XG Live is SOOOLD OUT; Club Weird Cup ticket offer - buy one, get deported; TNT explodes; Bryson has LIV over a barrel; Inside Edge; Wedge Issues
Overthinking the sports business, for money
SOOOLD OUT!
We did warn you.
Expected Goals Live is at SOOO London, the hippest women’s sport pop up in town.
All the tickets have gone.
But there’s a wait list for if we get any drop outs.
There’s a speed pitching round.
Maggie and Matt have hand picked the pitchers to go in front of our investors lined up below.
TNT explodes
Wall Street bankers and David Zazlav are making a killing from the Warner Bros Discovery split.
What we don’t yet know is what happens to the sports rights portfolio.
My old mate Bill Cohan is the only source to follow on this story.
“But David hasn't even really signaled exactly where the sports are going to land and what the strategy with sports is. So there's a lot that is riding on how he and Gunnar split up those sports assets or what they do there.”
From The Powers That Be: Daily: WBDivorce!, 9 Jun 2025
Club Weird Cup
What will be the scale of DAZN’s loss on the FIFA Club World Cup?
We talked on The Bundle about it, citing a report by Frank Dunne, SportBusiness’ media rights doyen.
He writes that DAZN is on course to generate $170m to $180m from the sub-licensing of co-exclusive rights it paid FIFA a billion for, just after they got a billion from PIF, which was what my Aunty Joyce would call ‘interesting timing’.
Dunne puts additional advertising sales at $200m.
So the most bullish half glass full estimate gets a return from the billion of somewhere near $500m. So, a half billion bath (probably more), which is a big number to put toward subscriber retention, new subs and ‘brand’.
The Number’s Always Wrong: There’s a fantastically daft research number in the story from GWI – 87% of football fans say they will watch the tournament with the majority saying they will watch on streaming. I don’t mean to be rude but….that sounds high.
The event continues to fascinate.
This story is incredible if true:
Gianni Infantino is keen that the Club World Cup becomes a flagship event.
But tbf, he never defined what he meant by flagship.
See wikipedia’s entry on Operation Flagship, one of the great sports ticket-as-sting operations ever, when the Feds lured a load of on the run fugitives to a fake Washington Redskins convention centre.
Regardless of whether anyone actually watches the CWC, there’s a problem with the product, says Omar Chaudhuri of Twenty First Group, failing on three criteria:
Quality: just 50 of the world’s top 100 players feature in the tournament, compared to a benchmark of 72 at the 2022 World Cup. Moreover, 3 of the world’s 4 best teams currently did not qualify
Jeopardy: 1-in-4 group matches have a favourite with an 80% chance of winning, something which doesn’t happen at the World Cup. Meanwhile, there is more than a 95% chance of a European winner
Connection: three of the world’s seven most followed clubs on social media are absent from the tournament, along with other popular players
Whatevs. At least we can use this data as an opportunity to re-up this clip of Infantino taking a corner.
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The AI Bundle
To be discussed: how AI and LLMs will be bundled in to telco offers, and what that means for sports place in the subscription game, particularly those at the filler end of the must-have spectrum.
Free in France, Opta in Australia and several others have started selling Claude, ChatGPT and other LLMs as part of the subs package along with more traditional media offers such as Netflix, Disney and the more sport specific streamers.
It’s going to get a bit crowded in there if this becomes a thing.
What leverage looks like
Pet theory: Bryson DeChambeau is the most powerful athlete in the world in 2025.
No other sports property is so dependent on a single player.
Given LIV is funded by oil, it’s kind of fun that he has them over a barrel.
As mentioned previously, his contract is up next year.
Since leaving the PGA TOUR Bryson has built a media platform that’s arguably the best example of the athlete-as-creator vibe.
He’s more famous, and more valuable, than the rest of LIV’s player line up combined.
LIV could get rid of every one of their expensive cast of famous-within-golf competitors and their product would be pretty much unchanged.
For all intents and purposes, Bryson is LIV.
So, what’s his number?
Here he is this week:
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We got in to Brand Bryson here:
The Premflix sell-in
Deloitte plugged their new football finance report via the medium of D2C rumour mongering.
From The Times:
Premier League clubs may have to consider a radical Netflix-style broadcast model if they want to vastly expand their TV revenues, according to a new report.
England’s top flight is more than twice as rich as its closest rival, with total revenues of £6.23billion in the 2023-24 season — just over half of which (£3.25billion) came from TV money, according to Deloitte’s Annual Review of Football Finance.
Inside Edge
The ICC World Test Championship final is playing out at Lord’s this week.
At the same venue last weekend, the second iteration of World Cricket Connects took place, the brainchild of Mark Nicholas that convenes the great and the good of the game to reimagine the game’s future.
We’ll get in to the details on an upcoming Inside Edge.
But a couple of snippets.
Boston Consulting Group presented the keynote on the state of the global game, there was a panel asking ‘Is Cricket Cool?’ (UP Rule, if the headline is a question, the answer is always no), the challenges of running franchised T20 leagues and the potential of women’s cricket
All that and then Jay Shah, the ICC President, didn’t turn up.
Sidebar: Sunset + Vine’s excellent coverage of the ICC WTC Final between Australia and South Africa included a record breaking 52 cameras focused on the field of play.
Recently, CEO of Cricket Ireland Warren Deutrom (see previous: the best sports executive you’ve never heard of), suggested a dialling down on production values to reduce the cost for smaller test playing nations.
"To preserve the prestige of the format doesn't necessarily mean it should be so exclusive as to be unaffordable," Deutrom said. "Perhaps we could potentially remove some of the preciousness around how everything has to be done. With 24 to 30 cameras, Super Slo-mo, DRS, etc."
‘I heard you on Unofficial Partner’, the most powerful sentence in sports marketing
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