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Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on the heroes and villains of the sports media business. Happy Day 1 of the U.S. Open to all who celebrate.
It’s been a busy week in the industry: Paramount Global’s deal with David Ellison and Gerry Cardinale collapsed. The NBA is in the final stages of negotiating $75 billion worth of media rights deals. But the one story that dominated my social feeds on Wednesday pertained to competitive eating. Hours after Major League Eating banned Joey Chestnut from Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4, of course, Netflix announced that the hot-dog-eating champ would face off against his arch rival, Takeru Kobayashi, during a Labor Day competition—proving once and for all that the streaming giant is deadly serious about sports!
On that note, if I catch you forwarding these private emails to colleagues who can clearly afford them, I will make you watch Marchand’s competitive eating tryout for the July 4 Coney Island event! Not pretty!
Let’s get to it…
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Player of the Week:
Mike Whan |
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| As the U.S. Open teed off from Pinehurst this morning, it was hard not to juxtapose the angst-ridden PGA Tour with... |
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR
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| Malone’s New F1 Fantasy |
| The ageless mogul’s decision to take a controlling position in Formula E suggests that he’s looking to re-create the magic he found in its sister racing sport. |
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| Earlier this morning, John Malone’s Liberty Global announced that it was buying Warner Bros. Discovery’s 25 percent stake in Formula E, the F1 spinoff for electric cars, giving the entity a controlling 65 percent position. On a practical level, the deal made plenty of sense. Malone, who sits on the WBD board, knows that his protégé David Zaslav must sell off non-core assets to service their company’s nearly $40 billion in debt. As part of a much smaller deal, for instance, WBD recently... |
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| FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT |
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| Sharinobyl |
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| WILLIAM D. COHAN |
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| Time Will Tell |
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| DYLAN BYERS |
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