SBJ Unpacks: Honoring John Henry’s ‘all in’ philosophy

Tonight in Unpacks: SBJ’s Lifetime Achievement Award honoree for 2026 is John Henry, who grew Fenway Sports into a company with a vast, transformational impact throughout the industry, reports SBJ’s Bill King in this week’s magazine.

Also tonight:

• Playfly hires longtime MLB exec Chris Marinak as president
• Korn Ferry signs sponsorship deal for LA28
• TGL views flexibility as an asset
• Op-ed: Why sports is playing an increasingly central role in American life

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour discusses UFC CEO Dana White’s pledge that taxpayers won’t foot the bill for the planned bout at the White House, Walmart’s sponsorship of a weekly MLS game, the PGA Tour and ESPN putting some muscle behind Brooks Koepka’s return and more.

The founders of Fenway Sports Group were in their fourth or fifth meeting to discuss whether to purchase then-distressed Liverpool FC when principal owner John Henry shifted from skeptical shopper to determined buyer.

“I wasn’t sure it was something that was even remotely of interest to him,” said Sam Kennedy, CEO of FSG and the Boston Red Sox, who was a Sox executive vice president at the time. “And then, all of a sudden, he blurted out — ‘OK, we’re going to do this. But we’re only going to do this if we’re committed to overtaking Manchester United as the biggest football club in English soccer.’

“That’s what he does. He studies, he listens, and then — we’re all in.”

Thirty-seven years after purchasing the Class AAA Tucson Toros, Henry is “all in” on a dizzying array of assets that have spanned five sports and an ocean.

His $150 million purchase of the Florida Marlins in 1998 turned into a majority stake in a well-regarded group that purchased the Boston Red Sox, Fenway Park and 80% of regional sports network NESN for $660 million in 2002. Five years and one vanquished curse later, they expanded into NASCAR, taking a 50% stake in Roush Racing. Then came Liverpool and its fabled stadium, Anfield, acquired in 2010.

In 2021, they added controlling interest in the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins. In 2023, they moved into golf as owners of the Boston franchise in TMRW Sports’ TGL, launched by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. For the last two years, Henry has led a consortium of investors that has committed as much as $3 billion to reshape the PGA Tour.

For that vast, often transformational impact, Henry will receive Sports Business Journal’s Lifetime Achievement Award for 2026. He will be honored at the Sports Business Awards on May 20 in New York City.

“We talk about Fenway Sports Group being one of one, this collection of assets,” Kennedy said. “He really is one of one.”

The son of soybean farmers, Henry grew up listening to Cardinals games on the radio and playing tabletop baseball games. He built his wealth trading commodities futures, founding an investment firm known for its hedge funds.

Fascinated with baseball and its numbers, Henry took steps to get closer to it. He followed his purchase of the Tucson club with an investment in the over-35 Senior League, a short-lived, Florida-based winter league. In 1991, he secured a 1% stake as a limited partner in the New York Yankees.

When Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga put the team up for sale after failing to secure public funding for a new ballpark, Henry graduated to the big leagues. He held on to the Marlins for three seasons until, stymied on a deal for a new ballpark, he too put the club on the block.

Encouraged by others in MLB to remain in ownership even if it meant switching teams, Henry considered the then-Anaheim Angels before turning his attention to a group fronted by Larry Lucchino, a longtime club president who was assembling an effort to buy the Red Sox.

Henry joined Lucchino and former San Diego Padres owner Tom Werner in an ownership triad that was undeniably long on industry experience and connections. The most common question was whether they could share a sandbox.

The three quickly became close friends.

“John is the most collaborative owner or business person you’ve ever met,” Kennedy said. “He wants different views. Different opinions. He does not need to be the loudest voice in the room. I’ve seen it time and time again — in baseball settings, in international football settings, in PGA Tour settings, National Hockey League — people literally waiting for him to speak. He’s one of these guys where they’re sitting there wondering, ‘What does John think?’ He’s fine listening and learning and registering what’s happening around him.”

His touch has proved restorative, and at times transformative. The Red Sox have won four World Series under his stewardship, the most of any club during that span. Said to be destined for demolition when he acquired the team, Fenway Park stands as a beacon of ballpark preservation.

In 2020, Liverpool finished atop the Premier League table for the first time in 30 years. Last season, it won again. It won the Champions League in 2019 and lost in the final in 2022. As with the Red Sox, Henry has managed to do it while renovating, rather than leveling, a historic stadium that has been the club’s home since 1892.

“It’s been 24 years and the partnership is still going strong,” Kennedy said. “But I will also tell you, he’s in charge. And it’s clear. Everybody knows it. He is the ultimate authority in every way. But he doesn’t need to tell you that or remind you of that or make that clear.

“You know. You just know.”

Playfly Sports has hired longtime MLB executive Chris Marinak to serve as the company’s new president and report directly to CEO Craig Sloan. Marinak, an SBJ Forty Under 40 Hall of Famer who spent 17 years in the MLB office, left the league last month and most recently served as its chief operations and strategy officer. TurnkeyZRG assisted Playfly with the search.

Marinak, who will begin his role on March 2 and remain based in N.Y., will have six direct reports at Playfly, including the three main divisions (media; sponsorship; and advisory and services) plus global partnership sales, business development and international business. All commercial units will be under his purview. Asked about what attracted him to Playfly, Marinak talked about the company’s reach, which includes over 250 partners in sports. “I’m not sure there’s another place where I could have this level of impact,” he said. “You can reach every single basketball, baseball, hockey team. You can have an impact in college, you can have an impact in other professional sports. And to me, that’s just really compelling.”

Sloan, who has been Playfly CEO for two years, was looking to fill this position as the company continues to be in “build mode” after just five years of existence. “It was pretty clear that we were going to have to be able to add additional executive horsepower,” he said. Playfly will also look to Marinak to bring his vast experience with data to this new role. At MLB, he oversaw fan-facing tech (including MLB.com and MLB.tv), ticketing operations and the creation of the schedule. Now, Marinak sees a lot of opportunity for data solutions at the university level. “When Craig and I were talking about the opportunities for Playfly and Playfly’s clients, particularly when you start looking at the college level, that is probably one of the biggest opportunities in sports right now,” he said.

Marinak’s MLB duties also encompassed international and special events, including the MLB World Tour and World Baseball Classic. At Playfly, international growth will be a key goal for Marinak as well. “Playfly already has a great start with their European business,” he said. “There’s a lot we can do to grow that both in Europe and then in other parts of the world. And so that’ll be another area that I think I can really spend a lot of time on trying to develop and build.”

LA28 is adding another sponsor at its highest level, signing consulting firm Korn Ferry as the organizing committee’s official talent and organizational consulting partner. The deal will see Korn Ferry, which LA28 used to hire its CEO Reynold Hoover, working with organizers to hire and onboard the more than 4,000 employees LA28 will need for the Games.

The deal is the first new sponsorship announced in 2026 after the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Properties -- the joint venture between LA28 and the USOPC -- added 15 new sponsors and crossed the $2B mark last year.

Korn Ferry becomes the seventh founding partner, LA28’s highest level of sponsorship. It joins Delta and Comcast -- who joined in 2020 and 2021, respectively -- and four sponsors added last year in Honda, Starbucks, Google and Intuit.

Sophomore seasons are periods of adjustment for any startup league, and TGL is no exception. The novel concept from co-founders Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Mike McCarley hit on some key viewership goals in Year 1 in 2025, when it drew younger audiences and bigger numbers than what media partner ESPN had in similar windows the year prior.

Now, TGL has one eye on navigating Year 2 and another on monitoring its future media prospects. A few matches into the new season, the league continues to hover around a half-million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC. That’s on par with what the league ended with last season.

“We got off to a good start,” McCarley said, “and I think some of the things that we’re still working through — and ESPN has been a very good thought partner on this — are when you do have the opportunity to be flexible on the schedule given the PGA Tour schedule. When are times that could be opportunistic for us to try and find the right audience? And I think we are very willing to experiment.”

But that flexibility has some drawbacks. One area TGL fans want improvement on is consistency with TV windows. The league started this season on a weekend on ABC opposite the NFL. Then there are Mondays vs. Tuesdays or ESPN vs. ESPN2. Also, some windows start at 5 pm ET, while others begin at 7 pm or 9 pm ET.

“One of the reasons why we designed the competitive format the way we did was that a two-hour format for a television window is interchangeable with any basketball game,” said McCarley, whose league in 2025 took the slots of many of those college basketball games in the same windows two years ago. “The audience is finding TGL, and the audience is coming back.”

Getting in on the ground floor

Matt Barrie, the voice of the TGL, is no stranger to ESPN’s golf programming, having done work around the Masters and other majors. When he saw that Woods, McIlroy and other marquee names were going to be a part of TGL, he knew he was in.

“I was trying to wrap my head around what it was and what it was going to be, and then I saw some of the names attached and I said, ‘All right, these are very successful people who don’t like losing,’” Barrie told SBJ. “I knew where the sport was headed. Simulators. Topgolf. Some of the other places that I knew the golf had started trying to venture into for a younger demographic and I thought it was cool. ... To be a part of a startup was probably the most fascinating part. It’s very, very difficult nowadays to be a part of something new, creating a new league, essentially creating a new sport. And so, I was jumping in full body just to be a part of something that no one had ever done before.”

Up next?

TGL’s deal with ESPN on the men’s side is up after this year, and McCarley notes the relationship has been solid. To that point, ESPN senior brass — including Jimmy Pitaro, Burke Magnus and Roz Durant — all stayed after the CFP National Championship to take in the TGL match the following night, along with a number of folks from CAA, who are advising TGL on its media strategy.

With a women’s version of the league set to launch after the 2026 LPGA season, TGL is also in the hunt for a rights partner there. “We’ve been in pretty good conversations with a lot of different potential partners over the last couple months, and I think we have a pretty good sense this spring where we think that’ll land,” said McCarley, who noted a number of suitors have already come to the facility to take in a match.

Beyond men’s and women’s matches, TGL also lends itself well to the idea of crossover opportunities or celebrity matches. “It’s never too early to start talking about it, but I think we are focused on delivering what it is that we’ve signed up to deliver with our partners at the PGA Tour and our partners at the LPGA and the players,” McCarley said. “Are there opportunities for more and other types of formats down the road? Of course there are, but right now we have a good business.”

The Bills will demolish the 53-year-old Highmark Stadium by March 2027, leaving a large expanse of land adjacent to the team’s training center facility and HQ, across a street from the new $2.2 billion venue.

Once demolition is completed, the former stadium site will be transferred from Erie County to the Erie County Stadium Corporation, which will then be leased to the Bills. As part of a 30-year lease for the new stadium (beginning this year), the team could redevelop the former stadium site.

Bills President of Business Operations Pete Guelli told me there are no plans to move the training facility or team HQ, making the old stadium site an appealing mixed-use development prospect. The main question he and the Bills are beginning to ponder: What are the opportunities over there, and how do they connect to the new stadium?

The very earliest thinking is that it could be a destination-oriented development.

Orchard Park is a 20-minute drive south of downtown Buffalo and could — without a detailed feasibility study to support this claim — almost certainly use more hotel rooms. The town of Orchard Park recently relaxed its hotel height restrictions in a move that should benefit any future Bills’ plans.

The stadium’s capacity is more limited than its predecessor, likely growing the number of people interested in the team and the stadium that are unable to get game tickets. The Bills’ fan base, like many others, includes a large number of people that come to the stadium site on game days without tickets, only to tailgate and hang out in the parking lot. The Bills and Legends Global plan to stand up a stadium tour business, and development across the street could support that during the week. A juiced-up team hall of fame exhibit and store make sense, too.

“Being a Bills fan and coming to Orchard Park has almost become a pilgrimage, so how do we play on that?” Guelli said.

The Bills have a team of people scouting other mixed-use properties, including visiting Green Bay for the NFL Draft this year to study Titletown, a place somewhat similar to Orchard Park.

“Can we come up with a plan where they work together, and this becomes more of a year-round destination?” Guelli said. “I think we can.”

At a time when coming together across cultural or political differences is increasingly difficult, sports has emerged as the primary way Americans experience unity — more than religion, music, or entertainment. These findings come from a nationally representative Kantar U.S. MONITOR study of 2,000 adults ages 18-plus, fielded Nov. 12-23, offering a timely read on how Americans connect, gather, and consume culture today.

New data shows that Americans are more likely to identify sports and sporting events as the activities that best create a sense of shared experience across social, cultural, and political lines. In a fragmented environment, sports now performs a disproportionate share of the connective work once carried by traditional institutions.

What best creates shared experience/sense of unity (% selecting each)

Sports takes center stage

Sports ranking above religion on this measure reflects a broader cultural shift: Americans increasingly find their most consistent shared experiences through sports rather than through traditional institutions. This aligns with long-term declines in participation; weekly religious attendance has fallen from roughly 40% in the early 2000s to the mid-20s today, reducing built-in communal touchpoints. Sports now fills more of that space, offering shared narratives and recurring events that synchronize attention at scale.

Sports fill the void, particularly among men

Despite rising appeal among women, sports fandom still skews male. Men are significantly more likely to identify as sports fans (77% vs. 52% of women) and significantly more likely to view sports as a unifying force (37% vs. 21%). With many traditional sources of male community — religious attendance, civic groups, fraternal organizations — receding, sports increasingly provides the structure and belonging those institutions once supplied.

Sports fandom rises amid cultural upheaval

These dynamics are strengthened by expanding interest overall. Sixty-four percent of Americans now identify as sports fans, up from 55% in 2020. In a fragmented media landscape, sports is one of the few arenas growing in reach and relevance — reinforcing its role as a primary source of shared experience.

Sports fandom has risen during a period of institutional volatility and declining trust. In the post-pandemic era — defined by more time spent alone, more people living solo, and more fragmented routines — sports delivers something increasingly scarce: excitement, escape, and the energy of crowds. Just as importantly, it offers predictability and ritual at a time when much else in culture feels uncertain.

Why Americans show up for big moments

Men are more likely to watch out of inherent fandom (32% vs. 16% for women), while women are more likely to cite entertainment and spectacle (25% vs. 17%). Across the population, motivations cluster around features that naturally generate shared attention:

Reasons Americans watch major events

• Inherent fandom: 24% (men 32%, women 16%)
• Entertainment & spectacle: 21% (women 25%)
• Unpredictable live moments: 21%
• National pride: 19%
• Social interaction: 15%
• “Everyone’s watching” feeling: 14%

FOMO drives youth engagement

Half of Americans (50%) say that when they skip the Super Bowl, Olympics, or World Cup, they feel they’ve missed out on being part of something everyone experienced together. This sports-driven FOMO is especially strong among millennials (62%) and Gen Z adults.

These “moments that matter” stand out because they’ve become rarer. More people live alone, spend more time on their own, and are single by choice — shrinking the number of natural gathering moments in daily life. Against that backdrop, major sporting events act as instant community: They pull people into a shared timeline and create a sense of belonging that everyday routines deliver less often. For younger adults especially, sports remains one of the most reliable ways to feel part of something bigger, in real time.

Sports are the best vehicle for mass audiences

Interest in major events shows a clear hierarchy. The Super Bowl remains the most broadly engaging shared moment in American culture, followed by the Olympics. Other major events — including the Oscars and the 2026 FIFA World Cup — attract lower but still strategically meaningful mass reach in a landscape where true scale is increasingly rare.

Interest in major events (very/somewhat interested)

The takeaway

As other cultural rituals fade, sports has moved to the center of American life. It is now one of the most dependable ways to reach a large, diverse, and brand-safe audience in moments of genuine engagement. Men rely on sports for community, women increasingly participate through shared spectacle, and younger generations respond strongly to FOMO-driven participation. Major events — especially the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the coming World Cup — remain among the few moments capable of convening the country at scale. For brands and rights holders, the message is clear: Sports has become the most reliable venue for broad cultural connection in an increasingly volatile era.

Ryan McConnell is executive vice president and head of Kantar Sports MONITOR, a data-backed service that helps brands keep up with the modern sports fan.

• MLS will highlight a marquee match each Saturday on Apple TV during the 2026 season with Walmart Saturday Showdown, the most prominent activation yet of the multiyear deal Walmart signed last summer as a sponsor of MLS and Leagues Cup, reports SBJ’s Alex Silverman.
• Silverman also notes that the USL revealed new details about the Division I men’s professional soccer league and promotion-and-relegation system, with an eye on a 2028 launch.
• The Chiefs narrowed their architect search for their new stadium in Kansas to Manica and Populous, writes SBJ’s Bret McCormick.
• The Portland Fire reached a deal with fintech company Chime to be a jersey patch sponsor as the WNBA expansion franchise plans for its debut 2026 season, notes SBJ’s Tom Friend.
• Range Sports is acquiring N.Y.-based live event and experiential marketing agency Superfly, its sixth acquisition since its 2022 founding, reports SBJ’s Terry Lefton.
• Australian Open officials made headlines for requesting players such as Aryna Sabalenka, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner take off their Whoop devices during matches. The exact reason remains unclear, writes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.
• The CW is making its foray into tennis, signing a deal for broadcast rights to the MGM Slam on March 1 from T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas as the event expands to eight players this year, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp.