SBJ Unpacks: Main Street could finish NBA, NHL seasons

Tonight in Unpacks: Main Street Sports Group remains poised to lose its nine MLB teams, but that could give the beleaguered company the flexibility it needs to pay reduced rights fees to NBA and NHL teams for the rest of this season, sources tell SBJ’s Tom Friend.

Also tonight:

• TKO, Paramount come out swinging amid investor scrutiny
• FIFA’s training site deals ensure commercial control, limits costs
• PGA Tour, ESPN upping bet-focused stream eightfold
• Indiana’s CFP title merch keeps pace with Michigan’s record

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour wraps up the week with Fox Sports’ heavy load of FIFA World Cup games, NBC assembling its MLB broadcast team with the hiring of Anthony Rizzo, NFL stars such as Vikings TE T.J. Hockenson and 49ers TE George Kittle backing a curling league and more.

With nine MLB teams still likely poised to abandon Main Street Sports Group, three sources said Friday their exit could actually create financial flexibility for Main Street to avoid immediate liquidation and pay NBA and NHL teams reduced rights fees the remainder of this season.

“What is bad from MLB might be good for us,” said an NBA and NHL team source asking for anonymity due to the sensitivity around the topic, which has many industry stakeholders on edge.

The freed-up and redirected MLB money could lead to a wind down of Main Street’s business in April rather than a last-resort Chapter 7 filing next week, although the rights fees paid to NBA and NHL teams the rest of this season are still expected to drop, sources said, somewhere between 20% or beyond.

Main Street declined comment Friday afternoon.

Because Main Street would then cease to exist after April, those NBA and NHL teams would still need to find local broadcast solutions for at least next season -- a one-year bridge scenario until, in the NBA’s case, it is expected to launch a national streaming RSN for the 2027-28 season.

Sources Friday continued to maintain that the nine MLB teams (Braves, Reds, Tigers, Royals, Angels, Marlins, Brewers, Cardinals and Rays) are virtually certain to break away from Main Street, if they haven’t already. The company’s 20 NBA and NHL teams expect to hear next week if that freed-up money will allow Main Street to keep its promise -- in the event of a wind down -- to broadcast games the rest of the season and pay abbreviated rights fees.

As of now, the next set of payments for those 20 teams (the Hawks, Hornets, Cavaliers, Pistons, Pacers, Clippers, Grizzlies, Heat, Bucks, T’Wolves, Thunder, Magic and Spurs from the NBA and Hurricanes, Red Wings, Kings, Wild, Predators, Blues and Blue Jackets from the NHL) are due this Sunday, Feb. 1. Main Street missed its Jan. 1 payments, and the cure period to reimburse those teams has already passed -- meaning the 20 teams could technically leave for other broadcast groups.

However, the lure of the rights fees -- even if reduced -- has NBA and NHL teams willing to accept the wind-down scenario, with sources saying the teams prefer Main Street remain viable at least through this season.

TKO Group Holdings and Paramount Skydance Corp. feel good about the start to their new alliance in combat sports, but the sides still appear to have plenty of work to make the deal pay off in the long term.

From Las Vegas, the Paramount+ streaming service aired the first Zuffa Boxing card on Jan. 23 and UFC 324 on Jan. 24. The sides reported an average minute audience of 4.96 million viewers for UFC 324 in the U.S. and Latin America, and mobile app analytics platform Sensor Tower told Sports Business Journal that its data shows 600,000 downloads of Paramount+ that day and 1 million over the two-day weekend. The signups on Saturday were up 150% from the prior day, Sensor Tower said.

UFC has become one of Paramount Skydance’s first big gambles in its new ownership era, as the legacy media company works to become a modern-day entertainment behemoth.

Michael Morris, senior managing director and equity research analyst of media and internet at Guggenheim Securities, said Paramount Skydance is using the seven-year, $1.1 billion per-annum investment in UFC to help age down and diversify its audience. He noted that investors are paying appropriate attention to the significant outlay, but he also said the return on investment won’t come from just one successful night.

“The investment Paramount made in UFC is specifically intended to complement the big broadcast business that arguably over indexes to older viewers. The company wants to get younger, they want to have more male viewers, and they want to make sure they’re diversifying their offering to sports fans outside of the NFL season, each of which supports growth at Paramount+. The reported strong audience level and healthy number of Paramount+ signups are both good starts for the product,” Morris told SBJ. “But I think in the grand scheme of things, the number of say 1 million signups is not the ultimate goal. I think they want to continue to grow and build on this — so I would say it was a start but not a crossing of the finish line.”

The weekend began with the debut of TKO’s boxing product, which it is running in conjunction with Sela, a company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. A couple hundred people were on-site at the UFC’s Meta Apex for the Zuffa Boxing card, with UFC President and CEO Dana White saying afterward that the fights were “great” but have “a lot of work to do.”

TKO is trying to build its boxing property from scratch by signing largely rising fighters instead of established superstars, as it attempts to reset a market that White has long said is broken and filled with what he derisively calls “going-out-of-business sales.” Viewership figures for the Zuffa Boxing card were not shared.

TKO is in the middle of backing proposed legislation in Congress, which regulates boxing, that would allow for a new model to be introduced to the sport. The bill recently passed a subcommittee in the House, and the next step will be to take it to the floor for a broader vote. White told SBJ that TKO was “obviously very excited and pumped up about the vote,” but he didn’t know when it would advance to the House floor, and that he hasn’t asked President Donald Trump whether he will sign the bill if it passes.

White said Zuffa Boxing will resemble one of the other combat properties he founded, Power Slap, in that it will start by holding events at the Meta Apex but eventually move to other venues, potentially on the Vegas Strip. He said he is in talks with MGM Resorts International and Caesars about bringing Power Slap to their venues after the property’s current deal with the Fontainebleau Las Vegas expires, “so I would expect boxing to be the same.”

One of the headlines from the new deal with Paramount was the network agreeing to do away with pay-per-views for UFC’s numbered events. Under the prior deal with ESPN+, a double paywall existed, with PPVs priced near $80 a unit. Now, numbered events can be viewed with a Paramount+ subscription, monthly ($8.99) or annually ($89.99). The cost of watching every UFC event has dropped dramatically for viewers, something White thinks will help bring in new fans. The sides have said some number of UFC events also will air on the CBS linear TV channel, but White told SBJ they are still deciding how many.

“Yeah, I think we’re going to pick up a lot of new fans, a lot of fans that fell off [who] couldn’t afford it,” White said. “But as far as the [illegal] streaming type guys go, I don’t know, I don’t give a shit about them. … The cost for the UFC for the year is less than a pay-per-view was last year, and when you pay that, you get so much more — you get everything UFC, plus you get all their television shows, movies. I mean, you should buy Paramount+ right now just for ‘Landman’ and ‘MobLand,’ let alone UFC."

Paramount’s stock dropped about 18% over the last month, to $11.01 a share at press time. But that has come amid its much-publicized and pricey pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount+ reached more than 6 million daily active users on the day of the UFC fight, 55% more than the prior day, according to Sensor Tower. U.S. website visits for Paramount+ were up 100% on fight day from the previous day.

Paramount said late last year that Paramount+ has about 80 million subscribers, and it has described the direct-to-consumer service as its top priority. Still, Paramount paid roughly double what ESPN did to license UFC’s media rights, and Paramount investors are likely to keep a close eye on the deal to see if the network is able to properly monetize it. On the night of the UFC fight, social media was filled with complaints about what some fans felt was a heavy ad load, including ads during the fighters’ walk-outs.

TKO’s stock is down 9% over the last month to $195.82 a share at press time.

“Distribution of UFC content is seeing a pivot in the monetization structure from pay-per-view to a more broadly available structure on Paramount+. For fans who didn’t mind the cost of pay-per-view in exchange for an experience without ad interruptions, I understand the complaint of additional advertising interruptions,” Morris said. “But that is not the fan base in its totality and so I think No. 1, there’s going to be a trade-off in terms of how consumers compensate the company for the product and it’s not surprising for that to come with some friction.

“And No. 2, I would expect Paramount to continue to fine-tune the approach to advertising and to monetization. I think they’ve done a very good job across their other sports properties in terms of balancing that.”

Paramount promoted the UFC relationship heavily in the buildup to its debut, something that caught White’s attention. The network also has started cross-promoting between its scripted series and movies and UFC, with a costumed character from the next installment of the “Scream” movie franchise following some of the fighters during their walk-outs and exits during UFC 324.

The network also has already added a UFC hub to the service with an archive of past fights, and it quickly uploaded UFC 324’s fights for subscribers to watch as well.

“I think investors are always sensitive to large expense commitments and have a lot of focus on how any media company is driving return on those investments. That certainly applies to this investment from Paramount, and it applies to just about every other sports contract you can think of across every other partner,” Morris said. “It’s not exceptional in that regard.

“Now the magnitude of the step-up in rights cost does put attention on this, and you have a new ownership and management team, you have the potential for a further structural change from here. So it is one of several inputs that I think investors are considering when they evaluate the company and stock idea. This particular investment does matter in terms of that analysis, but I wouldn’t characterize it as over-concerned or excessive concern. I’d call it an appropriate level of consideration.”

American cities and institutions are eager to be part of the first World Cup on U.S. soil since 1994, a dynamic FIFA has used to apply contractual terms that tilt heavily in its favor.

The terms of its training site rental agreements, two of which have been obtained by Sports Business Journal, are the latest example of this dynamic.

The contracts, which FIFA said reflect a “template agreement” that can be tweaked for “each tournament, training site and use,” grant soccer’s governing body the same level of strict control over commercial branding that it will have at stadiums. FIFA also can hold ticketed events and sell merchandise at training sites, rights it may grant to the national federation using the facility. In return, facility operators receive low-six-figure rental fees while remaining responsible for staffing, utilities and ongoing maintenance costs during a use period that can stretch up to two months.

Based on public documents, FIFA is expected to spend roughly $12 million to $16 million on rental fees for team training sites across all 48 participating federations. That figure does not include venue-specific or referee training sites, but it underscores the relatively modest investment FIFA is making in training infrastructure compared with a World Cup budget measured in the billions of dollars.

FIFA pointed out that it also will provide each participating federation with $1.5 million to cover preparation costs. Teams could potentially use those funds to compensate training site operators for services above and beyond what is laid out in FIFA’s training site agreement.

Each of the 64 team base camp options made available by FIFA to the participating federations includes a training site and nearby lodging. The training sites largely consist of facilities belonging to professional soccer teams (including MLS, NWSL and USL), colleges, high schools and municipalities.

FIFA plans to make a formal announcement of all 48 federations’ base camps sometime in the next month or two, but teams such as Germany, Croatia, France and Curaçao already have shared where they will reside and train during the competition. Some are making their own arrangements with facilities not listed in FIFA’s catalog.

FIFA confirmed that, regardless of whether a training site is listed in its catalog, operators must agree to the same clean-site rules outlined in the two agreements viewed by SBJ. The same restrictions will apply to venue-specific training sites, which are used by a rotating cast of teams in advance of matches at a given stadium, as well as to referee training sites.

The contractual language outlining clean training site obligations mirrors the rules governing stadiums. “Any room, area, building, facility or section” of the training site must be available free of branding. FIFA said donor-named college facilities and others with non-commercial monikers will not be required to mask those identifiers, but sites with corporate naming rights would have to temporarily cover them.

Meanwhile, FIFA will display its own sponsors’ logos at the training sites, just as it would at a World Cup stadium. The contract requires that media areas be equipped with interview backdrops carrying the branding of FIFA commercial affiliates, such as Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai-Kia, Lenovo and Visa.

Each facility operator receives a base rental fee from FIFA if its training site is selected by a federation. While the figure is redacted in one agreement reviewed by SBJ, another pays the institution just over $200,000 for a use period that begins 14 days before the World Cup and can span roughly one to two months.

A memo circulated to the council of Langford, British Columbia, provides additional insight into how FIFA determines those rental fees, stating that training sites were offered $10,000 to $15,000 per day for the 22-day group stage, depending on available amenities. Langford, which would have needed to spend nearly $1 million to convert the playing surface at Starlight Stadium to natural grass, ultimately declined to make the facility available as a training site.

In another instance, the Oakland Roots and Soul of the USL told the Alameda City Council that the estimated cost of providing security, field maintenance and other support services as a World Cup training site would be around $700,000, exceeding the compensation offered by FIFA. As a result, the city agreed to share up to $150,000 in hotel tax revenue with the club to make hosting financially viable.

Executives at professional teams and universities hoping to host a base camp have described the opportunity as a chance for publicity, relationship building, community engagement and civic pride, not a financial windfall. That prioritization of intangible benefits allows FIFA to limit its costs as it prepares to earn billions from the most lucrative World Cup in history.

Host cities court VIPs

With host cities pushing to raise revenue to cover the cost of hosting World Cup matches, operating fan fests and fulfilling legacy programs, several plan to sell premium experiences outside matches.

Organizers in Philadelphia, for example, are partnering with the Stateside Live dining and entertainment complex near Lincoln Financial Field to offer high-end hospitality before and after matches. Fans must hold match tickets to purchase the Match Day Experience packages, which range from $250 to $1,000 before fees.

Meg Kane, Philadelphia’s host city executive, said the hospitality revenue is critical to keeping the city’s fan fest at Lemon Hill Park open for all 39 days of the competition and free to the public.

Atlanta also plans to make its fan fest in Centennial Olympic Park free to the public, but Atlanta Sports Council President Dan Corso said his team plans to offer “elevated paid experiences for those who might be looking for VIP hospitality within fan fest.” Details will be made available in the spring.

Alex Silverman can be reached at asilverman@sportsbusinessjournal.com.

Though golf sets up as an ideal sport for in-play betting, with ample time between shots for sportsbooks to set odds and customers to make bets, the limitations of the traditional TV feed make it difficult for bettors to sweat, and then celebrate, their outcomes.

All sports deal with latency, the 15- to 30-second delay between when a play occurs and when it’s seen on linear television. Networks airing golf compound that dynamic with a plausibly live approach to telecasts, airing shots well after they’re played — a necessity with balls in the air across 18 holes for much of the day.

Last year, the PGA Tour took a step toward solving that dilemma, devoting one of the four feeds that it produces for streaming on the ESPN app to a betting-focused telecast that aired from 10 a.m. to noon ET each day during six tournaments.

This year, it will expand that option from 50 hours to nearly 400, with eight hours of daily betting-focused coverage from each of a dozen events, beginning with next week’s famously raucous Waste Management Phoenix Open. Sponsored by DraftKings, which replaced Penn Entertainment’s shuttered ESPN Bet as the network’s official sportsbook in December, the betcast will be available alongside the main feed, featured groups and featured holes on the ESPN app throughout the tournament.

Anchored from a studio at PGA Tour headquarters, the telecast will include analysis of betting options and probabilities, with integrations incorporating DraftKings odds and featured bets. The schedule includes the tour’s eight higher-purse “signature” events, along with The Players Championship and the FedEx Cup playoffs.

“What we built last year with these guys was a nice start to this,” said Scott Warfield, vice president of gaming at the PGA Tour. “What we saw very early on and what we heard from our fans was this allows me to actually see in real time what I’m betting on. … So why don’t we do this around our 12 really big weekends when all the best players in the world are playing? And oh, by the way, why don’t we do it all damned day?”

Because the tour produces the feeds as part of its rights deal with ESPN, the decision largely was its to make, though it would be thorny to proceed without the network’s blessing. Production costs are likely to double, as the schedule doubles from six to 12. The tour would only do that if DraftKings signed on to allocate funds from its expansive ESPN sponsorship deal.

Both the network and the sportsbook say they see potential in a betcast.

Viewers of last year’s betting feeds watched longer than others and were likely to toggle between it, the main feed and feature groups. And that was when it aired during a two-hour block in the morning, with little of the West Coast tuned in. ESPN hopes expanding that window will attract a broader, younger audience for golf.

“We understand this may not be for everyone,” said John Suchenski, senior director of programming and acquisitions at ESPN. “But that’s why we want to do it. We have the core golf fan. We want to try and reach other people that are interested in consuming PGA Tour Live in a different way.”

Betting on golf accounts for less than 5% of legal U.S. handle, but has grown steadily, increasing 20% last year — nearly twice the rate of increase of the overall U.S. market — with a 50% bump across the three FedEx Cup events. That marked golf’s fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth.

For DraftKings, the low-latency betcast offers an opportunity to showcase the breadth and depth of its menu of live golf odds, developed through its 2024 acquisition of Mustard Golf, a specialized B2B supplier of golf oddsmaking models. The sportsbook, which holds exclusive rights to sponsor betting integrations during ESPN telecasts, also will air commercial spots.

“Live betting can be fun and engaging no matter what, but the lower the latency, the more real-time the experience is,” said Josh Levin-Scherz, DraftKings senior vice president of marketing. “With the betcast, with eight hours of streaming a day that we’re doing in a fully immersive experience that the viewer gets with the tour and ESPN, we feel like we’ll create pretty unique and engaging opportunities to bet live in ways that, if you’re just watching a regular broadcast on a major network, you just can’t fully enjoy.

“We’re viewing each hour-window as giving us something like five or 10 touchpoints with a customer to talk to them about how much fun it can be to bet on golf. And then as an extension of that, why DraftKings is the best book to do it with. That’s a massive opportunity within the betcast.”

Much of the on-air talent from last year’s betcasts returns, with Jonathan Coachman back as host, joined by analysts Matt Every and Michael Collins. Graham DeLaet, Jeff Eisenband and Steve Scott also return, with golf betting analyst Rick Gehman and Kevin Sylvester of PGA Tour Radio added.

“We’re tapping into talent that is specific to this subject matter, this content,” Suchenski said. “We’re not trying to force traditional golf commentators into this. We are actually tapping into people who have either a passion or a background for this particular style of content.”

“If you fake it,” Warfield said, “you probably do more damage than not doing it at all.”

Thus far, the best way for bettors to follow their in-play golf wagers has been to monitor play through real-time, hole-by-hole graphics available on the PGA Tour app and some sportsbook apps. Warfield said the tour’s long-term hope is to expand its video offering to allow for live viewing of every shot from every player on the course.

“This is the beginning of what we believe is a multiyear process to ultimately have a TV product that will allow the consumer to have flexibility on who they watch, when they watch them and how they bet,” Warfield said. “But you don’t do that overnight.”

Hot-market sales of licensed products commemorating Indiana University’s recent CFP championship continue to comp with the record set by Michigan in 2024.

Just as Indiana’s on-field success was boosted by the addition of 24 new players over the past two seasons, the demand for Hoosiers product has been aided by the fact Learfield’s CLC licensing division won an RFP for Indiana’s licensing rights just a few months before the college football season. IU became a CLC client on July 1.

“The joke here is that we all knew this was going to happen,” laughed CLC SVP Partner Services John Greeley.

IU had been handling merch in-house. Nice timing, eh? “The reality is they were preparing for any eventuality, but way before this, we just had a ton of respect for what their brand could be,” Greeley said. Aiding the sales boom: Indiana University has the largest alumni base in the Big Ten at over 805,000.

Around 94 licensees have hopped on the IU championship licensing program, and there are retailers and licensees saying it is their largest championship market ever. Will that continue? “It looks like something that will have a long tail,” said Greeley, citing apparel that ties the CFP championship team with IU’s NCAA undefeated championship basketball team 50 years ago.

Connor Hitchcock’s Homefield is an Indianapolis apparel licensee with DTC sales and a local brick-and mortar store that can’t keep up with demand. “The Rose Bowl win was our best sales day ever. And the championship doubled that,” Hitchcock said. “We’re at the point where we’re just trying to keep up with orders and hope we don’t run out.”

The Super Bowl keeps getting bigger by most metrics, but live attendance is one notable exception. In December, an NFL spokeswoman told me they expect about 64,000 people at the game Feb. 8 in Santa Clara, though Thursday she said that figure is growing as plans are finalized. Even if it ends up at 67,000, that would be the sixth-smallest non-pandemic Super Bowl crowd. Furthermore, that would mean that four of the six smallest non-pandemic Super Bowl crowds will have come in the 2020s.

Part of this has an obvious explanation: Most stadiums are smaller than they used to be. Gone are the days of putting 100,000 people or more into the Rose Bowl, or 84,000 in the old Stanford Stadium. If the gigantic AT&T Stadium outside Dallas ever hosts a Super Bowl again, the trend would reverse itself for one year, but most of the NFL’s other options are a lot closer to the mid-60,000s range.

But broad trends in stadium design don’t tell the whole story. After all, Levi’s Stadium packed in 71,088 for Super Bowl 50 a decade ago, and the 49ers averaged 71,177 for their home games this year. The stadium’s design hasn’t changed, but Super Bowl 60’s crowd will be several thousand people fewer.

The official explanation is that the Super Bowl requires more “seat kills” than any other event. Another way to put it: the NFL leverages its biggest event for growth on many fronts. It no longer sees maximizing the live game attendance as a goal compared to other considerations.

Look at media credentials alone. There will be 6,500 media members at the game, 800 more than 10 years ago. Considering the full picture of the league’s global ambitions, using that space to drive interest in American football to the right demographic or country is worth more than the value of a ticket there. That’s particularly true when most of those seats would be relatively cheap, and the league could make it up by pushing up the price on ultra-premium offerings to price-insensitive high rollers.

You might say the same about “seat kills” to make NBC’s broadcast better, or to replace especially low-value seats with a higher-yield temporary club space. Industry experts agree on one thing: It is not creating scarcity for its own sake. Scarcity certainly helps drive prices, but the Super Bowl is such an outlier in demand that each individual seat is still profitable. There’s just a wider definition of value than there used to be, and a more nuanced understanding of what’s most important.

“The Super Bowl is a totally different animal than a regular season game at Levi’s Stadium,” said Tony Knopp, co-founder and CEO of TicketManager, which handles ticketing for major corporate clients. “There’s exponentially more media, [more] security, and there’s unique buildouts at each stadium which can compromise and obstruct views in otherwise habitable seats.”

Rates for a 30-second Super Bowl spot are like speed limit signs on a desolate interstate stretch: widely read but not necessarily trusted, nor followed. Nonetheless, every year, the network with Super Bowl rights issues a going rate, which this year is put at $8 million per 30 seconds for TV’s most-watched show and an association with a secular holiday. No media buyer in our 35 years at intersection of sports and commerce has ever admitted to paying rate card, of course, and the practice of a brand being able to buy a single Super Bowl spot and nothing else is about as likely as you being able to saunter into your local grocer and purchasing a lone grape (can I get a bag for that, please?).

Affordability and inflation have been much in the news, but nowhere has inflation been more buoyant than in the Super Bowl ad space. Last year, that mythical Super Bowl rate card was $7 million. In 2002, it was $6.5 million. Sprinkle those numbers with salt to taste, but that would mean a 14.2% increase from last year and better than 23% from four years back. Which all leads to this rhetorical: How far are we from the first $10 million rate card for 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time?

When Horizon SVP/Integrated Investment, Sports Adam Schwartz started buying Super Bowl ads around 17 years ago, the rate card was $3.5 million. “Everyone was saying it couldn’t get higher,” recalled Schartz, whose agency has several Super Bowl buys this year, including one for Squarespace.

“The Super Bowl marketplace has completely transformed over the past three years,” he said. “The pace is so different. If you don’t register your budget and interest during the [May] upfronts, they’ll shift numbers for those coming in later.

“A decade ago, we thought Super Bowl [ads] was undervalued. Now, maybe it’s at value,” said Jeremy Carey, president of Optimum Sports, which handled 25% of the ad spending for last year’s Super Bowl and has clients in the game this year, including PepsiCo and State Farm.

“The culture in and around the Super Bowl is continuing to drive value and pricing. There’s a level of engagement here that doesn’t exist anywhere else. You’ve still got people tuning in only to see marketing campaigns.”

There were scattered reports — without clients named — of some $10 million ads being sold by NBC for this Super Bowl. As for when that becomes the “published” rate?

“Honestly, I would not be surprised if Disney came out at $10 million for next year,” Schwartz added. “At some point, rights fees and these prices have to hit a tipping point — but they haven’t yet. I would say pricing doesn’t have that much to do with the viewership number, which was very good last year. It’s just about scarcity.”

The vagaries of media packaging practiced by those networks peddling top-shelf sports rights offer an altogether different answer to that rhetorical.

“Actually, we’ve probably seen a $10 million ad already; just no one has admitted to it, because of the way these things are bundled,” said Ron Furman, who heads broadcasting and brand partnerships at the AKC, after selling media for the likes of NFL Network, NBC Sports, ABC Sports and Univision. “The matching fund has become an almost standard practice.” Add production and talent costs, and an associated integrated campaign and you can exceed $10 million quickly.

A seller’s market

Former A-B media czar Tony Ponturo (who was highlighted as part of SBJ’s Influence 125 project) remembers being “somewhat startled” after buying two Super Bowl ads in 1985 (one each for Bud and Bud Light) at $500,000 per 30. Four years later, A-B bought 10 spots at $750,000 each to debut its Bud Bowl. Then and now “quantity discounts makes the [Super Bowl] stated rate somewhere between selling tool and sales propaganda,” he said.

Scott Rosner, academic director of Columbia University’s Sports Management Program, said as long as the Super Bowl is the biggest campfire, pricing will continue to escalate.

“The widespread inability to aggregate audiences makes this property seem more valuable and puts networks with those rights in more advantageous positions every year,” he said.

Many interviewed here thought ABC/ESPN Disney has appropriate chutzpah and associated platforms to ask for $10 million per 30 when it broadcasts the Super Bowl next year — which will be its first in 21 years.

“There are so many variables with Super Bowl spots now, but I’d say Disney is well-positioned to achieve that kind of price, especially linked to their other premium inventory like CFP and Oscars,” said former ESPN sales and marketing chief Ed Erhardt, now a consultant.

“There’s never been more Super Bowl demand,” said longtime media exec Ray Warren, who founded Optimum Sports in 2004 and has been buying ads in the NFL’s championship game for more than four decades. “So, I don’t see us being more than two years away from $10 million rate. Nobody ever got fired for a buying a spot on ‘Seinfeld’ in its time, or the Super Bowl any year. At whatever rate, it’s still a very safe bet for most brands.”

• The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, NASCAR, UFC and WWE unveiled an agreement with Fanatics, the White House and America250 that will see an exclusive USA 250 patch and logo featured on athlete uniforms and performance gear, as well as in the venues where they compete, during marquee moments throughout 2026.
• Derek Falvey is out as the Twins’ president of baseball and business operations, reports SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo. The Twins and Falvey described that they had mutually agreed to part ways Friday.
• The Golden Knights agreed to a multiyear renewal of their sponsorship agreement with the Southern Nevada Toyota Dealers that includes a jersey patch placement on the team’s away jerseys, reports SBJ’s Alex Silverman.
• A-B InBev is set to feature three of its flagship brands during Super Bowl LX in Bud Light, Michelob Ultra and Budweiser, and Michelob Ultra SVP/Marketing Ricardo Marques said each of the brands will “approach the moment in a very similar way and in a way that is true to the different brands,” writes SBJ’s Michael Boylan.
• Sports business investors David Blitzer and Paul Wachter are joining the new ownership group of the Red Bull KTM Tech3 team in MotoGP, becoming some of the first American financiers to take a bet on the series under Liberty Media’s ownership, writes SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• USA Volleyball brought on JMI Sports as its third-party sales rep through 2030, notes SBJ’s Terry Lefton. The NGB had been running commercial efforts in house.
• GSE Worldwide signed Johnny Keefer, one of the PGA Tour’s top rookies, reports SBJ’s Josh Carpenter. For other agent-related news from Friday, check out Irving Mejia-Hilario’s Talent Pool roundup.
• REV Entertainment, the events and facilities business the Rangers created, secured a 10-year naming-rights deal with Texas Health Resources for the forthcoming $88 million stadium for the MLS Next Pro club North Texas SC Mansfield, Texas, writes Silverman.