Mar 06, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity, my twice-weekly private email on
all the deal chatter in the owner’s suites and rumblings in corner offices. The U.S. sports calendar has been in a lull since the Super Bowl, but March Madness is finally right around the corner. Thank goodness—I was getting sick of listening to Marchand practice his one-man opera, The Barber of Ithaca, all the way from downstairs. (Please replenish the rich chocolate Nespresso pods, Andrew. I’m counting…)

🚨🚨 Pod
alert: The National Women’s Soccer League kicks off its 13th season next week, so I invited commissioner Jessica Berman on The Varsity podcast to discuss the league’s breakthrough 12th season, record attendance, and soaring TV viewership. (Check out a sneak preview, below.) Also, make sure you listen to yesterday’s podcast. Axios’s Sara Fischer and I covered Ted Leonsis’s growing media ambitions,
among other topics.

Player of the Week: Nick Khan

It was hardly a surprise to see UFC president Dana White front and
center during Wednesday’s announcement that parentco TKO would partner with the Saudis on a new boxing venture. White, after all, has always fantasized about expanding the UFC into boxing. But I was surprised to learn about the involvement of WWE president and TKO board member Nick Khan. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. A former CAA agent, Khan enjoys massive influence at TKO given his expertise in media rights negotiations, live event promotion, and high-profile talent
relations. Also, Khan began his sports career managing James “Lights Out” Toney and Manny Pacquiao…

Down to the J.V.: Nico Harrison

I don’t want to pile on the Mavericks G.M., who got clobbered over the disastrous
Luka trade. (Harrison works for the Adelson family, the Mavs’ new controlling owner, if anyone is really looking for a culprit…) But Harrison could really use a lucky bounce. After the Mavs lost five of six games and Kyrie Irving tore his A.C.L., the club decided it would be the perfect time to announce a price hike for season ticket holders. It was enough for Tony Kornheiser to muse on PTI,
“Nico Harrison took a master class in how to be a terrible G.M. It’s all bad.”

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The Starting Five

Chelsea’s Girma play: In January, Chelsea paid $1.1 million to poach star player Naomi Girma from the NWSL, marking the first million-dollar transfer in women’s soccer. On the Varsity podcast, I asked commissioner Jessica Berman if this deal was a harbinger of things to come for the growing league, which has a firm salary cap in place. “It is part of the game. Players move between leagues,” she said. “That is known,
and understood, in men’s soccer, and for people in Europe. Secondly, as a general point, our players have value, and this is now an investable business proposition. That’s great for women, and that’s great for women’s soccer. Third, we are structured very differently from the likes of the WSL [Women’s Super League], where Chelsea plays. … We live with a salary cap. We live in a world where we expect our clubs to provide a consistent experience for players and fans, for training facilities, for
stadiums. With all that in mind, we have to lean into the things that make us better, or great, and not try to be something that we’re not. One of our superpowers is the competitiveness of our league.

She continued: “Do I want Naomi here? 100 percent. I hope she comes back. We will welcome her back with open arms. But when the hysteria starts, we have to level-set with some rationality about what is real and what is not real in this world, and caution around getting too caught up in some
of those one-off situations that may not work in our favor. By the way, we brought in more players in this transfer window than we lost.”
Double bogie: PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan sat down with Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch for an in-depth interview that touched on everything from the PGA Tour’s LIV deal and Donald Trump’s involvement with the negotiations, to his own past mistakes when
the Saudi rival emerged and the flagging support of the Tour’s rank-and-file. Lynch’s first question: “Why do you still have a job?” Monahan’s answer, in part: “Let me get to the heart of the question you’re asking, because it’s a question about leadership. When you’re fortunate enough to serve in the capacity that I serve, there are going to be criticisms.” The whole interview is
worth a read.
Netflix’s live sports surprise: After Netflix recently announced that the company had amassed 24 million new subscribers in the second half of 2024, I was struck how little of that haul depended on sports programming—especially
in a year when the streamer carried the Jake Paul–Mike Tyson boxing match and two Christmas Day NFL games, one of which featured a Beyoncé halftime show. The boxing match garnered 236 million hours viewed, and the NFL games registered 84 million hours viewed. “Together these events still were just a rounding error of Netflix’s total time viewed,” noted a report from MoffettNathanson.
What’s
ahead for Fox’s streamer: Fox’s hiring of former Venu head Pete Distad to run its direct-to-consumer service presages a heavy focus on sports, Axios media reporter Sara Fischer told me on yesterday’s episode of the Varsity podcast. “It’s also notable that Pete will report to Tubi Media Group C.E.O. Paul Cheesbrough, the tech wiz over at Fox Corp. who’s overseeing Tubi. That suggests to me that they are taking this new service
pretty seriously. Remember, Fox already has a subscription service for its news products, called Fox Nation, that has between two and two and a half million paid subscribers. If you are launching a new service that is supposed to be a little bit of everything—entertainment, sports, news—and you already have a distinct service for news, and a distinct service for weather content, it would appear to me that sports is going to have to be a very big part of what this service is about.”
Fox’s IndyCar-NASCAR pairing: Fox Sports C.E.O. Eric Shanks recently told me that last weekend would be the first time that viewers would be able to see an IndyCar race lead into a NASCAR race. And that interleague doubleheader is going to occur a few more times this year, and even more next year. “Part of the strategy was to lift all boats,” Shanks said.
According to the numbers, however, there’s still
some lifting to do. Viewership for Sunday’s IndyCar race was outstanding, with 1.4 million viewers tuning in—a 45 percent increase from IndyCar’s season opener last year on NBC, surely thanks in part to Fox having gone all out on pre-race marketing as well as production for the event. But Fox’s NASCAR audience numbers were not as high as I expected, averaging 4.1 million viewers, down slightly from the circuit’s third race last year.

Exiles on Main Street

As ESPN’s relationship with MLB continues to fray, Bristol
executives are cozying up to Main Street Sports on a deal that will help the network stay close to the game that it has carried for the past 35 years. But the deal isn’t quite the “end around” that some have suggested.

John Ourand

The sky is not falling on Major League Baseball—at least not yet. Yes, ESPN is
about to start the fourth and apparently final year of a seven-year deal with the league that carries an annual average payment of $550 million. And yes, ESPN told MLB that it wanted to drop that payment down to $200 million a season, per the WSJ. And, since we’re on the topic, MLB and ESPN executives have not had any meaningful negotiations about the media deal since then—and none are planned despite the fact that Opening Day is three weeks away.

Even worse:
Shortly after ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro sent MLB commissioner Rob Manfred a Dear John letter, and Manfred subsequently put the network on blast to his owners (in a memo that happened to turn up in press reports almost immediately thereafter), there were reports that executives in Bristol were pursuing an end-run around MLB—partnering with Main Street Sports Group’s R.S.N.s to show local baseball games on its platforms.

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Alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I can report that ESPN and Main Street
Sports (née Diamond), which owns the FanDuel–branded R.S.N.s, are talking. But these discussions have thus far focused on a marketing push that would bundle both companies’ direct-to-consumer offerings for a fee, akin to the WBD-Disney deal that combines Disney+, Hulu, and Max D.T.C. People familiar with the talks say the parties are not focused on an arrangement akin to the one Main Street has with Amazon, which would have allowed ESPN to offer the Main Street R.S.N.s as an
add-on to its direct-to-consumer service. That’s an important distinction. Indeed, several sports business executives, including league sources, believed that ESPN was trying to come up with a cost-effective way to carry MLB games after its contract runs out this fall.

Pitaro has often spoken about the potential of turning ESPN’s digital platforms into a sports hub that can direct viewers to games on other platforms—described in Bristol as the “Where to Watch” strategy—and this
is where talks with Main Street were initially focused. The hub concept would resemble the arrangement ESPN currently has with Monumental Sports Network, NESN, and SportsNet Pittsburgh, where it provides links on its website and app that send users to R.S.N. streaming services where they can watch the games. The key distinction, obviously, is that the games aren’t on an ESPN platform; users are pushed to the R.S.N.s’ streaming platform and either log in through their cable or satellite
account, or buy a D.T.C. subscription directly from the R.S.N.

But talks progressed rapidly and soon coalesced around bundling strategy. Both ESPN executives and Main Street’s David Preschlack viewed the WBD-Disney D.T.C. bundle as a template. Notably, ESPN is not talking about acquiring the rights to Main Street’s teams. Rather, Bristol executives have told Main Street that they will use ESPN’s reach to drive subscribers and engagement back to Main Street’s D.T.C.
services.

Sources describe talks on both these issues as far along, though no announcement is planned in the next few weeks. An understated goal for both companies is for ESPN to eventually offer the FanDuel R.S.N.s as add-on packages to its ESPN+ and Flagship subscribers, but sources insist that this is not part of the current talks—and probably won’t be anytime soon. Last November, Main Street entered into a deal to make its channels available on Amazon Prime, a deal that
precludes other media companies from pursuing a similar framework for an undetermined length of time. To cut the Amazon deal, Main Street needed MLB’s approval. I can’t imagine the league would rubber-stamp a similar deal with a network that just walked away from a national package of games.

From the Cheap Seats

On replacement programming for Sunday Night Baseball: “Recently I’ve seen a
number of references to TGL in the Puck universe as a potential viable programming alternative for ESPN to MLB. With all due respect, I think you and your colleagues are suffering from a case of irrational exuberance when it comes to Tiger’s new venture. The TGL audience is cratering. Overall household ratings are down considerably from their peak in week two, when Tiger first played. Even more concerning is the huge drop in ratings among 18-to-34-year-olds since then.
From an audience standpoint, TGL is neither delivering scalable reach, nor interest among young viewers. Yes, ESPN isn’t paying anything for the rights. I don’t know how much runway TGL has with sponsors, but if these trends continue, it’s hard to imagine it lasting. Regardless, TGL isn’t close to being in the same programming league with MLB.” —A golf media executive who’s keeping score

On who might be interested in the Nats rights: “You have to
think Nexstar could use local Nats rights for former-NBC-turned-indie WDVM (formerly WHAG), which it operates out of Hagerstown, but which also services Washington, D.C. They could put most games on WDVM, but shift some of them over to their CW (WDCW) for feature telecasts and do their best to generate higher retrans fees out of each one.” —A sports media veteran

On the MASN deal: “I don’t think anyone is shocked by this eventual
outcome, although I’m very interested to see what comes in its place—and if it changes again in 2028, with Manfred’s desire to bring all of the broadcast rights together.” —A media veteran

Have a great weekend. See you Monday,
John

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