of WSL.

Mercedes Benz is the latest sponsor recruited by the league.

The top line roster now reads: Mercedes Benz, Apple, Nike, Barclays, Subway, EA Sports.

That’s a properly blue chip line up.

Each of them feature in Interbrand’s Global 100 list of the most valuable brands in the world.

I’m certain that someone will have done a PhD on this question, but what’s the halo effect of premium brands on the property? How long does it take for the perceived value to transfer? (See previous post: Women’s football should be reassuringly expensive)

It’s a bit apples and pears but run the current list of Premier League club shirt sponsors through Interbrand’s list.

You won’t find any matches.

See also: if sponsors are a guide, the Bundesliga is a local league.

Mamdani is a proper Gooner

@cbssportsgolazoNYC Mayor @Zohran Mamdani ball knowledge 💯

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