SBJ Unpacks: Bringing swagger to the UFL

Tonight in Unpacks: Mike Repole made billions building consumer brands where big players such as Coca-Cola dominate, and he did it without shying away from his basic loudmouth-from-Queens persona. Will that approach work for spring football? In this week’s magazine cover story, SBJ’s Ben Fischer reports on Repole and the changes he’s made at the UFL ahead of its 2026 season.

Also tonight:

• Calgary, Edmonton, Prague to host NHL’s 2028 World Cup of Hockey
• How much are conferences cashing in on March Madness?
• Ubisoft’s ‘major milestone’ with NASCAR
• Op-ed: March Madness, NIL and ambush marketing

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour kicks off the week with the WNBA and its players failing to reach an agreement as the commissioner’s Monday deadline passes, the Boston Legacy getting a big win with an attendance record for the expansion club’s first game, IndyCar earning high marks for the opening weeks of its season and more.

In February, uber-entrepreneur Mike Repole took to social media to address complaints from Birmingham Stallions fans about their team’s new uniforms.

“‘Shockingly’ They are not happy,” Repole wrote on X. “Complaining already. This fan base is harder to please than my family. … My suggestion is that all the fans buy season tickets ASAP and protest the uniforms in the Stadium! Win games and suddenly everyone will love the uniforms.”

Taking that condescending tone with the United Football League’s too-small group of diehard fans goes against the marketing textbooks, but Repole’s business track record has earned him some benefit of the doubt.

“This guy is so unlikeable it’s almost impressive,” said one Reddit user in response. Another said: “I’d rather have him saying dumb things on occasion [than] past leadership seemingly not caring about the league at all.” And another: “He comes off as a douche but this is the most off-season activity in spring football history. So he’s doing something right at least.”

With a fortune estimated by Forbes at $2.5 billion, Repole brings to the spring league a history of successfully building consumer brands on the turf of established giants, earning billions by selling the Vitaminwater and BodyArmor brands to Coca-Cola, along with a lucrative exit from the snack brand Pirate’s Booty. He’s done that without shying away from his basic loudmouth-from-Queens persona, and he’s not changing it for the UFL.

The strategy isn’t complicated, Repole says. The UFL’s problem isn’t quality football, solid operations or distribution. It’s relevance. There simply aren’t enough people who care. What better way to elevate the brand than a little controversy? Marketing consultants might blanch, but P.T. Barnum, Jerry Jones and Donald Trump would all recognize Repole’s trolling playbook as a winner. Or at least worth a shot.

“What do I have to lose, right?” Repole said in an interview. “No one’s ever engaged with the fan base. And I guarantee no owner in f------ history is doing what I’m doing right now. I’m poking the Stallion, I guess, not the bear, right? I hear ‘I love you,’ ‘I like you,’ ‘I hate you,’ but — you’re writing about the UFL and talking about it. … We’ve got to get some noise. We’ve got to be the squeaky wheel.”

The UFL will launch its third season March 27 when those Stallions play at the Louisville Kings. If the season is completed, it would become the first non-NFL, 11-man pro football league to execute three consecutive seasons since the old United States Football League did in 1985.

Merely staying alive is a victory for a startup, but that sense of accomplishment is matched by an enduring frustration among spring football enthusiasts and a growing sense of cynicism among sports industry observers, who are starting to suspect Americans simply aren’t interested.

In 2025, TV viewership declined from the UFL’s first season by 20%, and live attendance was down 5%. The metrics remain competitive with other spring sports properties, but the declines were a troubling sign for investors who won’t fund startup losses indefinitely.

Enter Repole, who signed on in July with a large but undisclosed cash infusion into the league. Is this profane, high-octane disrupter the one thing spring football has been missing? The UFL’s blue-chip owners, who include Fox Sports, RedBird Capital Partners, ESPN, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Dany Garcia, hope so.

Repole thinks so. He sees in the UFL all the ingredients for success — except himself.

“They’re heavyweights in their industry,” Repole said of the other owners. “But they’re not necessarily entrepreneurs, and I think when you put an entrepreneur like Mike Repole on a team with people like this … It could be something very, very interesting. And that’s where we are right now.”

Repole’s investment traces to a 2023 encounter at a Sports Business Journal conference between former Fox Sports Executive Vice President Larry Jones and Inner Circle Sports partner Steve Horowitz. Horowitz told Jones, who was integral in Fox’s development of the United States Football League in 2023, that he might have an interested investor.

By the time the three got together at Madison Square Garden for a Michigan-St. John’s basketball game that November, the Fox-owned USFL was in merger talks with the XFL, owned by the RedBird group. Two seasons of the combined UFL later, they were ready to do a deal.

Jones, who still sits on the UFL board in a Fox-controlled seat, calls Repole a “crazy cowboy.” “I call him crazy to his face,” Jones says, and that’s what the UFL was missing.

“We could get money from a lot of people, but we couldn’t get this type of expertise, this enthusiasm and willingness to be out there and do interviews, and go to cities like Columbus or Louisville or Orlando and pump the flesh and meet politicians,” Jones said. “I’ve done a little of that when we were first starting, but this is a guy who’s just born to do it.”

The UFL enters its third season in an intriguing position. It’s far from a failure, but it’s not exactly a success, either. Neither the UFL nor its predecessors have regularly disclosed financials, but it still depends on its investors for critical business services and prime broadcast windows as it tries to build revenue.

The league’s other owners are so hopeful Repole is the guy to finally deliver that growth, they handed him an unusual degree of control for a minority investor. “You have to recognize when you’ve got the talent, and you hand over most of the keys to the person with the best chance of succeeding,” said Jones.

For Repole, the guy who could have walked away from business 19 years ago when he sold Vitaminwater to Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion, it’s another challenge with long odds.

“It’s loving sports, it’s loving to build brands, and the last part is just the long shot,” Repole said. “If you give me an idea that’s a 99% rate of being a success, I’d have no interest. If you told me this has a 1% chance, I’m all ears. I want to hear about that.”

A portfolio built on disruption

If nobody saw Repole coming to the UFL, they might be forgiven for assuming he’s too busy to run a sports league.

He actively oversees his majority investment in the performance apparel brand NoBull. In 2023, he acquired a majority stake in Junkless Foods and closely advises that business, too. He runs Repole Stable, the thoroughbred racing operation with more than 300 horses and $61 million in lifetime earnings, and has threatened a major antitrust lawsuit against key governing bodies in that sport. He’s never far from the action at St. John’s University, where his outsized role as booster and funder has turned him into something of an unofficial executive chairman of the men’s basketball program.

From his home office in Windermere, Fla., he bounces between his assets with an air of controlled chaos, placing himself on the org chart — insofar as there is one — somewhere between active investor and CEO. To keep him on track, if not on time, as he hops around his portfolio, he depends on executive assistant Erin Short, whom he calls his “executive nanny.” She sits next to him most days.

“After I sold BodyArmor, I said, ‘I’m never going to anything that will take more than 5% of my life,’” Repole said. “Now I’m doing 100 things at 5%. So the math didn’t work out. Now it’s 500% instead of 100%. This is my life. This is who I am.”

Repole likens himself to an NFL owner who will get involved if he thinks it’s necessary.

“In my prime, I was Tom Brady trying to win seven Super Bowls,” Repole said. “Then I learned I needed to coach more. I guess I became Bill Belichick — except that I’d make the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, that’s the only difference — and now I’m trying to be Bob Kraft. But the only difference is that when Belichick calls the play wrong, I run out on the field and call the play.”

Running the league from a minority stake

Technically, Repole is just of one of several co-owners of the UFL, none of whom have a controlling interest. He has a seat on the UFL board, which is otherwise split among fellow investors Fox Sports, RedBird, Disney, Johnson and Garcia.

The original investors still oversee strategic aspects of the business, sources said, with Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks and ESPN President of Content Burke Magnus focused on media strategy, RedBird’s Kevin LaForce and UFL CEO and President Russ Brandon leading the league’s NFL relationship, Garcia and Johnson on social and digital content, and RedBird’s Gerry Cardinale and Shanks overseeing the entire enterprise. The board still must approve all major decisions, such as market and venues, team brand names and football rules.

But Impact Capital, Repole’s investment shop, has a concurrent operating agreement to manage the business, and the other owners have given him wide latitude on day-to-day work and his particular sweet spot, brand development and marketing in each of the eight markets.

“Make no mistake, Mike is leading the charge,” said Brandon. “If you gave Mike an org design, he’d probably put it in a shredder. There’s no one within my executive team, or within the organization, with any doubt who’s leading the operation, and it’s Mike Repole.”

He used that authority to quickly engineer three franchise relocations last summer — Memphis, San Antonio and Detroit (branded as Michigan) became Columbus, Louisville and Orlando.

Repole’s single biggest complaint about the UFL prior to his investment was the mismatch with venues, with most them being far too big for the UFL to realistically sell out or even fill up enough to create an energetic atmosphere. This drive for optimizing crowds and venues is so thorough that Repole even floated moving the St. Louis Battlehawks, far and away the league’s best-drawing team, into MLS-sized Energizer Stadium. But also, Repole says, St. Louis’ success in drawing crowds was proof the UFL could scale.

In the weeks before Repole’s investment was even announced, Brandon quickly learned what it meant to work for him. Instead of taking a few days off after the UFL Championship game in St. Louis last season, Brandon drove four hours to Louisville to meet with John Neace, CEO of Louisville City FC and Racing Louisville FC, who is now the Louisville Kings’ landlord.

“Right from the jump, Mike challenged us on venues, to think smaller, more quaint, and bring the live entertainment experience to a different level, and that went pretty deep,” Brandon said. By the fall, the league had changed six of its eight venues, something Brandon would have given a no more than 5% chance of happening successfully.

“Mike has a lot on his plate when you look at NoBull and Junkless, and his other elements of his business portfolio, but that does not slow this man down at all,” said Brandon. “He spends hours and hours every day with the UFL, and he’s got a low sleep tolerance, that’s for sure. And now I do, too.”

Repole’s also moved quickly to put his own brand on the league, leveraging it to help his other businesses and vice versa. The new uniforms have a prominent NoBull logo on the shoulder, and the Louisville Kings’ name and horse logo is a nod to the thoroughbred business.

Note the Kings’ scheduled home game on April 30 at Lynn Family Stadium. That’s 7 miles from Churchill Downs, where the following day, Repole has a serious contender in horse Zany, entered in the Kentucky Oaks, and two days later, his horse Renegade will run in the Derby.

Repole’s ability to focus on multiple subjects, at both a high strategic level and in the weeds, while also forging an emotional bond, stood out to former Patriots and Bucs quarterback Tom Brady on his first phone call with Repole in 2021. With Brady approaching retirement and still trying to build his TB12 wellness business, a friend put him in touch with Repole.

They spoke for nearly three hours that night. In January 2024, NoBull acquired TB12 and they’re still partners. “He’s got incredible charisma, and he’s got the most incredible way about him in terms of his communication, in the way he gets his point across,” Brady said. “Our personalities fit perfectly together.”

Brady’s only note of advice for Repole is to learn how to turn it off from time to time.

“His brain is like a computer when it has 10 open windows and all of them are working, and he’s processing information, you know, he’s in the market and his brain doesn’t turn off,” Brady said. “Probably the only thing he needs to improve on, in my opinion, is to sometimes decompress.”

Thoroughbred horse trainer Todd Pletcher, another Repole friend and business partner, agrees. When Pletcher starts his day, often before 4 a.m., there’s usually a message from Repole waiting for him. If Pletcher replies right away, Repole often replies — either still awake, or already started on the new day.

“Anything he thinks, he says,” Pletcher said. “And I’m more reserved. But for whatever reason, it seems to work out well. We have a very good working relationship, and a good friendship. A lot of it’s about kids and family and different things, and at some point we’ll get around to talking about the horses.”

Repole says the UFL came after he briefly considered options to invest in NFL teams, which didn’t pan out for obvious reasons. “Some of the owners that I spoke to that were doing minority deals, I think they could easily pick up that Mike’s probably a better majority partner than he is a minority partner,” Repole said.

The long-shot vision

Repole and others at the UFL won’t discuss revenue goals or expectations. But the standard of success in 2026 starts with winning better TV viewership and attendance across the board — doing better than 2025’s 645,000 average TV audience and average crowd of 12,162. Mindshare is important too, Repole knows. That’s a more subjective question of whether or not the UFL is in the national sports conversation. Are the debate shows and major social media accounts talking about it? If you open the ESPN or DraftKings app on a Saturday in April, can you find the UFL easily? Do the words “D.C. Defenders” or “Columbus Aviators” mean anything outside of those markets?

Allen Johnson, the chief venues officer for the city of Orlando, praised the UFL for getting a deal for the new Orlando Storm to play in Orlando City FC’s Inter&Co. Stadium (25,500 capacity) instead of Camping World Stadium (65,500). Based on that city’s prior experience with spring football, Johnson said the UFL must prioritize families as the main audience — that means kid-friendly game times and promotions — have an authentic local identity and role in the community, and win. There is a chance to find traction with fans in the spring, with only the NBA Magic playing now and no NHL or minor league baseball team as competition.

“It has to be competitive, good football — real football — and then a fun experience,” Johnson said. “I don’t know their numbers to know what they need to make the books work, but if they get 10,000 people coming through on a regular basis, I’d say that’s successful.”

As Repole enters his late 50s with more than enough money to disappear, retirement still isn’t appealing. His ambition and energy needs a vessel — several vessels, really — and the UFL’s backers are happy to be one.

“I want to win the Triple Crown,” Repole said. “I want NoBull to be bigger than Nike. I want the UFL to have 32 teams. That’s what I want to do. I’m blessed, in my 50s, to be able to pick and choose the targets, the brands, the categories and the sports that I want to do. I feel very fortunate and blessed to be able to do that.”

The NHL and NHLPA have awarded hosting rights for the 2028 World Cup of Hockey to Calgary, Edmonton and Prague following a bid process that included 28 cities across North America and Europe.

The eight-nation tournament, which will be held during a pause in the NHL regular season in February 2028, will feature 17 games. Calgary and Prague will each host seven games (six round-robin and one elimination game apiece), while Edmonton will host the semifinals and final.

The World Cup of Hockey will be among the first major events held at the Flames’ new arena, Scotia Place, which is set to open for the 2027-28 season. The venue, which will ultimately anchor a mixed-use development, is expected to have a capacity of 18,400 for hockey. Rogers Place, home of the Oilers, will host the games in Edmonton, while O2 Arena will host games in Prague.

Playfly Sports led the host city bid process on behalf of the NHL and NHLPA, who jointly own the event. The firm began accepting expressions of interest in June 2025 and invited 28 cities to participate in the RFP stage of the host city selection process. The Province of Alberta submitted a joint bid for Edmonton and Calgary. Perinvest Group will organize the event in Czechia.

Holding the North American portion of the event in Western Canada rather than on the East Coast significantly increases the travel burden for the teams advancing from the European portion of the tournament. With the full schedule not yet released, how much time they will have upon arrival before playing is unknown.

The 2028 World Cup of Hockey will be the fourth edition of the competition and the first since 2016, when the entire event was played at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto prior to the start of the NHL season. The tournament’s return is part of a joint effort by the NHL and NHLPA to establish a regular international competition cycle, with players participating in the World Cup and the Winter Olympics in alternating years.

Unlike the Olympics, the NHL and NHLPA benefit directly from sponsorship, media rights, ticket sales and other revenue streams associated with the World Cup of Hockey. Strong U.S. TV audiences for last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off -- a one-off event that reintroduced international competition involving NHL players -- and this year’s Olympics could make the World Cup appealing to potential media partners and brands.

“4 Nations and the Olympics gives us every indication that the World Cup will be greeted with great anticipation and should be a huge success,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman told Sports Business Journal prior to his appearance at last month’s National Sports Forum. “The one thing that is clear is there’s no athletes that I can think of that are more passionate about the game and representing their NHL teams and representing their countries than NHL players.”

NHL President of Business Keith Wachtel recently told the “SBJ Sports Media Podcast” that the league is in discussions with prospective media partners about broadcast rights for the World Cup of Hockey. The event is not included in ESPN and WBD Sports’ existing national broadcast packages, which run through the end of the 2027-28 season.

March Madness is here.

The First Four kicks off the festivities in Dayton, Ohio, on Tuesday night, while first-round games begin Thursday.

But before a single game has tipped off, conferences are already cashing in on college basketball’s biggest revenue-generating event.

NCAA tournament units are a form of payment distributed by the national office to the coinciding conferences over a six-year span based on the number of games a team participates in during March Madness. The entire value of the unit in 2025 was roughly $2M, equating to an annual payout of around $350,000 over the six years it’s distributed. (Payments begin the year after a tournament is played).

Units apply to games beginning in the First Four and, starting this year, the Final Four and national championship, for an annual total of 135 units ($270M per tournament paid over six years). Units previously ended after the Elite Eight, before a change was made to NCAA rules in order to reward teams that reached the final two rounds of the tournament.

That said, just making the field of 68 has notable financial ramifications for schools and leagues whose March runs will end as soon as this week.

Here’s a breakdown of how much each league that received multiple bids will be paid starting next year by qualifying for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this year, just by virtue of appearing in the bracket:

• SEC — 10 teams, $3.5M ($21M total over six years)
• Big Ten — 9 teams, $3.15M ($18.9M total over six years)
• ACC — 8 teams, $2.8M ($16.8M total over six years)
• Big 12 — 8 teams, $2.8M ($16.8M total over six years)
• Big East — 3 teams, $1.05M ($6.3M total over six years)
• WCC — 3 teams, $1.05M ($6.3M total over six years)
• Atlantic 10 — 2 teams, $700,000 ($4.2M total over six years)
• MAC — 2 teams, $700,000 ($4.2M total over six years)

Earlier this month, NASCAR and Ubisoft marked the first collaboration for The Crew: Motorfest, the French publisher’s racing game. It’s another sign of how the stock car organization continues to expand its presence in video games to reach audiences outside its traditional fan base.

The Year 3, Season 9 update on March 3-4 included cars, a track and a competition, featuring NASCAR stock cars that players can use in any mode. The update also brought a bevy of NASCAR assets to The Crew’s user-generated content mode, Trackforge, which players use to brew tracks and other racing courses.

The NASCAR cars include:

• Next Gen Ford Mustang Dark Horse Cup car (2024)
• Next Gen Chevrolet ZL1 Cup car (2025)
• Next Gen Toyota Camry XSE Cup car (2025)

Ubisoft has been making racing games for decades, with The Crew debuting in 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. But it’s the first time the French publisher has worked with NASCAR, the leading racing series in the U.S.

“After months of hard work, bringing one of the most iconic car culture brands into The Crew franchise is a major milestone for the team,” The Crew Creative Director Julien Hummer said.

The NASCAR track includes what Hummer described as “a fully dedicated environment, including paddocks, grandstands, access roads, and a central dirt track.”

NASCAR and Ubisoft’s Ivory Tower studio worked directly, without any outside agencies. Ubisoft also worked with NASCAR partners such as Sunoco, Goodyear and its car manufacturers (Chevy, Ford and Toyota).

While NASCAR has a track in The Crew, don’t expect to motor around Daytona or Talladega. It created an original course to better fit The Crew’s Hawaiian setting (along with a mini campaign of sorts).

“The idea was to support a ‘zero-to-hero’ campaign rather than re-create real-world tracks,” Hummer said.

It’s here. The time when brands are finalizing social content calendars and pushing through NIL deals with student athletes as part of March Madness. Attention spikes, timelines compress and brands are readying “tournament season” posts that feel timely and shareable. That combination is exactly when otherwise ordinary NIL deliverables drift into avoidable legal exposure.

Ultimately, this is an ambush marketing problem: using the momentum of a major event without official sponsorship rights. During March and early April, brands understandably want to be part of the conversation. The risk arises when content uses event-style cues, phrases, graphics, hashtags or visuals that suggest official status, approval or affiliation, even if the post does not say or convey it outright.

The NCAA actively polices its tournament trademarks. For example, it recently asked prediction market platform Kalshi to remove “March Madness” branding and related tournament terms from its offering because the wording could imply NCAA involvement or approval. Brands are advised to put guardrails up front, require rapid approvals before anything posts and build in substitute deliverables for the moments when creative needs to be revised or pulled.

The March pressure test: Where NIL deals break (and why)

March Madness highlights trademark and implied affiliation problems that show up in fast-moving social content. Tournament season accelerates everything: more views, more reposts, more reactive creative and more pressure to take advantage of the moment. That’s also when brand-provided copy, graphics, or production choices can unintentionally violate intellectual property (IP) rights.

In practice, the highest-risk creative typically falls into a familiar set of categories:

• Protected marks and phrases and close variants that trade on the tournament’s identity.
• Bracket-style visuals and event-look graphics that mimic tournament presentation.
• Hashtags, venue/backdrop choices, and celebratory “event framing” that collectively suggest official affiliation, sponsorship or approval.

The NIL agreement drafting takeaway for the brand is straightforward: If it wants “tournament season content,” the NIL agreement must (1) define what the athlete can and cannot say/show, (2) require content approvals before anything posts, and (3) permit compliant substitutes when content must be revised or pulled. March moves too fast for vague language; imprecision becomes pressure, and pressure produces poor results and potential liability.

Brands should also confirm that any proposed campaign complies not only with tournament intellectual property restrictions but also with applicable school, conference and NCAA NIL policies; the athlete’s existing sponsorship obligations; and any right-of-publicity limitations that may restrict overlapping endorsements or category conflicts.

The March Madness clause kit (what to add before the tournament)

March Madness NIL deals are all about adding the right clauses. These are four samples (to be reviewed with counsel) of clauses that can do most of the heavy lifting:

1) Tournament IP + “No Implied Affiliation” + Event-Indicia clause. Define what can’t appear in sponsored content: NCAA/tournament marks (e.g., “March Madness,” “Final Four”), bracket graphics, official hashtags and any creative that suggests NCAA approval or official status. Athletes will not capture content in restricted areas (e.g., credentialed spaces) or in any location/backdrop where tournament marks or other event-controlled indicia (official signage, court markings, media backdrops, credentials/lanyards) are visible. If event indicia cannot be avoided, the parties will use an alternate backdrop/wardrobe, crop/blur, or substitute deliverable.

2) Rapid review + backup deliverables clause. March content is time sensitive. The contract should set a fast approval timeline (who approves and when) and include backup deliverables if a post is flagged. Sponsored tournament-season content must also comply with the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, requiring clear and conspicuous disclosure of material connections (e.g., #ad or #sponsored) so that consumers understand the commercial nature of the post.

3) Paid amplification (whitelisting/boosting) clause. If the brand wants to boost content or run ads tied to the athlete’s handle, define it: term (e.g., 14–30 days), platforms, spend cap, no edits without written approval and an automatic shutoff at the end of the campaign.

4) Risk allocation + takedown clause (indemnity/insurance as appropriate). If the athlete is posting without strict pre-approvals, the deal should shift risk back into the contract: (a) a clear takedown obligation (e.g., remove within [X] hours of notice), (b) a breach-based indemnity for losses caused by prohibited tournament IP use or implied-affiliation content, and (c) for higher-dollar deals, consider requiring the athlete or their NIL agency to carry media/advertising liability coverage, where commercially reasonable, naming the brand as additional insured, or have the brand place coverage and pass through the cost.

The fix isn’t to avoid NIL deals in March or not to leverage the “it” factor of a rising collegiate player. Rather, brands should pay extra attention to bright-line creative boundaries, fast approvals and substitute deliverables when a concept drifts too close to event IP or implied affiliation. Most importantly, the brand should make sure it has a direct line to its NIL attorney, who can create contracts and amendments to fit the situation. Ultimately, the NIL contract determines whether a post from or an ad featuring a star athlete produces value or leads to a protracted legal dispute.

K.J. Russell is an associate attorney in Fennemore’s Business & Finance practice group. He is a registered NIL agent. David McCarville is a director in Fennemore’s Business & Finance practice, where he advises clients on corporate governance, regulatory compliance, and commercial contracting.

• Nike and its Jordan Brand continue to ride high above the competition as the leading jersey and shoe provider for the NCAA women’s tournament, reports SBJ’s Rick Ellington, repping 45 of the 68 teams in the field, up four from last year’s 41. On the men’s side, Nike swept the top seeds, with 44 teams in the tournament wearing its gear.
• U.S. Soccer and Nike revealed the kits that the U.S. men’s national team will wear during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be played on home soil for the first time since 1994, writes SBJ’s Alex Silverman.
• Guggenheim Securities says that it views the postponement of two F1 races in the Middle East as a one-off development that doesn’t affect the valuation of the Liberty Media-owned property, notes SBJ’s Adam Stern.