When the league office decides on a phrase, it tends to stick. “America’s Game” was one. “Protect the Shield” was another. The newest entry is shorter and more specific, and it is doing more rhetorical work than either. The NFL has spent the better part of two years telling Washington, and anyone within earshot, that 87 percent of its games air on free television.

The figure has appeared in friendly-columnist memos, in carefully timed earnings-call asides, in a league statement issued the same week the FCC opened a formal inquiry into pro football’s broadcast practices, and again in the NFL’s most recent submission to the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. It is the league’s go-to defense in a year where everyone seems to want a piece of it. Lawmakers are asking. The FCC is asking. The DOJ has decided that the Sunday Ticket settlement did not, in fact, resolve everything it was supposed to resolve. Every time the questions come, the answer begins with 87 percent.

If you have spent any time near league communications, the consistency is the tell. League PR does not repeat numbers because they like the way they sound. It repeats numbers because someone has decided that the number is going to carry a particular weight in front of regulators, and the discipline is to keep saying it until the press internalizes the framing. The phrase functions as a defense. The question now is whether it can survive contact with arithmetic.

Sportico recently decided to run the math. Its methodology was straightforward: rather than count which games appeared on a broadcast network somewhere in the country, the magazine counted which games an actual fan, sitting in an actual market, could watch on free over-the-air television. The number that fell out of that calculation was not 87 percent. It was closer to 33.

The gap between the two figures is the entire essay.

To understand how the same league produces both numbers, you have to understand what CBS and Fox actually do on Sunday afternoons. This is the part of the broadcast architecture that most fans intuit without quite articulating, and that the league has spent a generation describing in ways designed to discourage articulation.

Each Sunday during the regular season, CBS and Fox carry “regional” telecasts. A slate of games is distributed to local affiliates based on team market, audience interest, and lead-in considerations. A CBS or Fox affiliate in Charlotte does not show every CBS or Fox game. It shows the games CBS or Fox has determined are appropriate for the Charlotte market. The same logic applies in Cleveland, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Birmingham, Buffalo, San Diego, and on down the list. There is, in nearly every Sunday window, one nationally distributed late-afternoon game (the “doubleheader” game, which one of the two networks gets that week on a season-long alternation). Almost everything else is regionally locked.

So when the NFL says that all of CBS’s Sunday games and all of Fox’s Sunday games “air on free television,” what is technically true is that each of those games airs on some affiliate somewhere. What is functionally false, from the perspective of any individual fan, is that the games air on his television.

Sportico’s calculation, which a reader can verify with a copy of the 2025 schedule and an afternoon, asks the more honest question. Of the 272 regular-season games on the 2025 calendar, how many were available to the average fan, in his home market, on free over-the-air TV?

Sunday Night Football on NBC counts. That is a true national broadcast. The late doubleheader game on the alternating network counts, in whichever home markets fall inside the broadcaster’s coverage map for that game. The Thanksgiving triple-header counts. The Christmas window on broadcast counts, when it exists, which in 2025 increasingly did not because that inventory had been licensed to Netflix. The Saturday late-season afternoon windows count. The Sunday early window includes one game in most markets; the late window includes one, occasionally two.

What does not count, in the Sportico methodology, is the long catalog of regionally restricted games that the league pretends are free because they technically aired on a broadcast affiliate two thousand miles from where the fan was sitting. Run that calculation across the season, weight it across the league’s actual television footprint, and you land in the low thirties. Different markets produce slightly different numbers. Buffalo gets every Bills game and not much else. Los Angeles, with two resident teams, has a different profile. New York and Chicago, ditto. But the cross-market average rests at roughly a third of the schedule. Sportico’s 33 percent is, if anything, a generous reading.

That gap, 87 versus 33, is not a rounding error. It is not a methodological dispute. It is the difference between a sentence the league can defend in front of a regulator and a sentence a viewer would recognize as true. The league’s argument to the FCC and DOJ depends on the first sentence. The fan’s actual experience produces the second. The talking-point writers at the league office know the difference. They are too good at their jobs not to. The discipline is simply to keep saying the bigger number.

If you want to see the gap a different way, ask what it costs to close it.

Senator Mike Lee’s office released a memo last fall that tried to do exactly that. The senator from Utah is not a typical antitrust scold. He is a conservative Republican who has been more aggressive about Big Tech antitrust than most of his caucus, and who has lately turned that attention to professional sports. The memo, prepared by his staff and circulated to relevant committees, asked a single question: in 2025, what does it actually cost a fan to watch every NFL regular-season game?

The answer his office arrived at was roughly a thousand dollars, spread across ten platforms.

The arithmetic is unglamorous. Start with the broadcast tier, antenna, free, in your market. That gets you about a third of the schedule and costs nothing. To pick up Sunday Ticket and watch out-of-market games, you pay YouTube somewhere between $349 and $449 depending on package, more if you bundle it with YouTube TV’s base service. ESPN’s Monday Night Football is theoretically accessible by cable, but for cord-cutters who do not have cable, the cheapest path runs through Disney’s streaming bundle. NBC’s Peacock has a few exclusive Sunday windows and a playoff game which, in the 2024 cycle, was a wild-card game so anticipated and so paywalled that it produced its own news cycle and a congressional letter. Amazon’s Thursday Night Football is bundled with a Prime subscription, which most American households already pay for, but is still a discrete cost. Netflix has Christmas Day games and is plainly preparing to acquire more. CBS’s streamed games sit behind Paramount+, which the network has been pricing up for two years. NFL+ adds RedZone, mobile streaming, and the secondary feeds the league keeps shifting into and out of paywall. Fubo or YouTube TV’s standard channel package fills the seams if you want everything else, the international series games on a Sunday morning, the occasional Saturday window, the rare game that ends up only on a regional sports network owing to some scheduling quirk.

Tally those costs across a full season, with monthly fees rolling over and seasonal subscriptions stacked, and Lee’s office arrived at $980-something. Round up. A thousand dollars. Ten platforms. To watch a product the league describes, in every conversation in Washington, as available on free TV.

The senator’s memo did not propose a fix. It was, in the way of congressional memos, mostly an exercise in numbering the problem. But the numbering was useful. It gave the question a vocabulary. Reporters could now reference “ten platforms and a thousand dollars” without sounding like they had cherry-picked the figures themselves. Within weeks the formulation showed up in cable hits, in podcast monologues, in the Times’ coverage of the Sunday Ticket appeal, and in a House subcommittee hearing on streaming media that the chairman opened with a recitation of the senator’s number.

The league office did not respond directly. It repeated the 87 percent figure.

What is most striking about Lee’s memo, on a second reading, is not the dollar figure. The dollar figure is a Bloomberg terminal calculation. Anyone who could be bothered to do it could have arrived at something close. What is striking is the platform count. Ten. Pro football, the most centralized sports product in American life, the league with the most consolidated broadcasting tradition of the four major sports, the league whose entire commercial identity was forged on the unifying power of nationwide Sunday broadcast, has fragmented its distribution into ten parallel customer relationships. None of which are pure broadcast. Most of which are paywalls. All of which the league still expects regulators to treat as continuous with the free-TV deal that built it.

There is a story the league prefers about its own evolution. In that story, the migration of games onto streaming services is a response to consumer demand and a continuation of pro football’s long history of meeting fans where they are. Television in the 1960s, ESPN in the 1980s, satellite in the 1990s, streaming in the 2020s. It is presented as a natural progression. Same product, same league, different pipes. The 87 percent figure is meant to reinforce that story by suggesting that all the new pipes are additive. The free games are still free, the argument runs. We just added more games on top of the free ones.

The actual story is harder to keep straight.

Between 2020 and 2025, the league signed media rights deals worth roughly $113 billion across an eleven-year window. The largest single structural change in that portfolio was the routing of Sunday Ticket from DirecTV to YouTube on a deal that priced the package higher than any prior cycle and tied it to Google’s streaming infrastructure. Amazon got an exclusive Thursday Night Football package that took those games off broadcast television entirely. Peacock paid for playoff exclusivity, which was the most explicit signal of the cycle: the league was willing to paywall postseason inventory if the price was right. Netflix paid hundreds of millions for Christmas Day games and is reportedly bidding aggressively to expand. ESPN’s package shifted further into Disney’s streaming stack, with ABC simulcasts dwindling and Disney’s direct-to-consumer service positioned as the long-term home.

In each of those deals, the league traded broadcast reach for subscription revenue. In each case, the trade was rational on the individual deal’s economics. And in each case, the cumulative effect was to move the product, piece by piece, off the kind of television the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act was specifically designed to enable.

If you had described this trajectory to a media executive in 2010, the response would have been disbelief, not at the dollar figures, which everyone in the industry already understood would inflate, but at the willingness of the league to fragment audience reach to capture them. The whole logic of the NFL’s broadcast strategy through the 1990s and 2000s was reach first, monetization second. Reach was the substrate on which everything else got built: the gambling product, the fantasy product, the sponsorship product, the franchise valuations that funded ownership groups who could buy in at a billion and exit at five. Reach was the moat. The decision to start trading pieces of the moat for streaming checks, on a cycle-by-cycle basis, is the most consequential strategic shift in the league’s commercial history. It is also the shift that the 87 percent talking point exists to obscure.

You can see why the league wants the obfuscation. Reach was not just a commercial preference. It was a regulatory premise. The legal architecture that lets the NFL exist in its current form, with thirty-two competing franchises selling their broadcast rights as a single pooled product, depends on the regulatory premise that the games are reaching the public on free, advertiser-supported television. That premise was the explicit basis of a 1961 statute, and the implicit basis of every regulatory accommodation since.

The league’s lawyers will argue, and have argued, that “sponsored telecast” is capacious enough to cover any commercially supported program. Streaming services run ads. Subscription services are “supported” by subscribers. The exemption, the argument goes, evolves with the medium.

This is the legal posture the FCC and DOJ are now testing. The 87 percent talking point is the public-facing version of the same argument. If most of the games still air on free TV, the migration to streaming is incremental rather than transformative, and the statutory bargain that built the league in the first place is being honored in spirit if not in letter. If the games are not actually still on free TV in any sense that a fan would recognize, then the bargain has been broken silently, over the course of two rights cycles, and the antitrust exemption the league depends on is doing work it was never designed to do.

This is where our second will pick up. The legal architecture of professional football, the architecture that lets a single business with thirty-two competing franchises sell its product as a pooled monopoly, was built on a 1961 deal in which Congress granted an antitrust exemption in exchange for the league delivering “sponsored telecasts” of professional football to the American public. The deal was implicitly renewed when ESPN began carrying Sunday and Monday night games on cable, and renewed again, even more implicitly, when DirecTV’s satellite-delivered Sunday Ticket package debuted. Each renewal was a quiet expansion of what the statute was understood to authorize. Each one was small enough that no one in Washington picked a fight over it.

Streaming is not small.

The 87 percent number is the rhetorical strategy the league has chosen to defend the cumulative result of all of these expansions. It is meant to suggest that nothing has fundamentally changed: same games, same fans, same free television. Sportico’s math says otherwise. Mike Lee’s $1,000 figure says otherwise. The ten platforms a comprehensive fan must now navigate say otherwise. The FCC says it intends to find out. The DOJ has already decided to ask.

Next, we will look at the 1961 statute itself: at what “sponsored telecast” actually meant in the legislative record, at the cases that have tested the exemption over six decades, at the much more interesting recent cases nobody outside antitrust academia paid attention to, and at what the law would actually do to the NFL’s commercial structure if a regulator or a court concluded that the bargain has been broken. It is the question that has been quietly sitting underneath the league’s business model the entire time. The 87 percent talking point, against the league’s intentions, has made it the central question of 2026.

What “sponsored telecast” actually meant in 1961, and why pro football should be worried about a sixty-five-year-old statute.

The argument that ended our previous part is the one no one in the league office wants to make on the record. Translated into plain English, it goes like this: the antitrust exemption that allows the NFL to exist in its current form was granted on a specific premise in 1961, and the league has spent two rights cycles quietly relocating the activity outside the premise. Whether that relocation has gone too far is now a question for a regulator and a federal court rather than for the league’s communications shop.

To see why the question matters, you have to go back to the case the league lost.

United States v. National Football League ran in front of Judge Allan K. Grim of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1953. The government’s claim was simple. The NFL had implemented a rule, named after Commissioner Bert Bell, that controlled which games could be broadcast on television and where. Bell’s rule was unapologetically protectionist. It prohibited the televising of an outside game into a home team’s market on a day the home team was playing at home. The Justice Department’s view was that this was, as a matter of statute, a horizontal agreement among competitors to restrict the market for telecasts. Judge Grim agreed in part. He preserved a limited blackout on the theory that the home gate had a legitimate competitive interest, and struck down the broader pooling restrictions.

The ruling, narrow as it was, created a problem the league did not know how to solve. The Bell rule had survived as a limited blackout. But the broader principle, that the NFL could not pool and sell broadcast rights as a single entity, was now federal law in the only circuit that mattered. CBS had been buying rights team by team. NBC was doing something similar. The single, league-wide television deal that Pete Rozelle would soon use to remake the economics of professional football was, under Judge Grim’s ruling, a per se Sherman Act violation.

Rozelle’s response was the Sports Broadcasting Act. The legislative history is unusually candid for federal law. Rozelle testified personally in front of the relevant Senate and House subcommittees. So did the commissioners of baseball and the upstart leagues. The pitch they made was specific and, by the standards of contemporary corporate lobbying, almost touching in its earnestness. Pro football would only realize its potential as a mass-market American product, Rozelle argued, if the league could sell a single national rights package and distribute the proceeds back across its member clubs through revenue sharing. That structure would allow small-market clubs to survive economically alongside large-market clubs. It would produce competitive balance, the thing fans valued in a way that the New York-dominated baseball broadcast economy of the 1950s, by contrast, did not.

Critically, what Rozelle and the others were asking for was an antitrust exemption for the collective sale of broadcast rights. The word had a specific meaning in 1961. The medium being contemplated was free television, distributed through advertiser-funded networks, with the sponsoring advertisers’ commercials interrupting the game at predictable intervals. That was the only model of mass television that existed at any meaningful commercial scale. There was no cable to speak of. There was no satellite. Pay TV existed mostly as a theoretical proposal involving closed-circuit theatrical exhibitions of boxing matches.

Congress, after some negotiation, gave the leagues what they asked for.

The Sports Broadcasting Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1291, exempts from the antitrust laws “any joint agreement by or among persons engaging in or conducting the organized professional team sports of football, baseball, basketball, or hockey, by which any league of clubs participating in professional football, baseball, basketball, or hockey contests sells or otherwise transfers all or any part of the rights of such league’s member clubs in the sponsored telecasting of the games.” Subsequent sections impose limitations: the exemption does not apply to agreements that prevent the telecasting of games on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons within 75 miles of a scheduled college football contest. The statute was amended in 1966 to authorize the AFL-NFL merger. Otherwise, it has not been meaningfully revised in sixty-five years.

The phrase that does all the work is “sponsored telecasting.” In 1961 it was not a vague descriptor. It was a term of trade. It meant the kind of broadcast where a commercial advertiser, the “sponsor,” paid for the production and distribution of the program in exchange for the right to insert commercial messages into it. The legislative record uses the phrase in this specific sense throughout. The House Report on the Act says so. The Senate floor debate says so. The Federal Communications Commission, in contemporaneous filings, says so.

What the phrase pointedly did not cover was subscription television. The 1961 House debate explicitly addressed pay TV and excluded it from the exemption. The committee’s reasoning was that the antitrust accommodation it was granting was specifically tied to the public-interest justification of mass-market free television. Pay TV, if and when it became commercially significant, would have to clear its antitrust hurdles on the merits. The exemption was a deliberately narrow one. Congress was buying mass-market free distribution of football for the American public. It was not authorizing a generic exemption for the league to sell broadcast rights however it pleased.

The legislative deal was specific. Free television, with advertisers, going to a mass audience, in exchange for the right to negotiate collectively. That deal is the foundation of the league’s commercial architecture. Strike it down, or even meaningfully constrain it, and the architecture does not survive in its current form.

The exemption has been tested several times since 1961. The cases are less well known than they should be, partly because the league has historically had the political and legal resources to settle quietly when an unfavorable ruling looked plausible.

The most important is Shaw v. Dallas Cowboys Football Club, decided by the Third Circuit in 1999. The plaintiff, a fan, sued the league and DirecTV over the Sunday Ticket package. His theory was that the league’s collective sale of out-of-market games as a single subscription product, to a single distributor, was a horizontal restraint that the SBA did not exempt. The Third Circuit agreed with him on the threshold question. The court held that the SBA’s exemption applies only to free, over-the-air broadcasts, and that the league could not invoke the statute to immunize the Sunday Ticket subscription product. The case ultimately resolved on other grounds, but the legal holding survived. Sunday Ticket has been operating outside the SBA exemption, in legal terms, for a quarter century.

That fact has been hiding in plain sight. The league has continued to sell Sunday Ticket. The league has continued to invoke the SBA in defense of its broader broadcasting arrangements. The disconnect was tolerated because no one with the authority to do anything about it picked up the question. Private plaintiffs lacked the resources to litigate the full structural challenge. The DOJ, under multiple administrations, declined to intervene. The FCC stayed in its broadcast lane. Each institution looked at the question, decided it was someone else’s problem, and moved on.

In re NFL Sunday Ticket Antitrust Litigation finally forced the issue. The case, brought as a class action on behalf of Sunday Ticket subscribers, went to trial in the Central District of California in 2024. The plaintiffs’ theory was that the league’s collective sale of the Sunday Ticket package, combined with the requirement that the package be sold as an all-or-nothing bundle of every out-of-market game rather than as individual team subscriptions, was a horizontal restraint that artificially inflated prices to consumers. In August 2024, a jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs in the amount of $4.7 billion, which under the antitrust statutes would have trebled to a recovery on the order of $14 billion.

Judge Philip Gutierrez subsequently vacated the verdict, ruling that the plaintiffs’ damages model was insufficiently rigorous and ordering further proceedings. The headlines, predictably, reported the league’s victory. What the headlines mostly missed was that the underlying liability theory survived intact. The judge did not rule that the SBA exempted the conduct. He did not rule that the conduct was not a Sherman Act violation. He ruled that the damages had been inadequately proven. The league won a procedural reprieve. It did not win on the law.

That distinction has not been lost on the Antitrust Division.

When the FCC opened its inquiry, the relevant filing made clear that the agency was not interested in re-litigating Shaw or Sunday Ticket. The agency was interested in something more specific: whether the migration of game inventory from broadcast to streaming was occurring at a pace and scale that affected broadcast licensees’ ability to serve the public interest under their license obligations. That is the regulatory hook the FCC has. Broadcast licenses are not perpetual property rights. They are temporary grants of access to the spectrum, given in exchange for a commitment to serve the public interest. The FCC’s question is whether the licensees the NFL has historically used, the local CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC affiliates, are still receiving enough inventory to honor that commitment.

It is a more limited question than the SBA’s. It does not directly threaten the league’s broader business model. But it has teeth. The FCC can condition license renewals on showings about programming. It can investigate whether retransmission consent negotiations, which determine how much cable and satellite providers pay broadcast affiliates for the right to carry their signal, are being distorted by the migration of premium content off broadcast. It can refer matters to the DOJ. More practically, it can make life expensive for the league by requiring formal proceedings, evidentiary hearings, and the public airing of agreements that the league prefers to keep proprietary. The mere threat of those proceedings is itself a form of leverage, of the kind the league has not historically had to negotiate against.

The DOJ’s tools are larger. The Antitrust Division has the authority to investigate the league’s collective rights sales for compliance with the SBA’s terms. If the Division concludes that the rights being sold are not “sponsored telecasts” within the meaning of the statute, the exemption does not apply, and the collective sales become a Sherman Act §1 conspiracy in restraint of trade. The remedy menu includes injunctive relief (requiring the league to disaggregate its rights sales), structural relief (requiring teams to negotiate streaming rights individually), civil penalties, and, through follow-on private litigation, treble-damages exposure on the entire revenue stream from non-exempt rights sales over the relevant statute of limitations. The arithmetic on that exposure, if you run it across the 2020 to 2030 rights cycle, lands in the tens of billions.

That is the part of the threat that the league’s lawyers understand and the league’s public communicators have been hired to obscure. The 87 percent figure is not a casually chosen number. It is the number that the league believes, if accepted by the relevant audience, would persuade the FCC and DOJ that the structural question is not yet ripe for review. So long as most of the games still air on free TV, the argument goes, the SBA’s premises are still being honored, and there is no need to reopen the bargain. If the 87 percent figure does not hold up under scrutiny, the argument falls.

There is a second-order question that has been almost entirely absent from the public conversation, and it is the one that ought to be keeping the league’s lawyers up at night. The SBA does not just authorize the collective sale of broadcast rights. It is the legal underpinning of the entire revenue-sharing structure that makes the modern NFL viable.

The numbers are worth remembering. Each NFL franchise receives roughly $400 million per year in national media rights revenue, distributed equally regardless of market size. That figure represents close to half of total league revenue. Pooled rights are the reason Green Bay, Wisconsin (population 105,000) can field a team that is financially competitive with the team in the New York metropolitan area (population 19 million). Pooled rights are why Buffalo, Cincinnati, Jacksonville, Nashville, and Indianapolis all support viable franchises. Pooled rights are the equalizer the league has invoked, correctly, as the structural feature that distinguishes the NFL from the European football leagues where the same five clubs win the trophy every year and everyone else exists to keep the schedule full.

Pooled rights are also, in legal terms, a horizontal agreement among competitors. Without the SBA exemption, that agreement is presumptively illegal. With the SBA exemption, but only for the activity the statute actually covers, the agreement is legal for that activity and presumptively illegal for anything else.

Run the structural logic through to its conclusion. If a regulator or court concludes that the bulk of the league’s current rights sales are not “sponsored telecasts” within the meaning of the 1961 statute, then the bulk of the league’s pooled rights revenue is unprotected by the exemption. The DOJ could require those rights to be sold team by team. Streaming deals would have to be negotiated thirty-two times instead of once. The aggregate revenue would crater, both because of the lost negotiating leverage and because no streaming platform would pay premium rates for a fragmented inventory of one or two teams’ games. Most catastrophically, from the league’s perspective, the revenue that would survive would land disproportionately with the large-market clubs, because they have the audience size to command individual deals. The small-market clubs that the SBA was designed to protect would be the first casualties of the SBA’s collapse.

That is the irony hiding inside the 87 percent talking point. The statute the league has spent two rights cycles quietly outgrowing is the same statute that keeps Green Bay solvent. The league’s commercial appetite has put it at odds with its own legal foundation. The communications strategy is a delaying action.

The deeper question, the one we previously gestured at, is what the league is actually selling now.

A 1961 NFL game was a single product. The fan watched it on a single channel. The league sold one set of rights to one type of distributor. The advertisers paid the network, the network paid the league, the league paid the teams. The whole machine was simple enough to fit in a House subcommittee hearing.

A 2025 NFL game is something else. The same game, between the same two teams, exists simultaneously as a national broadcast on CBS, Fox, NBC, or ESPN; an out-of-market broadcast on YouTube’s Sunday Ticket; a streaming exclusive on Amazon or Netflix or Peacock depending on the week; a clip on Twitter and TikTok and Instagram, licensed through the league’s social media program; a fantasy sports input on DraftKings and FanDuel; a betting input on every major sportsbook; a highlight on NFL+ and the NFL app; a piece of inventory on the league-owned NFL Network; and, increasingly, a data stream sold to broadcasters, gambling operators, and software developers. Each of those products is monetized separately. Each has its own commercial terms. Each has its own distribution architecture. Each has its own audience.

The league has unbundled the product across every conceivable distribution channel and is monetizing each channel as a separate business. From a purely commercial standpoint, that is innovative and lucrative. From a legal standpoint, it is wholly different from the activity Congress exempted in 1961.

The 87 percent talking point exists because the league does not want anyone in Washington to recognize the difference. It is a backward-looking number deployed in defense of a forward-looking business. As long as enough people repeat it, in enough hearings, in enough committee memos, the structural question stays buried.

Sportico’s math, Senator Lee’s $1,000 figure, the surviving liability theory of the Sunday Ticket litigation, and the FCC’s new inquiry have, between them, raised the question out of its burial mound. What happens next will depend on whether anyone in Washington has the institutional appetite to pursue the answer. The NFL has historically been confident that no one does. That confidence may be the last 1961 assumption the league still holds.

The 87 percent talking point is, in this sense, more revealing than the league intends. It is the sound of a defendant who knows what the actual question is, and who has decided that the safest response is to keep answering a different one. That tactic works until someone in the room insists on the actual question.

In 2026, for the first time in sixty-five years, two of them have. ♦

The Inversion

A revenue multiple is, in the end, an opinion about the future dressed up in arithmetic. So when Sportico published its 2026 WNBA team values in May and the league’s average multiple landed at 13.6 times revenue, the number was less a finding than a vote. It put the WNBA narrowly above the NBA’s 13.5x and well clear of the NFL at 10.3x, the NHL at 7.7x, and Major League Baseball at 6.6x. A league that has lost roughly $40 to $50 million in recent seasons, that has never reported a profit in its 28-year existence, whose top earner made $249,244 the year before its multiple jumped past basketball’s most lucrative cartel, now trades at the richest revenue multiple in American team sports.

This should have prompted more questions than it did. Instead, it became another data point in a story about momentum.

The growth in women’s sports is real. Viewership, attendance, sponsorship, capital flows, draft ratings, jersey sales, every direction is up, often by margins that would normally take a decade to produce. None of that is in dispute here. What is worth disputing is whether the prices being paid for franchise equity have stayed connected to that underlying growth or have detached and become a separate object. A market in narrative, priced as if the narrative itself were the cash flow.

Because the prices are not priced to growth. They are priced to a future in which growth at recent rates continues, the media rights structure invented during a peculiar 2024 negotiating window holds for eleven years, the audience built around two or three breakout names disperses smoothly across a fifteen-team league, and the patient capital subsidizing the floor stays patient long enough to produce exits. Each of those assumptions has a defense. None has a guarantee. And almost none are being seriously discounted in the prices.

The question Eephus is built to ask, when prices behave like this, is not whether the underlying thing exists. It does. The question is whether the mechanism that turns cultural moments into franchise prices has gotten ahead of the mechanism that turns franchise prices into cash. A bull market in narrative is not the same animal as a bull market in cash flow. The two have a habit of decoupling for years before they reconcile, and the reconciliation, when it comes, tends not to be gentle.

The Staircase

Begin with the staircase, because the staircase is the cleanest evidence of how rapidly price discovery has moved in this space.

In 2021, Angel City FC and the San Diego Wave each entered the NWSL for roughly $2 million. Two years later, Bay FC and Boston Legacy paid $53 million each. In January 2025, Denver Summit paid $110 million. Eleven months after Denver, in November 2025, Arthur Blank’s group paid $165 million for an Atlanta franchise that will not actually begin play until 2028. By early 2026, the Haslam family in Columbus paid $205 million. The Atlanta deal carried a clause that would refund Blank’s group between $5 and $15 million if the next franchise sold for less than $200 million. Columbus voided it.

The WNBA arc has the same shape, with steeper risers. The Golden State Valkyries paid $50 million to enter in October 2023. Toronto matched that price seven months later. Portland came in at $75 million the same year, with $125 million in stadium and team commitments attached. Then on a single day in June 2025, Cleveland (Dan Gilbert), Detroit (Tom Gores), and Philadelphia (Harris, Blitzer and Adelman) each paid $250 million for expansion teams that will play their first games in 2028, 2029, and 2030 respectively. A fivefold increase in expansion fees in eighteen months.

The Connecticut Sun, originally founded in 2003 for under $10 million, traded hands in March 2026 to Tilman Fertitta for somewhere around $300 million, after a multi-step bidding process that involved Steve Pagliuca, Marc Lasry, the WNBA quietly steering the outcome, and an eventually withdrawn threat of a Senate antitrust investigation by Senator Richard Blumenthal. Mark Davis bought the Las Vegas Aces in 2021 for $2 million. Sportico now values the franchise at $400 to $425 million. A two hundred-fold revaluation in four and a half years.

Two features of this staircase reward more attention than they tend to get.

The first is that price discovery in this space is not happening at the team level. It is happening at the league level, through expansion fees. The dollars flowing into women’s sports valuations are arriving as new equity, not as transfers from old shareholders to new ones. That distinction matters, because expansion fees are administered prices rather than market clearing prices. The WNBA sits on overwhelming demand from a buyer pool that is essentially captive (every one of the six WNBA expansion franchises awarded since 2023 has NBA ownership ties) and can charge whatever it can extract. There is no competitive auction. There is a counterparty list, and a queue.

The second, slightly stranger, is that the highest revenue multiples are landing on the least profitable teams. Sportico noted, almost in passing, that the WNBA’s multiple structure is inverted relative to every other professional league. Small-market franchises with the lowest revenue carry the highest multiples (Atlanta around 14x), while higher-revenue franchises like Golden State (around 10.9x against $78 million in inaugural-season revenue) sit lower. In healthy capital markets the relationship runs the other way. Higher-quality cash flows command premiums; lower-quality cash flows trade at a discount. The inversion here is what a scarcity premium looks like once it has been rendered as a multiple. Buyers are not paying for operating performance. They are paying for the chance to be in the room.

Sal Galatioto, who has done more sports investment banking than most of his industry combined, described this directly to CNBC’s Alex Sherman in April 2026. “It’s not just based on valuation, it’s based on scarcity, ego gratification and just wanting that asset. You’re not focused on the numbers.” Sherman’s piece argued, and the underlying data supports, that the surge in NWSL and WNBA prices is downstream of a different market entirely. Investors priced out of the NFL and NBA, looking for somewhere to deploy capital that the NFL’s $10 billion entry barrier no longer permits. JP Morgan Private Bank’s 2025 Principals Report found that 20 percent of billionaire-family principals now hold controlling stakes in sports teams, up from 6 percent in 2022. Demand of that shape, against a fixed and small supply of NFL and NBA inventory, has to find an outlet.

It found one in women’s sports. That does not mean the prices it paid are wrong. It does mean the prices reflect the geometry of where capital was searching, not necessarily the geometry of the underlying asset.

The Thirteen-Times Problem

To see why a 13.6x revenue multiple is a difficult number rather than an easy one, walk through what it implies.

A team trading at thirteen times revenue with no operating profit is being priced as if revenue will compound at rates that justify the deferral of cash. There are essentially two paths to growing into that multiple. Either revenue triples or quadruples in five to seven years and the multiple compresses to a more orthodox 6 to 8 times as the league matures, or revenue grows at lower rates and the multiple was wrong.

Most of the bull case implicitly assumes the first scenario. The McKinsey 2024 report, which has become the foundational document of the women’s-sports investment thesis, projected the global women’s sports rights market reaching roughly $2.5 billion by 2030. That is a quadrupling from 2022. It is also still only about 2 percent of the U.S. sports market. The forecast that current valuations are anchored to is not, in other words, a forecast of dominance. It is a forecast of meaningful but bounded share-of-wallet expansion. And the multiples are already discounting as if much of that expansion has happened.

The most explicit version of the institutional bear case has come from Kroll, which is a useful source here because Kroll does not have an editorial axe to grind in this space. The firm values assets for sale processes, lender-side engagements, and litigation. In its 2024–25 paper on private equity entering women’s sports, Kroll wrote that current valuations “imply a large multiple of current and future revenue. While the new WNBA media deal will undoubtedly increase team revenues going forward, investors will be betting on long-term revenue growth for a league that has historically been subsidized by the NBA to cover operating losses. There is still a disconnect between the financial performance of the franchises and their reported value.”

The paper flagged a second risk that the popular coverage has almost entirely failed to internalize. Streaming-era media demand is buoying the current rights cycle. Leagues will need to put up viewership numbers, actual durable numbers, not Caitlin-Clark-rookie-year numbers, to justify the next cycle. The cliff sits in the early-to-mid 2030s, when the current bundles expire and the renewal happens against whatever ratings the league has actually built by then.

Dennis Coates of UMBC, an economist who has spent more time on sports valuations than most academics ever will, told the San Francisco Standard in July 2025 the version of this argument that almost nobody on the deal side wants to engage with. “Ownership paid $50 million to get the expansion franchise in 2023. Without ever stepping on the court, the team’s valuation increased tenfold. That suggests to me that the $500 million valuation is probably too high.” Andrew Zimbalist, in the same piece, was more cautious but landed adjacent. “There are NBA teams selling for $6 billion and $10 billion, but that’s on the back of a television deal that guarantees the NBA $7 billion a year.” The implication, never stated quite so plainly in the bull literature, is that without a comparable per-team media floor, WNBA multiples are stretched against any orthodox reading of an asset price.

The orthodox reading, of course, is not the only reading. There is a venture reading, in which 13x revenue is normal because the asset is being treated as an option on a future market that does not yet exist. We will come back to that in Part II. But it is worth pausing on the fact that the language being used to defend the multiples (momentum, scarcity, total addressable market, generational realignment) is venture language, applied to assets that are not, structurally, venture investments. They are not liquid. They cannot be IPO’d. They cannot be sold to a strategic acquirer. The exit, when it eventually comes, has to come either from another expansion-fee buyer at a higher administered price (a chain that ends with someone holding the last seat) or from a secondary transaction that the league office has to approve. That is a particular shape of asset, and it is not the shape that 13x multiples are usually paid for.

The Cap Table Behind the Curtain

Underneath the WNBA valuations sits an equity structure that most of the retail-investor coverage has not seriously grappled with. It is worth a few minutes.

The league is split, roughly, three ways. NBA owners hold approximately 42 percent. WNBA team owners hold approximately 42 percent. The 16 percent remaining belongs to a 2022 outside-investor consortium that put $75 million in at a $475 million post-money valuation. That consortium includes Nike, Condoleezza Rice, Laurene Powell Jobs, and a number of other strategic LPs. The consortium receives revenue distributions, including expansion-fee proceeds, but does not bear team-level operating costs. The 42 percent NBA block has, in practice, structural veto power over major decisions. Atlanta Dream CEO Suzanne Abair, in a moment of frankness quoted by economist David Berri, put it as plainly as anyone has. “If the 12 WNBA owners say they want to do something and the NBA says no, the answer is no.”

This matters because the celebrated $2.2 billion, eleven-year media rights deal the WNBA struck in July 2024, the deal cited in nearly every valuation pitch deck in the women’s sports ecosystem, is not a standalone valuation event. It is a slice of the NBA’s $77 billion megapackage with Disney, NBC, and Amazon. Networks pay the NBA. The NBA decides the WNBA allocation. John Ourand, reporting at Puck, has captured what executives at the buying networks have said privately. Media buyers “would sort of laugh to me like, ‘Yeah, we’re just paying this number, and whatever the NBA wants to say.’” The market price of WNBA rights, in other words, has not been independently tested. It is an internal transfer price within an NBA bundle. The 2036 renewal will be the first time the league’s rights are priced on their own merits.

That is the cliff Kroll was pointing at.

A second governance feature deserves more attention than it has received. The eleven-year term has no opt-out. There is only a “good-faith reevaluation” of the rights fee after the 2028 season, at the WNBA’s discretion, with no automatic adjustment. For a league claiming to be at the start of a generational growth curve, locking in a media revenue trajectory through 2036 is a peculiar choice if you actually believe the bull case. It is a much more rational choice if you do not. That is, if the league office and partner networks both privately suspect that the current premium reflects a moment rather than a baseline. The eleven-year length is itself information. Eleven-year term sheets are signed when both sides want certainty. They are not signed when both sides expect compounding leverage.

The opacity continues at the team level. Front Office Sports’ investigation, published as “Are the WNBA’s 9-Figure Losses What They Seem?”, pulled at the cap table and concluded that the income statements WNBA teams report are essentially uninterpretable. NBA owners control NBA-team allocations to WNBA-team books. Expansion fees are distributed among the three equity blocks in ways the league has not disclosed despite repeated requests. The 2022 consortium receives a slice of expansion economics without the offsetting drag of operating costs. Stanford’s Roger Noll told FOS, with the directness economists sometimes deploy when they have given up on diplomacy, “Because of this convoluted ownership structure and because of the way the revenues are divided, the income statements of the teams are meaningless.”

If the income statements are meaningless, the multiples calculated against those statements are doing analytical work the underlying numbers cannot bear. The 13.6x figure is not, in that case, a financial measurement at all. It is a confidence interval rendered as a number, and the confidence interval is wide enough to absorb almost any narrative the market wants to tell.

There is a deeper version of this problem that sports finance does not enjoy talking about. Private market valuations in any asset class, but especially in sports, are a function of who needs the price to be what number, on what date, for what subsequent transaction. Forbes lists, Sportico marks, league-office guidance to media outlets: these are not prices. They are inputs to negotiations. The handful of arm’s-length transactions where the buyer and seller had no prior relationship and no offsetting interest at stake, those are prices. There are not very many of them in women’s sports yet. The Burkle exit on the San Diego Wave in 2024 is one. That, give or take, is the list.

The Caitlin Clark Concentration

There is one other place the math gets uncomfortable, which is the audience.

The most serious accounting of Caitlin Clark’s individual contribution to WNBA economics came not from the league or any of the consultancies, but from Ryan Brewer, a finance professor at Indiana University Columbus. Brewer modeled the question with the kind of granularity that league offices typically prefer not to have done. He calculated that Clark accounted for roughly 26.5 percent of all WNBA economic activity in 2024. Not just merchandise, not just ticket sales for Indiana Fever home games, but a quarter of the entire economic activity of the league. He told NBC News in early 2025 that her presence had taken the WNBA’s enterprise value from roughly the $400 million range it sat at before her arrival to a minimum of $875 million, and potentially over a billion.

The empirical evidence for the dependency is granular enough that it is hard to argue with. Sportico’s regular-season analysis found that Clark games on national television averaged 1.18 million viewers in 2024. Non-Clark games on national television averaged 394,000. That is a 3-to-1 ratio. Of the 23 WNBA regular-season games that crossed a million viewers in 2024, Clark and the Fever appeared in 21 of them. The Pacers and Warriors of the WNBA, in other words, were one team.

Then 2025 arrived and produced something close to a controlled experiment. Clark missed extended portions of the season with a quad injury. Nielsen data, as compiled by USA Today and Front Office Sports, showed WNBA league-wide ratings dropped 55 percent during the two-week window she was on the bench. Indiana Fever-specific viewership averaged 1.81 million with Clark and 847,000 without. That is not noise. That is a signal at a magnitude that very few business assets in any industry would survive being labeled with.

The post-Clark draft and tournament data tells the same story. The 2025 NCAA women’s basketball championship without Clark drew 8.5 million viewers, down 55 percent from the 18.9 million that Iowa-South Carolina pulled in 2024. The 2025 WNBA Draft averaged 1.25 million viewers, down 49 percent from the 2.45 million that Clark’s draft commanded the prior year. The 2025 All-Star Game came in at 2.19 million, down 36 percent from 3.44 million the year before. ESPN’s PR team, in a maneuver worth pausing on, obscured this decline by comparing the 2025 number to the 850,000 figure from the pre-Clark 2023 game, producing a “+158%” headline that Christine Brennan of USA Today publicly called out on the broadcast itself. When the official storytellers feel the need to choose their baselines that aggressively, it usually tells you what the unmassaged comparison would say.

There are honest counter-signals. Non-Fever telecasts in 2025 ran roughly 37 percent above their 2024 baselines, suggesting Clark’s 2024 spike pulled some new viewers into the broader league ecosystem. The 2026 WNBA Draft, the first without Clark in any role, ran 20 percent above 2025. Both of those numbers are real, and the structural rerating thesis they support is not silly. But the gains are riding on top of a step-change that one player created. Strip out the methodology shift, Nielsen moved to “Big Data + Panel” measurement in 2024, which adds five to eight percentage points to virtually every year-over-year comparison, and a meaningful share of the headline growth in WNBA ratings disappears into the measurement noise.

A meaningful share of the rest is attributable to one player who has now had two consecutive injury-shortened seasons. Sportico said the quiet part out loud in September 2024. “When she exits, the ratings rocket will lose a lot of momentum.” The valuations were repriced upward as if it would not.

The structural problem this poses for valuation is not that the league cannot survive Clark’s absences. It might. The problem is that the league’s enterprise value has been struck against revenue lines, most importantly the new media deal whose terms were negotiated against the run of Clark’s rookie season, that depend on a particular viewership trajectory. The 2024 rookie year activated rights-reopener provisions and gave the league leverage at a moment that may not repeat. If you believe the cultural moment was real and will compound from here, the prices are defensible. If you believe the moment was a function of one transcendent player arriving at one peculiar instant, the prices have built-in dependency on that player’s continued presence, in a sport where bodies fail and where two of the league’s three biggest stars (Clark and Breanna Stewart) missed substantial 2025 minutes.

A league valued at roughly $6.4 billion in aggregate, the implied figure from current franchise marks, that is one-quarter dependent on the health and continued playing career of a single 24-year-old, is, considered structurally, the same kind of asset as a movie studio whose box office is one-quarter dependent on a single actor’s slate. Nobody pays 13x revenue for that movie studio.

Next, we’ll turn to the question of who is actually holding this paper. Three different kinds of capital are sitting in women’s sports right now, and they have very different patience profiles. The distinction between them does not show up in the prices on calm days. It will show up on the days that are not calm. We will also look at the proliferation problem (nine new women’s leagues launched or restructured in three years, one of which has already filed for Chapter 11), the global yardstick that American multiples are being measured against, the bull case in its strongest form, and the historical record of every previous “this time is different” moment in women’s professional sports.

The Patience Question

Capital flowing into women’s sports is not one thing. It is at least three things, and the differences between them are going to matter when conditions get less friendly.

The first kind is single-billionaire balance-sheet capital with no fund life and no LP redemption windows. Mark Walter is the cleanest example. He fully funds the PWHL through the Mark Walter Group with Billie Jean King Enterprises, has authorized a business plan Stan Kasten described publicly as exceeding ten years, and targets break-even somewhere around 2031. Walter’s net worth (Bloomberg pegged it near $13.3 billion in late 2025) and his other holdings (the Dodgers, his June 2025 acquisition of the Lakers at a $10 billion valuation, his 12.7 percent stake in BlueCo, which owns Chelsea) make the PWHL line item genuinely sub-rounding-error capital for him. Michele Kang’s Kynisca Sports International (Washington Spirit, OL Lyonnes, London City Lionesses) is a similar story. Her sale of Cognosante to Accenture in 2024 funds a pledged $55 million to U.S. Soccer plus the Kynisca Innovation Hub. The Long family at Kansas City Current, the Bhathal family at Portland Thorns and Fire, Iger and Willow Bay at Angel City, Larry Tanenbaum at Toronto Tempo, Arthur Blank at the new Atlanta NWSL franchise. These are owners with multi-decade horizons, no fund redemption windows, and the absorptive capacity to lose money for a long time.

The second is balance-sheet institutional capital with unusually long holds. Sixth Street’s Bay FC investment is funded from Tao Partners, a balance-sheet vehicle with no liquidation requirement. CEO Alan Waxman publicly committed to a ten-plus-year hold and called the women’s sports opportunity “literally the most undervalued thing we’re seeing not only within the sports landscape, but across everything.” This is patient money, but it is patient inside a structure where eventually some return narrative needs to materialize for Sixth Street’s own LPs.

The third is traditional private-equity fund capital with seven-to-ten-year fund lives. Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports Fund, closed at over $1 billion in commitments in September 2025, is the largest example. Monarch Collective ($250 million at last count, after raising another $100 million tranche), Carlyle (Seattle Reign), Bessemer Venture Partners (Unrivaled at $340 million), and the various secondary LP positions inside the various NWSL clubs are also working inside fund structures that have eventual liquidity requirements. These vehicles need exits this decade. That requirement is what is putting upward pressure on multi-club consolidation, on franchise sales like Burkle’s exit on San Diego Wave, and on the price ramps that worry analysts.

The Burkle exit, importantly, is the only marquee profitable arm’s-length exit in the entire NWSL/WNBA universe to date. Almost everything else cited as evidence for the asset class (Sportico marks, Forbes lists, expansion fees, secondary minority sales) is either an internal mark or an entry price. The Chelsea Women transaction, which BlueCo recorded at £198.7 million in June 2024, was a related-party transfer that happened to help Chelsea report a £128.4 million pre-tax profit and stay compliant with Premier League PSR rules. GlobalData’s Conrad Wiacek called it what it was. “Selling themselves to themselves.” Alexis Ohanian’s subsequent purchase of an 8 percent stake at a £245 million valuation in May 2025 was a real transaction, but it was a single block of minority equity from a related party of the original group. Not a price test under stress.

When markets are calm, the distinction between patient and impatient capital does not show up in prices. When markets get less calm (when fund-life clocks start ticking, when a downside scenario hits, when an LP decides their sports allocation is fully baked) the impatient capital is where the gradient is steepest. Mercury/13’s founder Victoire Cogevina Reynal departed as co-CEO in February 2026, with Avenue Sports Fund’s directors taking governance control after just twenty-four months. The reasons given were benign. Founder departures in PE-backed sports vehicles, even when explained benignly, are usually a function of LP-side governance pressure rather than spontaneous personal choice. Worth filing.

The Proliferation Problem

The other place fundamentals pull against prices is in the supply curve.

Between 2023 and 2026, the United States gained, by my count, at least nine new or substantially restructured women’s professional leagues. The PWHL, consolidating two predecessors. Unrivaled. League One Volleyball. Pro Volleyball Federation, which then merged into Major League Volleyball in August 2025. AU Pro Softball League. Women’s Elite Rugby. The Women’s Lacrosse League under PLL. The Women’s Professional Baseball League announced for 2026. And Grand Slam Track. Each was capitalized on essentially the same investor thesis. A generational cultural moment. Undervalued media inventory. A distinctive demographic appeal. The chance to compound from a low base.

The list above already contains a failure. Grand Slam Track, Michael Johnson’s track league, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025 with debts north of $40 million and proposed paying roughly $13 million in vendor claims at about 1.5 cents on the dollar. The creditors’ committee filing alleged “shocking levels of incompetence, bad faith, self-dealing.” Bill Ackman’s Winners Alliance had led the funding. Eldridge (Todd Boehly) reneged on a signed term sheet partway through. The failure did not get the coverage that the asset class’s wins did, but it is now the cleanest first-cycle data point on what happens when narrative-funded leagues run out of cash. The PVF/MLV merger in August 2025, which brought two competing volleyball leagues under one roof, was a less catastrophic version of the same dynamic. When two leagues capitalized on the same thesis collapse into one, that is supply telling you something about demand.

The proliferation question is whether the addressable demand actually scales the way nine simultaneous leagues require it to. The 2025 NWSL attendance figure offered an early hint. Average attendance fell 5 percent, the league’s first decline. Eight of fourteen NWSL teams declined, with the steepest drops at San Diego (down 26 percent), Chicago (down 22 percent), and Angel City (down 16 percent). Some of this is star turnover (Mallory Swanson and Sophia Smith out for pregnancy, Naomi Girma to Chelsea, Alex Morgan retired, Trinity Rodman missing time) and some of it is the natural decay rate of attention in a market saturating with women’s-sports content. But it is the first signal that the demand curve is not perfectly elastic to the supply curve, and the prices being paid for franchises in 2026 implicitly assume otherwise.

Even the league that is most obviously running well has a structural fragility at its center. LOVB has been profitable since launch in January 2025, an extraordinary outcome for a first-year league. The profitability is anchored by the roughly $160 million in capital LOVB has raised and by its vertically integrated youth-club ecosystem (77 clubs, 22,000 athletes paying tuition into the same parent company). LOVB’s profitability, in other words, is partly a function of a youth-pay-to-play funnel that the men’s professional model does not need. Whether that holds up if a competitor commodifies the youth-academy advantage is unclear. What is clear is that the profitability is not, fundamentally, a function of the pro league standing on its own. It is the parent business cross-subsidizing the showcase property. The same structure Chelsea Women has, that Manchester City Women has, that most European women’s clubs have, and that the multi-club ownership models being copied by Mercury/13 and the Bay Collective at Sixth Street are essentially formalizing as a strategy.

If the path to profitability in this asset class runs through cross-subsidy from a related parent business, the standalone valuations being paid for franchises that do not have such a parent are themselves doing a peculiar kind of work.

The Global Yardstick

Globally, the calibration is harsher.

The Women’s Super League’s new media rights deal (Sky Sports and BBC, signed October 2024, £65 million over five years, roughly £13 million per year) is celebrated as a fivefold step up from the prior cycle. It is also roughly 0.4 percent of the men’s Premier League domestic deal. The NWSL’s $60 million annually is roughly 3.5 times WSL’s per-year value, despite operating in a country whose men’s first division (MLS) generates dramatically less media revenue than the Premier League. That asymmetry, NWSL valuations higher than European peers despite weaker absolute media floors than the European peers’ parent leagues have, is part of why so much American capital is now flowing into European women’s clubs. Kynisca at Lyon. Mercury/13 at Como and Bristol City. Avenue at NC Courage with European ambitions. Carlyle at Seattle Reign post-OL Groupe. The flow is implicitly an arbitrage on the gap between American women’s-sports prices and European women’s-sports prices. The existence of the arbitrage is itself evidence that one side is mispriced.

Liga F, which contains the 2023 World Cup champions and FC Barcelona Femení, the dominant club side in Europe, signed DAZN to a €7-million-per-season deal that broadcast executives told SportBusiness was an overpayment. Two seasons of player strikes have followed. The minimum salary settled at €23,500. The Frauen-Bundesliga renews with DAZN at around €2 million per year. Australia’s A-League Women drew a record 312,199 fans for the 2023–24 season post-Matildas, but the AFLW’s average attendance has actually dropped since its 2017 inaugural year. Taken together, the global picture is one in which even the leagues with the most successful national-team programs (Spain just won a World Cup, Australia just hosted one, England has been continuously successful at the international level) are unable to convert World Cup euphoria into durable per-team economics that resemble the multiples being paid in the United States.

The most often-cited counter-comp is the Women’s Premier League cricket auction in India, which raised roughly $572 million for five franchises in January 2023, with Adani’s Gujarat Giants paying $158 million. But the WPL is a different animal. A season of roughly 22 matches, embedded in the BCCI’s IPL-anchored cricket ecosystem, with media rights of $23 million per year that are entirely a function of how cricket inventory clears in India. It is not a comparable case for whether women’s basketball or women’s soccer will sustain North American multiples. It is a separate auction in a separate market.

The Saudi capital that some bulls had built into the women’s sports thesis is also, as of 2026, less reliable than it appeared. The WTA Finals will leave Riyadh after 2026, only three years into what was supposed to be a longer relationship. The Saudis “felt committing to a new deal did not make financial sense,” per The National. PIF is ending LIV Golf financing after the 2026 season. The Next Gen ATP Finals departed Saudi after three of five planned years. SURJ Sports Investment’s May 2026 statement framed the contraction as a pivot to “sustainable, world-class sports platforms,” which in industry vernacular means the volume phase is over. Sovereign-wealth capital is not actually patient. It is patient until the political economy of the home country requires that it not be, and the patience window in this cycle has turned out to be roughly three years.

The Bull Case, Steelmanned

It is worth dwelling on the bull case in its strongest form, because the prices being paid imply that bull case is right.

The strongest version begins with the structural shift in how American audiences consume sports. The college women’s basketball numbers are not narrative. They are large. The Iowa-South Carolina national championship in 2024 drew 18.9 million average viewers and peaked at 24.1 million. A number that exceeded the average of every NBA Finals game that year. The 2024 Paris Olympics gymnastics team final drew 12.7 million. Caitlin Clark is one player. She is also a forcing function for a permanent structural rerating of how broadcast inventory in women’s basketball is priced. And that rerating, once it has happened, is hard to unwind.

The second pillar is the change in audience demographics that women’s sports uniquely deliver. Per YouGov, the WNBA fan base is 44 percent female versus 40 percent for the NBA. Per Operative, the 18-to-34 female audience doubled between 2023 and 2024, and viewership among Black women rose 94 percent year over year. SponsorPulse data shows WNBA fans are roughly twice as likely to actively buy from sponsors as NBA fans on a comparable measure. Brand-spending allocators are not paying for raw eyeballs. They are paying for an audience that has historically been very expensive to reach through other vehicles, and the relative cost of reaching it through women’s sports is still, even at current ad rates, favorable. This is real and durable.

The third pillar is structural. Women’s professional leagues are entering the rights cycle at the moment when streaming platforms (Amazon, Peacock, Paramount+, FAST channels) are paying premium prices for live sports inventory because nothing else holds audiences as well. The NWSL’s 40x rights uplift and the WNBA’s 6x lift on the rights bundle were not anomalies. They were market clearing prices at a moment when the demand curve for any kind of live sports right was unusually high. To the extent the streaming demand is structural (and the multi-billion-dollar deals from Apple, Amazon, and Netflix for various sports rights argue it is), the rights step-up will repeat at the next cycle.

The fourth is the asset class’s still-low penetration. Goldman Sachs Asset Management projected women’s sports revenue at $2.5 billion by 2030, up 250 percent from 2024, and noted explicitly that women’s sports represent only about 2 percent of the U.S. sports market. There is genuine room to compound. McKinsey, Deloitte, and PwC have all estimated meaningful additional growth runway. The patient capital now in the system (Walter, Kang, the Longs, Iger, Tanenbaum, Sixth Street’s Tao fund) provides a floor on how badly the asset class can be sold off in a downturn, because none of these holders have to sell.

The bull case is not a fantasy. It is a coherent argument that the combination of cultural shift, demographic gold, streaming-era rights premium, low penetration, patient capital, and structural multi-club ownership across global markets supports current valuations and continued growth.

The argument it has trouble making is that it supports continuing growth at current multiples. Multiples this rich already discount the path. The bull case, rigorously stated, is an argument for revenue growth, not for an increase in what one dollar of revenue is worth. And revenue growth at the rates required to vindicate 13.6x is itself contingent. Not impossible. Contingent.

What History Actually Says

The standard rebuttal to historical-bubble framing is that the present moment is sufficiently different from past failed leagues (WUSA, WPS, the ABL, the original USFL and XFL and AAF) that the analogies do not apply. The streaming environment is different. The corporate sponsorship environment is different. The capital base is patient and wealthy in a way it was not in 2001. Title IX’s compounding effect on participation and college audiences is different. All of this is true.

What is also true is that WUSA’s John Hendricks, in 2003, said almost exactly what some women’s-sports investors are saying now. “I was intoxicated by what I witnessed in 1999, and I mistakenly believed that level of corporate support would flow over into the league.” The Women’s United Soccer Association burned through its $40 million initial budget in its first season, spent roughly $100 million across three years, watched ratings collapse from a 0.4 on TNT to a 0.1 on Pax, asked its players to take 30 percent pay cuts, and folded five days before the 2003 World Cup. It was capitalized off a moment, the 1999 World Cup, that produced an audience explosion many of its founders read as durable demand and that turned out to be event demand. The WPS cycle from 2009 to 2012 was a smaller-scale repeat. Each iteration had patient money behind it. Each iteration had institutional sponsors. Each iteration had a cultural-moment thesis. The capital that funded these leagues lost almost all of it.

That history does not mean the current cycle ends the same way. Patient capital is more patient than it used to be. The rights environment is genuinely different. The audience compositions are not the same. But it does mean that the base rate for “this time is different” arguments in women’s professional sports is poor, and that the burden of proof on prices being paid in 2026 lies with the bulls rather than with the skeptics.

The MLS-as-precedent argument, invoked frequently in pitch decks and in JohnWallStreet’s pre-rebuttals to skeptics (“Skeptics will note it has taken MLS more than 25 years to get to the point it has reached today”), is a double-edged comp. MLS owners spent two and a half decades absorbing $10 to $30 million in annual losses per club before profitability arrived for some teams. Even now, soccer-specific stadium economics and a closed-system structure (no relegation) are doing as much work as on-field success. The implicit promise of the MLS comp is that women’s leagues will compound through losses for a generation. The current expansion fee structure does not appear to be priced as if buyers expect to absorb $10 to $30 million in annual losses per team for fifteen years.

If you want the MLS comp, take all of it.

The Stress Scenarios

The interesting question, when you are looking at an asset whose multiples have detached from its fundamentals, is what the system looks like under stress. There are at least four credible stress scenarios in women’s sports, and none of them is currently being seriously priced.

The first is a star vacuum. Caitlin Clark has had two consecutive injury-affected seasons. The league has not yet identified a successor cohort that produces ratings on her scale. Paige Bueckers’ draft class produced strong but not transformative numbers. The 2025 draft drew 1.25 million viewers versus Clark’s 2.45 million. Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, JuJu Watkins, Azzi Fudd are real assets, but the empirical record on what happens to ratings without Clark is the 2025 quad-injury data, which was unambiguously negative. If Clark misses extended portions of 2027 or 2028, the bull case requires the league to have built sufficient distributed star power to absorb the absence. The 2025 season suggested that distribution is incomplete.

The second is a media-rights downside renewal. The 2036 WNBA renewal is the cliff, but before it sits 2028, the year of the WNBA’s “good faith look-in” provision. If the look-in produces no upward revaluation (likely, since networks just signed an eleven-year deal at the top of the market), and if linear viewership erodes the way it has across all sports, the per-team central revenue figure (which doubled to roughly $6 million in 2026) has limited room to compound through the late 2020s. NWSL’s deal expires in 2027, so the next renewal is closer. If the 40x miracle of 2023 does not repeat, the deal-driven growth assumption breaks earlier than the WNBA’s does.

The third is PE-fund-life pressure. Avenue’s $1 billion-plus fund, Monarch’s $250 million, Carlyle’s positions, and the various Bessemer, Bain Capital, and family-office tranches inside the various leagues will need exits in 2030–2033. If the secondary-market price in those years is below the marks at which these funds are currently carrying their positions, the resulting downward pressure on quoted valuations will not be linear. It will resemble what happens in private credit markdowns, with large adjustments compressed into short windows. The Burkle exit at 50x is the data point bulls cite. One data point is not a market. It is a price observation.

The fourth is labor cost inflation outrunning revenue. The WNBA’s new CBA, ratified in March 2026, takes the salary cap from $1.5 million to $7 million. A 4.7x jump in a single year. David Berri’s calculations suggest implied 2026 league revenue of around $636 million if salaries are about 15 percent of revenue. If revenue does not actually clear $636 million, the salary share is larger than 15 percent and the team-level losses worsen. Players have already opted out once and may again. The 2031 opt-out is a known re-pricing event. NWSL’s cap progression to $5.1 million by 2030, paired with full free agency, the elimination of the draft, and a 2028–2029 reopener tied to a $300 million revenue threshold, builds in similar dynamics.

None of these scenarios individually is fatal. Two or three of them happening in some combination (Clark missing time, the look-in producing nothing, fund-life pressure forcing distressed exits, CBA economics turning losses heavier) would compress multiples meaningfully even without revenue growth slowing. The current 13.6x WNBA multiple has very little tolerance for multiple compression. A move from 13.6x to 8x, still richer than the NHL or MLB, implies a 40 percent-plus haircut to franchise marks even if revenue holds flat.

What the Prices Are Actually Telling Us

What the current valuations are most defensibly priced for is not a continuation of recent growth rates. That is mathematically near-impossible. And not a return to the long-term women’s-sports baseline, which would imply enormous downside. They are priced for a regime change. A permanent rerating of women’s professional sports as a category that lives somewhere structurally above its historical share of the sports economy. That rerating is plausible. It is not yet established.

The honest description of the asset class right now is that it is being treated as a venture-style bet inside a sports-franchise wrapper. Venture-style multiples justified by venture-style growth assumptions, but with the liquidity and exit dynamics of traditional sports franchises. Illiquid. Slow-clearing. Governed by league approval. That mismatch is the structural feature the strongest skeptics are circling around. A venture asset that cannot be marked to a public comparable, cannot be easily exited, and depends on a small number of governance bodies for any liquidity event is a particular kind of asset, and it is not the same asset as an NBA franchise. The investors paying NBA-rich multiples for women’s-sports assets are buying the multiple of one asset class and the liquidity profile of a different one.

Mellody Hobson’s December 2025 framing of women’s sports as “small cap stocks, fast-growing but also more misunderstood, ignored and under-followed,” is genuinely useful. It also cuts both ways. Small caps go down faster than they go up. The multiple at which they trade is more sensitive to narrative shifts than the multiples of large caps. The constituent teams in this small-cap basket are highly correlated to one another, to a small set of audience drivers, and to a media-rights cycle that synchronizes all of them. If the rerating fails or partially reverses, the unwind will affect every name in the index simultaneously. That is the structure of every sports-asset cycle that has reversed historically.

The deepest question Eephus might pose is not whether women’s sports are growing. They are. The question is whether the financial architecture that has been built around the growth is fit for the asset. The expansion-fee cascade. The celebrity cap-table assembly. The ESG-narrative-anchored fundraising decks. The “small-cap stocks” framing. The cherry-picked baselines. The ESPN PR percentage games. The related-party valuation transactions. The eleven-year media bundles inside larger NBA bundles. The multi-club ownership groups buying European clubs to secure exit options. The venture funds with seven-year lives buying assets that take twenty years to mature. These structures look less like a stable industry pricing a real cash flow and more like a market that has decided the cultural moment is the cash flow.

It might be. Cultural moments do, sometimes, become cash flow. They also, sometimes, do not.

The Burkle-to-Levine-Leichtman exit on the San Diego Wave is currently the proof point holding the rest of the architecture up. There is one of those. There need to be many of them, clean and arm’s-length and profitable secondary sales, before the price discovery in this space can reasonably be called complete. Until then, the prices are votes about a future that participants are paying for in advance, with money they cannot easily retrieve, into a structure they do not fully control. That is not necessarily wrong. It is what the prices are actually doing, regardless of what the press release says they are doing.

The bull case may be right. The hike in expansion fees from $2 million to $250 million in five years may turn out to be the early stage of a generation-long compound, and the 13.6x multiple may turn out to be the floor rather than the peak. But if it turns out to be wrong, if the Caitlin Clark concentration matters more than the bulls have assumed, if the next NCAA championship draws nine million instead of nineteen, if Saudi withdrawal generalizes into broader sponsor caution, if the 2028 look-in produces a number networks would have laughed at in 2024, if Avenue and Monarch and Bessemer’s funds need exits at marks the secondary market will not provide, the unwind will be told as a story about hubris and crowd capital. It will mostly be a story about prices that were set when no one was looking carefully at the assumptions buried inside them.

The eephus pitch works because the hitter has already committed his timing to the fastball. By the time the pitch arrives, the swing has begun. The decision was made earlier, against an expectation that no longer applies.

The narrative was real. The growth was real. The question Eephus is right to keep asking is whether the prices were ever the same thing as either.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ♦

Reference Materials

Transactional and valuation data drawn from Sportico (WNBA Team Values 2025 and 2026, NWSL Team Values 2026, Sporticast podcast archive, expansion fee reporting on Denver, Atlanta, Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, Portland, Golden State, the Connecticut Sun sale process, the New York Liberty minority sale, the San Diego Wave transaction, and the Avenue Sports Fund close), Front Office Sports (“Are the WNBA’s 9-Figure Losses What They Seem?”, coverage of the Connecticut Sun relocation, NWSL attendance and ratings reporting, Unrivaled valuation coverage, Grand Slam Track creditors filing, the women’s sports leagues expansion tracker, and Bay FC investment reporting), CNBC (Official WNBA Team Valuations 2026, Alex Sherman’s reporting on smaller-league valuations and Sal Galatioto), Yahoo Sports, ESPN, ESPNcricinfo, CBS Sports, Fox Business, Fox News, Sports Illustrated, Sports Media Watch, Awful Announcing, EssentiallySports, Saturday Down South, Pro Football Network, Des Moines Register, Boston.com, KSAT, The San Francisco Standard, The Athletic via Apple Podcasts (“Full Time”), MPR News, The GIST, GIGA Pro Gym, Markets Group, NBC Los Angeles, JohnWallStreet, SportBusiness, Sportcal, Inside World Football, The National (UAE), Nielsen, YouGov, Operative, Marketing Brew, Yahoo Finance, Yardbarker, MSN, The Current (Trade Desk), and CT Mirror.

Institutional and analytical sources include Kroll’s “Opportunities and Risks as Private Equity Steps into Women’s Sports,” Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s “Game Changer: Investing in Women and Sports” (March 2026), Deloitte Insights’ “Women’s Elite Sports: Breaking the Billion-Dollar Barrier,” McKinsey & Company’s women’s sports market sizing (2024), S&P Global Market Intelligence (“Women’s Sports in 2025 — The Olympic Legacy and Future Potential Growth”), the JP Morgan Private Bank Principals Report (2025), How Women Invest, Women We Admire, Mercury13 corporate releases, Washington Spirit, Time (Time100 Philanthropy 2025), the Wpleague reference, and primary corporate communications from Angel City FC, BlueCo (Chelsea), League One Volleyball, the WNBA league office, the NWSL Players Association, and Athletes Unlimited.

Expert commentary and contrarian analysis draw on Sal Galatioto (Galatioto Sports Partners), Ryan Brewer (Indiana University Columbus), Roger Noll (Stanford), Dennis Coates (UMBC), Andrew Zimbalist (Smith College), David Berri (Southern Utah University), John Ourand (Puck), Christine Brennan (USA Today), Conrad Wiacek (GlobalData), Mellody Hobson (Ariel Investments), Stan Kasten (PWHL), Alan Waxman (Sixth Street), and Suzanne Abair (Atlanta Dream).

Historical framing references the Women’s United Soccer Association archive (Wikipedia, Fun While It Lasted, The Washington Post coverage of the 2003 collapse), Women’s Professional Soccer (2009–2012), and the broader Wikipedia entries on women’s professional sports, the Caitlin Clark effect, Bay FC, Mark Walter, Michele Kang, Major League Volleyball (2026), the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, Grand Slam Track, and the Women’s Premier League (cricket).

All figures, transactions, and quoted commentary are current to May 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What Saudi Arabia Was Actually Buying

On April 30th, 2026, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia issued a statement about LIV Golf that ran to four short paragraphs. The phrasing was bureaucratic, the kind of language a fund manager uses when explaining to limited partners why a position is being unwound. “The substantial investment required by LIV Golf over a longer term is no longer consistent with the current phase of PIF’s investment strategy.” The decision, the statement continued, had been made in light of “PIF’s investment priorities and current macro dynamics.”

Strip away the formality and what you have is a sovereign-wealth fund explaining why an option is being allowed to expire. There is no mention of Phil Mickelson, no acknowledgement of the four years of legal warfare with the PGA Tour, no nod to the framework agreement Yasir Al-Rumayyan personally negotiated with Jay Monahan in a Manhattan boardroom in June 2023. The statement reads as though LIV were a tranche of distressed credit rather than a professional sports league that has, by reasonable estimates, consumed somewhere between five and six billion dollars of Saudi capital since 2021.

That is the tell. PIF has spent the past two years systematically retreating from international sports commitments it was, until recently, treated as the buyer of last resort for. The Saudi Snooker Masters, announced as a ten-year deal with a prize fund matching the World Championship, was cancelled after two editions. The WTA Finals, hosted in Riyadh on a three-year contract that paid out the largest single check in women’s tennis history, will not be renewed beyond 2026. The Next Gen ATP Finals left Jeddah after only three of the planned five editions. The 2029 Asian Winter Games, which were to be held at the still-unbuilt mountain resort of Trojena inside NEOM, were postponed in late January and reassigned to Almaty within a week. Saudi Arabia abandoned its bid for the 2035 Rugby World Cup without filing an expression of interest. PIF sold its seventy percent majority stake in Al-Hilal, the most expensive football club it owned, to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding for two hundred and twenty-four million dollars, a price below the club’s annual wage bill. And then, eleven days later, came the LIV statement.

The reflexive narrative around all of this has been retreat. Saudi Arabia overspent, the oil price didn’t cooperate, the Iran war that broke out in late February 2026 forced a fiscal recalculation, and the kingdom is now pulling back from a sportswashing project that had become embarrassing. Each of those things is partly true. None of them is the actual story.

The actual story is that Saudi Arabia was never buying sports. It was buying optionality. The pullback isn’t a retreat. It is the natural endpoint of a sovereign-wealth strategy that always treated sports as an instrument rather than a destination. And the harder question, the one almost nobody in the sports business is asking yet, is what happens to a global market in which a great many franchise valuations and league deals were quietly underwritten by the assumption that the Saudis would always be there to clear the bid.

The fund, not the fans

You cannot understand what PIF is doing right now without first understanding what PIF actually is, because the popular conception of it has very little to do with the institution itself.

PIF was incorporated in 1971 as a sleepy domestic financing vehicle, the kind of entity that signed off on petrochemical loans and held minority stakes in Saudi banks. It existed for forty-four years without anyone outside the kingdom paying it much attention. The pivot came in March 2015, when oversight was moved from the Ministry of Finance to the newly created Council of Economic and Development Affairs, which Mohammed bin Salman chaired. That single bureaucratic reshuffle is the moment PIF stopped being a sovereign holding company and started becoming the operational arm of Vision 2030. Yasir Al-Rumayyan was installed as governor. Headcount went from roughly fifty staff to approaching four thousand. Assets under management climbed from a hundred and fifty billion dollars in 2015 to nine hundred and thirteen billion at the end of 2024, with Al-Rumayyan telling an audience at the Economic Club of Washington in September 2025 that the figure stood somewhere between nine hundred and twenty-five and nine hundred and forty-five billion.

The growth is real but it is also misleading. A great deal of the 2024 jump came from a single accounting event, the transfer of an additional eight percent of Saudi Aramco from the government to PIF in March of that year. Strip that out and the fund’s investment performance for 2024 was close to flat. Three holdings, Aramco, the utility ACWA Power, and the mining giant Ma’aden, account for roughly forty-six percent of total portfolio value. The headline AUM is, in other words, dominated by a small number of very large domestic equity stakes that PIF did not so much choose as inherit from the Saudi state.

This matters because the fund’s stated allocation is now eighty percent domestic and twenty percent international, the inverse of where it sat five years ago. PIF is not, in any conventional sense, a global investor. It is a domestic transformation vehicle that occasionally writes large international checks when those checks serve a domestic purpose. Al-Rumayyan was unusually candid about this in Washington last September. If PIF deploys capital with foreign asset managers, he said, it expects them to deploy capital back into Saudi Arabia, ideally as co-investors on PIF deals. The international book exists to pull capital and expertise into the kingdom, not to generate diversified returns abroad.

Once you see the fund this way, the sports portfolio looks different. Newcastle United, LIV Golf, the Saudi Pro League, the 2034 World Cup, the Riyadh boxing nights, the Esports World Cup, the WTA Finals deal, the partnership with the ATP, the equity in the gaming holding company Savvy, the minority stake in DAZN, the half-attempted run at Formula One in 2023 that valued the sport at over twenty billion dollars and was waved off by Liberty Media. None of this is sports investing in the sense an Arctos Partners or a CVC Capital Partners would understand the term. It is something closer to an option-buying program, with the underlying asset being the post-oil future of Saudi Arabia itself.

Some of those options were always going to expire worthless. Some were always going to be exercised. The work of the past two years has been the kingdom sorting one from the other.

The fiscal squeeze that forced a sorting

Optionality is a luxury. It requires capital that is patient, plentiful, and, critically, not earmarked for something else. For most of the past decade Saudi Arabia had all three. It does not have all three any more.

Brent crude has been trading in the low sixties for most of 2026. It has not closed above ninety dollars a barrel since August of 2022. The IMF estimates Saudi Arabia’s fiscal break-even oil price at roughly ninety-one dollars; Bloomberg Economics puts the figure at ninety-four for the headline budget and a hundred and eleven once you include PIF’s domestic spending obligations. The 2024 budget deficit was 2.5 percent of GDP. The 2025 deficit, originally budgeted at SAR 101 billion, blew out to SAR 245 billion, or about sixty-five billion dollars, which is 5.3 percent of GDP. Saudi Arabia became the largest emerging-market dollar debt issuer of 2024 by a comfortable margin. PIF launched US and European commercial paper programs in June of 2025, which is the kind of thing a sovereign-wealth fund does when it needs short-term liquidity tools rather than when it is feeling expansive.

The Aramco dividend, which is the single largest cash inflow to PIF, fell from a hundred and twenty-four billion dollars in 2024 to eighty-five and a half billion in 2025, a thirty percent decline. PIF’s share of that drop was roughly six billion dollars in lost annual income, and as the Arab Gulf States Institute observed at the time, that drop arrived at precisely the moment Al-Rumayyan was telling investors he intended to scale annual deployments from forty billion dollars to seventy.

In December 2024, the PIF board met and ordered spending cuts of at least twenty percent across more than a hundred portfolio companies, with some budgets cut by sixty percent and others frozen entirely. PIF officially denies this happened. The Financial Times, Bloomberg, the New York Times, and the Arab Gulf Business Insight have all reported it from independent sources. In August of 2025 the fund took an eight billion dollar write-down on giga-project assets, most of it tied to NEOM. On September 16th, 2025, construction of The Line was formally suspended. In November, the New York Times published a piece quoting eleven people briefed on PIF’s operations who described the fund as running low on cash for new investments and asking asset managers seeking new mandates to help bail out distressed older ones. The fund’s spokesperson said this was “encouragement” rather than a “requirement,” which is the kind of distinction that survives a press call but not a closer reading.

The IMF’s August 2025 Article IV consultation included an annex titled “Learning from Past Hosts: How to Align Saudi Arabia’s Hosting of Large Sports Events with Expectations.” When the Fund starts publishing dedicated annexes about your country’s sports event hosting as a fiscal risk variable, you have moved into a different category of sovereign borrower.

All of this set the stage for what happened on April 15th, 2026, which was the day the PIF board approved a new strategy for the 2026 to 2030 period. The document organizes the fund around three portfolios. The Vision Portfolio covers six domestic ecosystems. The Strategic Portfolio holds key strategic assets and, in the language of the press release, “global champions.” The Financial Portfolio handles international diversification for what PIF now calls “sustainable returns.” Sports does not appear in any of the six named ecosystems. The previous five-year strategy, the one that governed the period of maximum spending, had named sports and entertainment as one of thirteen strategic sectors. The 2026 strategy quietly demoted it. Al-Rumayyan, asked at Cityscape Global to summarize the new posture, offered a sentence that should be read carefully: “We don’t want to approach all investments with the same level of priority.” The Saudi finance minister, Mohammed Al-Jadaan, was even plainer at Davos in January: “Some giga-projects will be scaled down. Some will be delayed.”

This is not the language of sports owners. It is the language of fund managers.

The asymmetry that gives the game away

If the sports pullback were really about fiscal panic or a retreat from sportswashing, you would expect it to be roughly uniform. Cut everywhere, with the deepest cuts where the bleeding is worst. That is not what is happening. What is happening is selective, and the selection criteria reveal more than any official statement.

Look at what is being kept. The 2034 World Cup, with somewhere north of twenty billion dollars committed to stadium construction alone and total infrastructure costs that Knight Frank estimates at over a hundred and fifty billion when transportation upgrades are included. Newcastle United, where Eddie Howe was on television on the first of May saying PIF remained “very ambitious,” even as the club’s stadium redevelopment was punted to a structure that would require a billion pounds of external financing rather than a fresh PIF check. The Qiddiya circuit in Riyadh, which is being built to host Formula One from 2027 onwards. The 2028 Saudi ATP Masters 1000 in Riyadh, which will be the first new Masters 1000 event in the ATP Tour’s thirty-five-year history. The Esports World Cup, which announced a seventy-five-million-dollar prize pool for 2026 in late January. WrestleMania 43 in 2027, which will be the first WrestleMania ever held outside North America. Aramco’s title sponsorship of Formula One, locked in through 2030. The DAZN MENA joint venture, which gives Saudi Arabia influence over the broadcasting of Riyadh Season boxing and the 2025 Club World Cup. Riyadh Season itself, which Turki Al-Sheikh told reporters in April was “100 percent” continuing, with Joshua against Prenga already booked for July.

Now look at what is being cut. LIV Golf, which existed almost entirely outside Saudi Arabia and whose flagship Riyadh event in 2025 averaged twelve thousand viewers on its opening night. The WTA Finals, which sent prize money to foreign players who flew in for a week. The Next Gen ATP Finals in Jeddah. The Saudi Snooker Masters, whose actual tournament was held in Riyadh and Jeddah but whose entire competitive infrastructure lived on the World Snooker Tour calendar in the United Kingdom. The Rugby World Cup bid, which would have required years of foreign-television negotiation for an event Saudi audiences have no particular relationship with. The Asian Winter Games, which were to be held at a ski resort that does not yet exist. Neymar, paid roughly a hundred million dollars a year to play seven games in eighteen months before his contract was terminated by mutual consent in January 2025. The seventy percent of Al-Hilal that was just sold for less than what the club pays its players in a season.

The pattern is not subtle. PIF is keeping the things that build durable assets located in Saudi Arabia, and shedding the things that were essentially operating subsidies to events and athletes located somewhere else. The 2034 World Cup will leave behind ten new stadiums, an expanded airport with three hundred and eighty percent more capacity, a metro system, and decades of tourism inflow. LIV Golf left behind contracts for forty-eight golfers and a TV deal that drew an audience of a hundred and seventy-five thousand on a good Sunday. One of those things compounds. The other one burns.

This is the asymmetry that gives the optionality reading its force. A pure sportswashing portfolio would be doing the opposite of what PIF is doing right now. It would be protecting LIV, because LIV produced years of sustained Western media attention, the bulk of it negative but all of it loud. It would be holding the WTA Finals, because Coco Gauff’s record prize check was a story that travelled. It would not be selling Al-Hilal, because Al-Hilal was the platform that brought Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo to Riyadh in front of cameras. A sportswashing fund protects visibility. A sovereign-wealth fund protects leverage. The visibility assets are going. The leverage assets are staying. That tells you which fund PIF was always running.

It also tells you something about the original strategy that the kingdom’s defenders and critics have both been getting wrong, in opposite directions, for the better part of a decade. The defenders wanted to talk about Vision 2030 and the entertainment economy and the legitimate aspirations of a country whose median citizen is thirty-one years old. The critics wanted to talk about Jamal Khashoggi and Yemen and the pretty obvious fact that buying Newcastle United does not make a kingdom into Norway. Both readings were correct, in their way, and both were incomplete. What sat underneath was simpler and stranger. Saudi Arabia was running a portfolio of bets on how the next thirty years might go, and the sports investments were the most legible part of that portfolio precisely because they were the part outsiders could see. Most of what PIF actually does is invisible. The sports stuff was the public face of an experiment that was never primarily about sports.

Next, we see what happens to the rest of the sports business when the buyer of last resort becomes the seller. The PE funds that have been quietly underwriting valuations for a decade do not work to the same return hurdles PIF did, and a lot of recent prices were paid on the assumption that someone behind them was. The floor moves, but it does not move evenly, and the question of which assets are most exposed turns out to be a more interesting question than the question of why Saudi Arabia changed its mind.

When the Buyer of Last Resort Becomes the Seller

The most interesting number in modern sports finance is one that almost nobody quotes, because it sits in a footnote to a press release issued in January of 2024. Strategic Sports Group, a consortium of American billionaires anchored by Fenway Sports, paid the PGA Tour one and a half billion dollars for an 11.62 percent stake in a newly created entity called PGA Tour Enterprises, with the option to invest up to another one and a half billion. The implied valuation of the whole business was roughly twelve and nine-tenths billion dollars.

That number did not exist three years earlier. Before LIV Golf, no analyst valued the PGA Tour as a standalone business in the ten-billion-dollar range. The Tour was a non-profit member organization that ran a mid-size cable property and printed a respectable but unspectacular amount of money. Then the Saudis showed up with a competing platform, signed Mickelson and Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau and ultimately Jon Rahm, sued the Tour, got countersued, and forced the Tour into a posture of permanent emergency. SSG’s twelve-point-nine-billion-dollar mark is, in important ways, the receipt for that emergency. It is the price the Tour was able to extract from American capital because Saudi capital had established a credible alternative.

This is the thing the sports business has spent five years trying not to think too hard about. A great deal of the recent valuation history of professional sport has been written in reference to a Saudi bid that was either present, recently present, or plausibly forthcoming. PIF did not need to actually buy your team or your tour to affect the price you sold for. It only needed to be the kind of buyer that everyone in the room could imagine showing up. The Saudi ceiling, which most observers treated as the upper bound of what any single asset might fetch, was functioning more like a floor. It was the price below which sellers would not go because they had a credible alternative. With that alternative now disappearing in a series of carefully worded press releases, the question is not whether the floor moves. It is whether the assets that were priced against it can find a new one.

Where the premium was real

It helps to be precise about where the Saudi effect actually existed and where it was always a story people told themselves. Three categories matter, and they behave differently.

The first is direct price-setting, where PIF was an actual bidder or where it created a competing platform that forced a counter-bid. Golf is the cleanest example. SSG’s valuation of PGA Tour Enterprises is not legible without LIV. The same is true of heavyweight boxing purses, which have run at three to five times what Las Vegas and Wembley alone could fund since Riyadh became a regular site. Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk fought twice in 2024 for combined purses that exceeded three hundred and forty million dollars across the two events. Anthony Joshua’s career has been substantially restructured around General Entertainment Authority money. Eddie Hearn, asked recently about the Saudi pullback, said the quiet part: “Saudi, whether we’re talking LIV Tour or other Olympic sports, are looking to cut back, which is fine, providing we’ve got other places to go.”

Formula One belongs in the same category. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain together pay roughly a hundred and fifteen million dollars a year in race-hosting fees, against a calendar in which the historic European races are still trying to hold the line at twenty-five. The Gulf premium has roughly doubled the going rate for a Grand Prix slot. When F1 cancelled both the Saudi and Bahrain races in March of 2026 over the Iran war, Liberty Media’s stock fell about seven percent on the day, and Guggenheim estimated a roughly two-hundred-million-dollar revenue hit and an eighty-million-dollar EBITDA hit from those two cancellations alone. That is what the Gulf actually means to F1’s financial structure, and it is also why no analyst should believe race fees will hold at current levels if Saudi pulls back from a renewed deal in 2030.

Tennis sits here too. The Six Kings Slam in Riyadh paid Jannik Sinner six million dollars for a single exhibition tournament in 2024, the largest single check in the history of the sport. The WTA Finals’ fifteen-million-dollar prize pool, the one Coco Gauff converted into a four-million-dollar payout, was funded by the Saudi hosting deal. So was the proposed two-billion-dollar PIF offer to merge the ATP and WTA tours into a single circuit, which the players’ associations spent six months debating before letting it lapse. Without Saudi money, prize money in tennis simply does not run at those levels. The Six Kings Slam might survive as a Netflix property. The WTA Finals will revert to the modest payouts it offered in Fort Worth in 2023.

The Saudi Pro League sits in this first category in a more complicated way. PIF acquired seventy-five percent stakes in Al-Hilal, Al-Nassr, Al-Ittihad, and Al-Ahli in June of 2023 and proceeded to spend nine hundred and fifty-seven million dollars on transfers in a single summer. That spend established a kind of outside option in the global wage market. Mbappé reportedly turned down a three-hundred-and-thirty-three-million-dollar one-year offer from Al-Hilal. Salah turned down two hundred million for two years. Whether or not those players ever signed, the offers raised the price European clubs had to pay to keep them. Manchester City could justify higher wages because Saudi Arabia could justify higher wages. Real Madrid could justify Mbappé’s Bernabéu salary because Riyadh had named a number first. The Saudi premium did not flow through Saudi clubs alone. It bled into the entire upper end of the global football wage scale.

The second category is indirect ceiling-raising in football transfer markets, where Gulf bids established walk-away prices that owners then used to negotiate with Western buyers. This is the most difficult category to quantify, because the bids in question often did not close.

The Chelsea sale in May of 2022 is the textbook case. The Saudi Media Group, led by Mohamed Alkhereiji, with funding support from Mohammed bin Khalid Al Saud, who chairs Saudi Telecom, tabled a bid of two and seven-tenths billion pounds. They did not advance to the final round. But their presence pushed the upper bound of what Roman Abramovich’s trustees believed they could extract under sanctions pressure, and the Boehly-Clearlake consortium ultimately paid four and a quarter billion pounds. Some of that delta was the fundamental scarcity of trophy Premier League assets. Some of it was the fact that Boehly knew, and the trustees knew Boehly knew, that there was Gulf money behind him in the line.

Manchester United is the same story with a different ending. Sheikh Jassim’s bid for the Glazer family’s holding was reported at over five billion pounds for the entire club, the only offer that valued a soccer team at world-record levels. Sir Jim Ratcliffe ended up buying twenty-five percent at an implied valuation of around six billion. That valuation does not get spoken into existence without Qatar establishing a ceiling first. And yet the Glazers refused to sell the whole club. Family ownership turns out to behave differently than corporate ownership, and the Saudi premium clears walk-away prices for some sellers but not others. The lesson, which the next generation of owners will absorb, is that Gulf money sets ceilings that families sometimes refuse to cross. That is also why Everton’s sale to the Friedkin Group in December 2024 at roughly four hundred and fifty million euros looked so different from any comparable Gulf-courted asset. Everton was a clean, fundamentals-based transaction. PE-style cashflow logic. No Saudi premium because no Saudi interest.

The third category is the one where the Saudi premium was always a fiction, and where the floor will not move at all, because the floor never had anything to do with PIF. Tier-one US franchises sit here. The Lakers sold to Mark Walter’s TWG Global in June of 2025 at a ten-billion-dollar valuation, which is roughly sixteen times revenue, the highest multiple ever paid for an NBA franchise. The Celtics went for six and a tenth billion. The Commanders for six and five-hundredths. The Giants raised capital from the Koch family at a ten-and-a-half-billion-dollar implied valuation. None of these prices were paid because Saudi Arabia might bid. The NBA does not permit sovereign-fund control ownership; the NFL has a similar prohibition. PIF was never in any of these auctions. The valuations are explained, completely, by the new NBA media deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBC, which runs at seven and a half billion dollars a year and rises to roughly two hundred and eighty-one million per team by the back half of the deal. The American premier leagues are insulated by media rights tailwinds that have nothing to do with sovereign wealth. They will hold up perfectly well without it.

This is the analytical move that gets missed in most coverage of the Saudi pullback. There is a tendency to treat the entire sports asset class as one object, with one price curve, exposed to one buyer. It isn’t and it wasn’t. The Saudi premium was real in golf and boxing and F1 hosting and tennis prize money and the upper end of the football wage scale. It was real but indirect in tier-two Premier League sales. And it never reached into NBA, NFL, or top-tier MLB ownership at all.

The IRR problem

So who clears the bid now, and at what price?

The reflexive answer is private equity. It is also the wrong answer, or at least an incomplete one, and the reason matters.

PE-affiliated firms now own stakes in sixty-three major North American teams totalling two hundred and forty-three and eight-tenths billion dollars in enterprise value, according to PitchBook. In the NBA alone, twenty of thirty teams have a PE connection, accounting for roughly seventy-four billion dollars. Arctos Partners closed its second sports fund at four and a tenth billion dollars in 2024 and has stakes in twenty-three franchises including the Warriors, Dodgers, Cubs, Astros, Paris Saint-Germain, and the Aston Martin Formula One team. KKR is in the process of acquiring Arctos, with the deal scheduled to close in 2033. CVC turned a two-billion-dollar investment in F1 into eight and two-tenths billion over a decade and went on to take stakes in LaLiga, Ligue 1, Premiership Rugby, and WTA media rights. RedBird Capital, with twelve billion dollars under management, owns AC Milan and Toulouse and a minority of Liverpool. The institutional money is real and growing.

But it does not work to the same return hurdle PIF did. PE funds need fifteen to twenty-five percent net IRR over seven to twelve year holding periods. Their LPs are pension funds and insurance companies and endowments who are very specifically not interested in helping a country diversify away from oil. PIF had no IRR target on Newcastle. PIF had no exit horizon for its tennis portfolio. When PIF wrote the check for an ATP and WTA merger, it was not modeling DCFs. It was buying a strategic position in a sport that Saudi Arabia wanted to host. The math was simply different.

This is the IRR problem, and it is the heart of what makes the floor question hard. When PE replaces sovereign money as the marginal bidder, the bid has to clear a return hurdle that PIF did not impose. That is mechanically a lower bid. By how much depends on the asset and the cash-flow profile, but in the categories most exposed to the Saudi premium, you would expect compression of somewhere between ten and thirty percent over the next two or three sale cycles. Not a crash. A repricing.

Arctos disputes this read, which is worth taking seriously. The firm publishes an index called RASFI that tracks the value of major sports franchises, and over the period from 2019 to the first quarter of 2025, the index compounded at thirteen and eight-tenths percent annually. That is a rounding error away from the S&P 500’s fourteen and four-tenths over the same window. Arctos argues that fundamentals, not bidder identity, explain the appreciation. EBITDA margins in major leagues have moved from negative one percent in the 1990s to positive ten percent today. Media rights deals keep ratcheting upward. Scarcity is real and structural. Available institutional capital is less than eleven billion dollars against more than two hundred and seventy billion in cumulative value gains across the Big Five leagues since 2019. PE, on this account, did not cause the rally. It merely participated.

The argument is partly right and partly self-interested. Arctos is correct that the macro fundamentals are powerful and that they explain most of the trajectory of US franchise values. But Arctos’s own first fund returned eighty-six and seven-tenths percent net IRR with a 1.15x net multiple, which is to say almost all of the return came from valuation appreciation rather than operational improvement. Some portion of that appreciation came from the same bidding dynamics that delivered the SSG valuation. You cannot eat the Saudi premium on the way up and then claim it never existed on the way down.

The other Gulf funds will partially fill the gap, but they are migrating to a different posture. Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi vehicle with three hundred and fifty-eight billion dollars under management, anchored a ten-billion-dollar syndicated investment in Mark Walter’s TWG Global in 2025. TWG owns the Lakers, the Dodgers, a stake in Chelsea, the Cadillac F1 team, and a piece of the women’s hockey league. Mubadala took a two and a half billion dollar minority stake in Mubadala Capital and a roughly nine percent stake in Raine Group itself. That is sports investing of a very different shape than what PIF was doing. It is passive minority capital allocated through professional intermediaries, not active strategic ownership. Mubadala’s representatives describe the fund as commercially driven and return-focused. They are not buying soft power. They are buying access to GP-led deals at scale.

Qatar is the same story in a different language. QSI owns one hundred percent of PSG. QIA holds five percent of Monumental Sports, a stake in Fanatics, and roughly four percent of Audi via Volkswagen, which gives it indirect exposure to the new Audi-Sauber Formula One project. Sheikh Jassim is reportedly looking at Tottenham. The UAE has a separate twenty-five-billion-dollar partnership with TPG Sports and Rory McIlroy’s Symphony Ventures, which is essentially a private equity vehicle with a Gulf anchor.

This is the substitution that is happening, and it is mostly a substitution of style rather than dollar volume. PE-style money replacing strategic money. Return hurdles replacing strategic mandates. Minority stakes replacing control positions. The dollars will be there. The willingness to pay above intrinsic value, which is what the Saudi premium ultimately was, will not be.

Where the floor settles

Map this onto specific assets and you can see roughly where the new equilibrium will land.

PGA Tour Enterprises is locked. SSG paid one and a half billion dollars in cash and the valuation is contractually anchored. If LIV folds, the implied valuation may drift down at the next strategic event, but the floor under the Tour is set by media rights and the fan base, not by Saudi pressure. The Tour will be fine. LIV is harder to predict. The April 30th statement points to a sale process led by an independent board under Gene Davis and Jon Zinman. The most likely outcomes, in descending order of probability, are a fire sale to a strategic investor at a fraction of capital invested, a dramatic shrinkage to a tour-within-a-tour model, or an outright wind-down. A clean merger with the PGA Tour, the outcome everyone in golf has been negotiating toward for three years, is now the least likely of the available paths.

Heavyweight boxing site fees will compress materially. Riyadh Season has been the platform for almost every meaningful heavyweight fight of the past three years, and the purses on offer have been roughly double what any other single market could sustain. With Turki Al-Sheikh insisting publicly that boxing is “100 percent” continuing and Joshua-Prenga booked for July, the immediate calendar is fine. But the long-term question is whether GEA continues to underwrite full purses for foreign fighters in foreign weight classes, or whether boxing reverts to the more fragmented economics of the pre-Riyadh era. The latter looks more probable than the former. Heavyweight purses ten years from now will likely look more like heavyweight purses ten years ago than they do today.

F1 race fees outside the calendar’s premium European slots are the next exposure. The Gulf circuit pays fifty-five million dollars a race against a Silverstone-class fee of about twenty-five. If Saudi does not renew its deal in 2030, or renews at a discount, the comparable rate for new circuits trying to enter the calendar will reset downward. Liberty Media will not enjoy this. Existing host countries that have been paying premium fees on the assumption that there is always a Gulf bidder behind them will negotiate harder. The race calendar will continue to expand, but the prices will not.

Tier-two Premier League clubs are the most ambiguous category and probably the most exposed in absolute dollar terms. The Newcastle takeover at three hundred and five million pounds in 2021 looks like an obvious bargain in retrospect. The valuations of Aston Villa, West Ham, Crystal Palace, Brighton, Wolves, and Everton have all risen on the implicit assumption that there is a Gulf-style bidder somewhere behind any future sale. That assumption was real in 2022 and 2023. It is now substantially weaker. Mubadala-style indirect exposure may emerge as a partial substitute, but it does not function the way active sovereign ownership does. The next sale of a top-half Premier League club, when it comes, will probably price twenty to forty percent below where the same asset would have priced two years ago.

Saudi-hosted prestige events will collapse without the host fee. The WTA Finals in Riyadh paid out fifteen million in prize money. Without that, the event reverts to something like its 2023 economics, which were a third of that. The same applies to the Esports World Cup if PIF ever decides to scale Savvy back the way it scaled back NEOM. Boxing site fees in Riyadh, if Turki’s optimism does not survive the next budget cycle, will halve.

And then, for completeness, the assets that are not exposed at all. American premier leagues. NFL, NBA, the top of MLB. The new NBA media deal alone is worth more than the entire Saudi sports portfolio combined, and it pays out to teams whose ownership structure deliberately excludes sovereign wealth. These valuations will continue to do whatever the media rights cycle and the broader equity market do, which has very little to do with Riyadh.

What this changes

The moment in front of us is, if you squint, a pricing reset rather than a crisis. The sports business has spent half a decade quietly assuming that there was always one more bidder behind the bidder, and that the bidder had a balance sheet whose constraints were geopolitical rather than financial. That assumption has been falsifying itself in slow motion since the December 2024 PIF board meeting, and it crystallized into something undeniable in the three weeks of April 2026 that took us from the new strategy document to the Al-Hilal sale to the snooker cancellation to the LIV statement.

What replaces it is a more conventional capital market. Private equity bids with IRR targets. Family offices bidding for trophy assets at family-office prices. Other sovereigns, but with mandates that look more like Mubadala’s return-focused passive minority approach than PIF’s strategic active ownership. The dollar volume will be similar. The premium will not.

Saudi Arabia did not really change its mind about sports. It changed its mind about which options were still worth holding. The 2034 World Cup, locked in by FIFA contracts and stadium commitments worth a hundred and fifty billion dollars, is too expensive to abandon and too valuable as a tourism platform to want to. Newcastle is profitable, reaching the Champions League, and now generating four hundred million pounds in annual revenue, which makes it an asset rather than a subsidy. Qiddiya is a Saudi-located F1 facility with a thirty-year operating life. The 2028 ATP Masters in Riyadh is the first new Masters event in thirty-five years and brings the global tennis calendar to Saudi Arabia in perpetuity. The Esports World Cup is a domestic gathering of foreign talent, the model Saudi has been refining since the first Riyadh Season. WrestleMania 43 in Riyadh in 2027 is the same idea applied to wrestling.

These are durable assets. They generate tourism, they justify infrastructure spending, they bring foreign capital into Saudi Arabia rather than sending Saudi capital out. They are, in the language Yasir Al-Rumayyan now prefers, consistent with the current phase of PIF’s investment strategy.

Everything else, on closer inspection, was an option. Some of those options paid off. Newcastle paid off. The 2034 World Cup will pay off. The ATP Masters will pay off. Some did not. LIV did not. The WTA Finals did not. The Snooker Masters did not. Neymar at a hundred million dollars a year for seven games did not. The expiring options are being allowed to expire. The exercised options are being held. This is not the behavior of a sportswasher caught short by oil prices. It is the behavior of a fund manager re-rating a portfolio.

The harder question is for everyone else. The sports business has been pricing assets, contracts, and rights deals for years on the assumption that the Saudis represented a credible exit at the top of the market. They did, until they did not. Anyone whose business plan or franchise valuation has the Saudi bid embedded in it as a tail-risk hedge needs to do the work of figuring out who replaces them, and at what discount. The private equity funds will be there. They will not be paying the same prices.

The buyer of last resort has become the seller. The market is going to find out, in 2026 and 2027 and the years after, what it was actually worth without that buyer in it. The early evidence, in the form of Al-Hilal selling for less than its annual wage bill and LIV being unwound rather than merged, is that the answer is meaningfully less than it looked two years ago. Not catastrophically less. Just enough to remind everyone who priced in a Saudi ceiling that ceilings are usually floors in disguise.

The slow pitch arrives, every now and again. The hitter’s job is to recognize it before it lands.

-end.

Sources include the Public Investment Fund, the International Monetary Fund's 2025 Article IV consultation on Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Ministry of Finance, KPMG's Saudi Arabia Budget Report 2026, Fitch Ratings, Moody's, and S&P Global; reporting by the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Associated Press, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, the Athletic, Front Office Sports, Sportico, Sports Business Journal, Sportcal, Al Jazeera, the BBC, Sky Sports, Golf Channel, Golf Digest, Golf Monthly, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, Yahoo Sports, Variety, the Manila Times, and Arab News; specialist coverage from the Arab Gulf Business Insight, the Arab Gulf States Institute, Middle East Briefing, the Atlantic Council, the American Enterprise Institute, the Middle East Institute, Sports Politika, House of Saud, and Money in Sport; financial and franchise-valuation analysis from PitchBook, Deloitte, Knight Frank, Guggenheim Partners, Arctos Partners, and Matchday Finance; expert commentary from Simon Chadwick of SKEMA Business School, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen of Rice University's Baker Institute, Karen Young, Steffen Hertog, Bernard Haykel of Princeton, Mohammed Soliman of the Middle East Institute, and Karim Zidan; and primary documentation from the PGA Tour, the ATP, the WTA, FIFA, Liberty Media, DAZN, Savvy Games Group, the Esports World Cup Foundation, World Snooker Tour, and Newcastle United's published financial accounts.