SBJ Unpacks: NASCAR CEO Jim France steps down; Steve O’Donnell takes on role

Tonight in Unpacks: For the first time in NASCAR’s existence, a member of the France family will not be its CEO, as Jim France steps down Friday afternoon and President Steve O’Donnell assumes the role, reports SBJ’s Adam Stern.

Also tonight:

• LOVB accelerates growth in Season 2
• Jason Benetti is ‘THE guy’ for the job
• Athletes First wins NFL Draft’s first round with nine selections
• Op-ed: Decision speed is the next competitive advantage in sports

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour closes the week with the big night for Pittsburgh and Athletes First at the NFL Draft, layoffs at the PGA Tour, LA28 selling more than 4 million tickets in its first ticket drop and more.

NASCAR is making a major executive shift, with company majority owner Jim France stepping down as chief executive but remaining as chairman, and President Steve O’Donnell is ascending to CEO, according to people familiar with the matter. O’Donnell is the first person outside the France family to hold the CEO role at NASCAR.

The Daytona Beach-based auto racing series hastily scheduled a meeting with teams and drivers Friday to discuss the forthcoming executive change that will also result in France family scion Ben Kennedy being promoted to COO.

France had been chair and CEO since 2018, when he took over in an interim position after Brian France stepped down following a DUI incident.

A formal announcement is expected Saturday at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, where NASCAR is competing this weekend.

O’Donnell has been with NASCAR since 1996, when he joined its marketing department. He’s held a variety of roles, becoming its chief racing development officer in 2014. He became NASCAR’s COO in 2022, moving into the president’s role in 2025 when Steve Phelps became the organization’s first commissioner.

Once again, purple confetti rained on the LOVB Championship court, with Austin winning a second title in the league’s second year. But the biggest winner might have been LOVB itself, with the startup volleyball league generating noteworthy broadcast, sponsor, investor and social media interest in a sophomore campaign that has seen year-over-year increases in several areas.

From new owners buying into the league to three new expansion clubs set to start play next season, LOVB has hit the accelerator on its growth.

“We’re in a phenomenal position two years in,” said Commissioner Sandra Idehen, who handed the Tiffany-made championship trophy to Austin just three months into the job. “I think most leagues would really kill to be where we are.”

LOVB finds itself at the junction of commercial interest in women’s sports and one of the fastest growing sports in the country. Season 2 indicators show no sign of that slowing down.

Going into the season, USA Sports acquired the rights to a Wednesday night game of the week and the postseason. The April 16 first match of the championship was the most-watched LOVB match ever, averaging 163,000 viewers and peaking at over 225,000 viewers, while the final two matches on April 18 were up 50% over last year’s final.

Regular-season matches on USA Network were up 164% compared to linear coverage on ESPN last season.

“We try to partner with the leagues that we feel are best-in-class and have the highest growth potential,” said Matt Hong, president of USA Sports, “and we certainly felt like LOVB fell into that category.”

That appointment viewing helped LOVB grow this year, said Raquel Braun of Mulier Fortis, who serves as LOVB’s chief media officer. LOVB is in the second year of a two-year deal with ESPN, and it added Victory+ as a broadcaster this season.

From the marketing USA Sports put behind the league — including sending players to the Critics Choice Awards to generate interest elsewhere on USA Network — to the accessibility with Victory+ offering a way to watch matches, recaps and creator content for free, LOVB looked to expand its reach.

“The focus was, first and foremost, our audience and growing that audience,” Braun said. “And if we do that well, the revenue will come, the rights fees, the sponsorship dollars, the ads — all of those things follow.”

Those already are. Sponsors activating in the arena at Long Beach State included Chase, Dagne Dover and DryWater, with a sold-out crowd taking in the final night of Austin’s win over LOVB Salt Lake.

The league’s collaboration with Togethxr brought new merch, including the popular “Everyone Watches Women’s Volleyball” tee in a new colorway, and saw postseason sales up 50% year over year.

Courtside and in content, the league’s conclusion generated buzz. The championship drew celebrities, including Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, Holly Rowe and Ari Chambers — all investors in the expansion San Francisco club — as well as Issa Rae and John Wall.

On LOVB social channels, the event generated 35 million impressions (up 273% YoY) and 15.9 million video views (up 365% YoY).

“It’s visible that people are excited for their sport to continue to grow, and we’re just happy to be a part of that,” said Gio Tayetto, manager of sports marketing for speciality sports at Adidas.

“In the first two seasons, they’re already the third-best league in the world. The product on the court is visible. The ecosystem that they have with the clubs is amazing.”

Building on youth-to-pro system

The “ecosystem” Tayetto referenced is a differentiator, with LOVB’s pro league built alongside the 90 youth clubs it has nationwide. Sponsors, owners and league officials cite that as being responsible for generating interest.

Rebel Girls CEO Jes Wolfe sponsored a jersey patch for the league’s Nebraska team last season before investing in LOVB San Francisco, for which she is chairwoman.

“I started going to all of these matches and I was like, ‘This is amazing,’” Wolfe said. “And I love the idea of youth to pro and bringing professional volleyball to the United States and women’s sports.”

So do others. After launching as a single-entity with six teams, something that has allowed the league to be nimble as it builds quickly, it has expanded with San Francisco, Minnesota and Los Angeles teams starting play next year.

Led by Chief Growth Officer Stephanie Alger, the league has sold ownership stakes for six of the nine teams (see chart). Lone Star Sports & Entertainment and Spurs Sports & Entertainment are among those buying into LOVB. The league will transfer business operations to ownership for those six clubs, and it remains in the market for ownership of the remaining three.

“There are so many amazing emerging women’s sports teams. There’s new opportunities all the time now, which is great,” said Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian, who leads ownership for the Los Angeles team. “This one stands out as one where we want to put our dollars and our energy and our time. … This is going to seem very obvious in a few more years. And the folks who are joining today are going to look very right and very smart.”

With the championship behind the league and a chance to plan long term this summer, Idehen said LOVB will be focused on negotiating its renewal with ESPN, as well as onboarding its new clubs. Idehen said it continues to receive inbound interest for expansion clubs.

“We’re building from an incredible base already of where some people probably didn’t even think we could be five, six, seven years down the road,” Idehen said. “And we’re there in Year 2.”

Shortly after his time had concluded at Syracuse University’s well-regarded SI Newhouse School of Public Communications, Jason Benetti did what many sports broadcast journalism hopefuls did in the mid-2000s: He sent out a CD of his play-by-play work to alumni of his school. The audio package included the 21-year-old Benetti calling a Syracuse near-upset of Florida in football, as well as a tight stretch between Syracuse and Rutgers in basketball. One of the people on the receiving end of Benetti’s college play-by-play highlights was Bob Costas, arguably the Newhouse School’s most famous living sports alum.

One month passed, then two.

Then one day, the phone rang.

“This was before the time of spam bots, because I remember the number did not come up, like it was a restricted number,” Benetti said. “I answered because I thought it could be Verizon with me being late again on the phone bill. But no, it was Bob Costas.”

At the time, Costas was hosting the monthly HBO sports show, “Costas Now.” As he offered Benetti notes over a 20-minute call, Costas also passed along that there was a job opening on his show for a writer.

“He basically said, you should call games if you want to, but if I was interested in this writing spot, he would look into it,” Benetti said. “It wasn’t a specific job offer, but he was talking like it could be a job offer. I still think it would have been pretty awesome to write for ‘Costas Now,’ and it might have sent me on a whole other trajectory.”

Now for the kismet part. Last month, Costas was in Los Angeles as the newly named host of the “Sunday Night Baseball” pregame show on NBC (and simulcast on Peacock). Prior to the first pitch of the March 26 game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers, Costas cited many of NBC’s acclaimed MLB voices, from Red Barber to Curt Gowdy to Vin Scully, before throwing it to … Jason Benetti.

“It feels simultaneously surreal, impossible and full circle,” Benetti said. “I went to school at Syracuse because Bob was one of the people I wanted to be. He was the dream all of us ’90s sportscaster kids were chasing. When I went to Syracuse, a close friend of mine said to me on my last night at home before I left for school, ‘Go be Bob Costas.’ I’m not Bob, but he tossed to me. That feels really special.”

NBC’s new leading man

Even with all of his career success — a plum job at Fox Sports, acclaim for his work as the lead TV voice of the Detroit Tigers and previously the Chicago White Sox, and an 11-year run at ESPN calling multiple sports — Benetti acknowledges that this is the biggest moment of his career.

He is heading a major sports package for a major sports network as the face of NBC and Peacock’s MLB programming. He’s also literally the leading man: The production setup for NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” has Benetti guiding a three-announcer broadcast booth, with one analyst connected to each team joining the play-by-play voice as part of a rotating duo of analysts each week.

“It’s not pressure that I feel, but an obligation to do right by the package,” Benetti said.

Benetti might not feel the pressure, but there is significant money at stake. NBC is paying MLB $200 million annually over three years for the Sunday night package and the wild-card round. It’s part of the corporate strategy. As NBC Sports President Rick Cordella noted to Sports Business Journal, the addition of MLB inventory completes his company having the three biggest American professional sports in the Sunday night window for the majority of the weeks of the year.

You might have read that Benetti has cerebral palsy. He has spoken candidly about his surgeries, his years of physical therapy and having a pronounced limp. So getting the NBC job has added significance for him because of what it represents with leading a national package.

“It’s one thing for me to say I believe in my work to the hilt, which I do, and I don’t say that with ego,” Benetti said. “But until somebody like [NBC executive producer] Sam Flood or Rick Cordella puts somebody with cerebral palsy in a lead chair, nobody has done it. There’s a difference between the work itself and the ceiling of somebody who is doing the work. So the fact that those two are now one and the same makes me feel in some way whole. The chase is different at this point for me from now on.”

Benetti established a relationship with NBC Sports when he called the Peacock MLB Leadoff package in 2022. He also called baseball for NBC’s Tokyo Olympics coverage. Cordella said there was no other candidate for the lead chair, and Flood and lead baseball producer Matt Borzello echoed those sentiments.

“He was THE guy for us,” Cordella said. “There wasn’t a debate where we said, ‘Here are five names and who do we want to go after.’ Jason was the guy, based on his résumé and everything he brought to the table when we worked with him.

“Here’s the thing about baseball: You’re gonna spend nearly three hours with someone, and that person has to be able to carry a show. You want to feel like it’s your friend on the TV and you’ve been invited into their living room. Mike Tirico does that. Noah Eagle does that. We have a bunch of people in our stable that are fantastic play-by-play people, and Jason fits that mold.”

‘Very welcoming’ vibe

The backstory of how the NBC deal came together involves multiple networks. Last fall, NBC Sports reached out to Benetti’s agent at CAA to ask if his client would be interested in leading the “SNB” franchise, which Benetti unquestionably wanted.

Both sides agreed that NBC Sports should formally approach Fox Sports, at which Benetti was under contract through August 2026. If an offer came, Benetti would then talk it through with his Fox Sports bosses. Flood contacted Fox Sports executive producer Brad Zager in early January to ask if Fox would let Benetti out of his deal early if NBC and Benetti could come to terms. Fox Sports obliged, and then negotiations began between Benetti’s camp and NBC Sports.

“I never want to be the one to get in the way of someone’s dream,” Zager said. “I’d much rather be someone who helps make that happen. But I am really bummed to lose him, not just because of his work on air, but because I really enjoyed having him part of this place.”

“Once we got to the framework of a deal with NBC, I called Brad and we had multiple conversations,” Benetti said. “Brad could have easily said, ‘No, you’re not doing that,’ because I wasn’t up until August 2026. Or he could say, ‘Hey, go, we don’t care.’ Both are not desirable results. We had a couple conversations and Brad was great. Fox said, ‘Here are a couple things that we could do [to keep Benetti at Fox].’ But it’s different to be a lead announcer.”

Benetti does not know who his “Sunday Night Baseball" partners will be beyond a couple weeks’ notice. He said he likes the organic nature of broadcasting, of figuring out how to work with new people. Benetti’s contract with the Tigers allows him 35 games off from calling games on Detroit SportsNet to make the schedule work. He praised team executives for their support as he pursued the NBC job.

“After doing 162 games with the same person or two different people, you get to know each other so well,” Benetti said. “I calculated it the other day — it’s like 25,596 minutes of baseball coverage over the course of a full season if you call a team. So there is total joy in not knowing what the conversation is going to be.

“I often think about the first time I did a game with Bill Walton. We were in Maui, and I had not met him. I went to our producer, Tim Sullivan, and I said, ‘Where are we sitting?’ He said, ‘Well, Bill’s over there, but Bill doesn’t wanna meet you until game day so you can have legitimate chemistry that comes organically.’ I literally sat down next to Bill Walton to do our first game and I hadn’t met Bill Walton. I miss him every day, and I think people would say we had good chemistry, even that first day. What I learned from Bill is ‘Listen to your partners and feel your partners out.’”

“I think everybody in life has a vibe, and I think Jason’s vibe is very welcoming,” said Orel Hershiser, the Dodgers broadcaster who was one of Benetti’s analysts for the Dodgers-Diamondbacks game. “It’s the sense of humor, the preparation, the stories, the ease of getting along. We were sitting near each other at dinner before we called our game, and I thought, ‘This is somebody I’m going to get along with.’ I think the audience can tell if the guys in the booth like each other, and he was an easy one to build that relationship very quickly. It felt very comfortable to me.”

Cordella said Benetti will be doing other things for NBC Sports as part of his multiyear deal — you can assume college basketball and the NBA — but no specifics have been set. He said he was certain Benetti would have a role for its Olympics coverage, and “if [MLB players are] in the Olympics, it’s hard to imagine him not calling that.”

Benetti said he would love to be part of NBC’s Olympics coverage and hopes to get a second sport if the schedule allows. “For instance, I would love to do team handball and learn everything about it,” Benetti said. “I’m that guy who will say, ‘Please assign me something else for a couple of days.’”

When the news broke about Benetti’s new job, social media exploded with genuine goodwill for the broadcaster. He received a ton of messages from people in the business. It was an experience akin to being alive for your own memorial service.

“When people say really nice things about you because of what you do through a television screen or an iPad, it tells me that I have not made their lives worse,” Benetti said. “I’m not Jewish, but it’s a mitzvah to be able to make somebody smile a little bit more or think in a happier way. I think it’s self-care to be around people who give you joy. I know how important those people were in my life when things were hard.”

He pauses.

“I don’t want to be maudlin, but when I was a kid in the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago [now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab] recovering from a surgery, there was a male nurse who did an amazing Donald Duck impression. He would do Donald Duck and then we would do bloodwork or something. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but I can still hear his impression,” he said. “If I’m someone who has brought joy in whatever way I have, well, I’m proud to be able to have done that. And there’s reciprocal joy for me in that, too.”

What they’re saying about Benetti

Sports Business Journal asked some prominent play-by-play broadcasters what they thought about Jason Benetti landing the job as the lead voice of NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball.”

Joe Davis

Fox’s lead MLB voice and television voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers

I think anybody who gets into this business and thinks about what they could become, they’re probably lying if they tell you that they don’t think about being the lead guy at a network at some point. Having a sense of ownership or the added responsibility that comes with being the lead guy, I think it’s something that you hope to one day have. You might not expect you’ll have it but you hope to, and if you get to do it, it’s pretty darn cool.

I’m so excited for Jason. I had a couple of people ask what I thought about Jason going to NBC and leaving Fox. I said I absolutely get it because it’s his chance to go be the guy somewhere. I’m also happy for us as baseball fans that we’re going to get to hear more of him, because I think he’s brilliant.

Dan Shulman

ESPN broadcaster and television voice of the Toronto Blue Jays

He’s one of the five smartest or funniest people I’ve ever met, all wrapped into the same person. He’s unbelievably quick with a movie reference, something historical or political, or a joke. He’s unbelievably well-read. He can talk about a million different things on the air. As for his broadcast style, he’ll take chances most of us won’t take. I don’t think I would have the guts or the ability to try to say some of the things that he does. But it’s his personality and it’s who he is off the air as well. In a sense, he is kind of redefining the position a little bit because it’s not just X’s and O’s with him. Now, he never misses the X’s or O’s, but he also can do a little improv and all these pop culture references.

When I got the ”Sunday Night Baseball” job for ESPN, part of the reason I felt a real responsibility is I was replacing Jon Miller, who is one of the greatest television voices. It was Jon for 21 years and then me. I needed some people to say to me, “You be you, that’s why they chose you.” What leading a package means is you will be getting good games and a great production crew. But you also know there are a ton of eyes on you that may never have been on you before. You say to yourself, “I’ve got to rise to the occasion.” But Jason has done big games before and I know he’s going to be totally fine.

Ian Eagle

CBS, Prime Video and YES Network broadcaster

Nothing changed in my own mind when I was told I would be calling the Final Four, but I did notice that others may have viewed me a bit differently based on the new assignment. My preparation and approach remained consistent in what I had done previously, and I tried to do the job the same way.

Nobody was surprised when Jason was hired to lead the top MLB team at NBC. He’s a gifted broadcaster who has always held himself to an extremely high standard. It may be validating from the outside, but within the business, there was never any doubt. It was just a matter of time and circumstance before he earned one of those spots. He’s already had an amazing career, and the best part is that now the whole country gets to enjoy his intellect, levity and natural talent on baseball telecasts.

Joe Buck

ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” broadcaster

I just could not be more proud of him. I think he’s a wonderful human being. He’s obviously been through a lot, but he’s never let anything stop him. He just keeps plowing ahead.

He’s funny. He can laugh at himself. I think he’s on top of the action and mixes in humor brilliantly. He is as good as there is, and I would watch him call anything.

Athletes First returned to the top of the agency leaderboards in the first round of the 2026 NFL Draft from Pittsburgh. The Laguna Hills-based agency finished the night with nine selections in its first victory in three years, putting an end to CAA Sports’ two-year win streak in dominant fashion.

The agency represented two picks within the top five and four within the top 10. Clients selected include Jets EDGE David Bailey, Cardinals RB Jeremiyah Love, Chiefs CB Mansoor Delane, Browns OL Spencer Fano, Ravens OL Vega Ioane, Buccaneers EDGE Rueben Bain Jr., Vikings DT Caleb Banks, Steelers OT Max Iheanachor and Titans EDGE Keldric Faulk. The agency’s Travis Allen and Kyle McCarthy stood above most of the field, representing three clients each. It’s among one of the top performances, if not the best, Athletes First has ever had in an NFL Draft, topping its 2020, 2021 and 2023 draft classes, which each had eight selections.

Still, none other than Ryan Tollner and Excel Sports had the privilege of claiming the top selection, Raiders QB Fernando Mendoza. Tollner also had a very successful night, also representing Cowboys S Caleb Downs and co-representing Panthers OT Monroe Freeling with fellow Excel agent Chase Callahan, tying him for first place among agents for the most clients represented.

Though CAA Sports had to wait till nearly halfway through the draft to see a client selected, the agency still reeled in three total selections with Rams QB Ty Simpson, Lions OT Blake Miller and Bears S Dillon Thieneman. However, 2026 is the weakest performance the Hollywood-based agency has had in round one from a pure numbers perspective since 2015 when CAA only represented one client.

This year also marks the strong return of VaynerSports to the first round. The N.Y.-based agency represented two first-rounders this year with Commanders LB Sonny Styles and Seahawks RB Jadarian Price. VaynerSports hasn’t had a first round pick since 2022. This is also the second year in a row Lil Wayne’s Young Money APAA Sports represented a first-rounder. Other notable victories include those for WIN Sports Group, GSE Worldwide, The Familie, Priority Sports, AthElite Agency and On Time Agency, which each represented their first ever round one selections.

Jerry Jones is a master of leverage and timing in high-stakes business deals. North Texas is one of the country’s most robust regions when it comes to local governments being willing to spend on private sports teams. Other NFL teams have recently landed favorable terms by waiting until lease expirations are on the horizon and exploring options in other jurisdictions.

So why did the Cowboys just renew their lease to AT&T Stadium more than 14 years early, in an understated, calm process with the city of Arlington? In short, the certainty today is worth more to Jones and the Cowboys right now than leverage in 5-10 years.

“Signing the extension now creates predictability which allows growth and investment to happen,” said Cowboys General Counsel Jason Cohen. “If you know the Cowboys will be in Arlington for the next 30 years, it’s a different mindset for how you approach the long-term planning. It’s good for everyone to have that certainty. You can amortize costs and feel better about doubling down on different projects.”

The Cowboys had been locked into AT&T Stadium through May 2040, but now they will be there through May 2055. As part of the deal, the Cowboys commit to spending at least $750 million in maintenance, operations and improvements through the end of the term. Arlington committed $273 million in taxpayer funds to upgrade the stadium site. The Cowboys will keep their annual rent payment at $2 million and share $500,000 of naming rights revenue annually with the city, both through 2055.

It didn’t require a public vote because the funding comes from mechanisms voters already approved for the venue in 2004 and 2016. Also, Arlington paid off the original debt for the stadium a decade early.

Perhaps also implicit in Jones’ judgment: a sense that the business-friendly political environment in Texas is particularly good right now, but it might not always be that way. Maybe by the mid-2030s, voter hostility toward sports subsidies, already widespread in much of the country, will grow in the Dallas area.

Teams know when a game is pacing behind. The weather looks shaky. The opponent doesn’t travel well. A star player is questionable. Pricing may be off, and the right fans haven’t been reached. There is still time to fix it, but most teams cannot move fast enough for it to matter.

For decades, competitive advantage in professional sports came from familiar variables: better players, bigger payrolls and stronger coaching. Off the field, scale mattered: larger markets, sponsorships and media deals created separation.

Those gaps have narrowed, and with them, so have the traditional sources of advantage. A different kind of edge is emerging in how teams operate:

Speed. More specifically, decision speed.

Sports operate on tight windows, and every unsold seat represents lost revenue once the game ends. For many teams, fan attention shifts throughout the season, and the best opportunities often come in short bursts: a winning streak, a rivalry game, a playoff push.

Modern companies like Amazon and Uber operate in real time and are built to update pricing and launch campaigns at a moment’s notice. That’s possible because their systems are unified and their data lives in the same place execution happens. Most sports organizations still rely on workflows designed for a different era.

It’s 2026. Sports teams are still operating and running predigital workflows when delay costs them opportunities they’ll never recover.

Where sports operations slow down

Sports teams generate a significant amount of data. Ticketing systems track behavior, purchases and inventory. CRM platforms store fan engagement history. Marketing tools capture campaign performance. But that data is fragmented across systems. Even when the insight is there, it’s hard to access it fast enough to make a difference.

An MLS team sees a midweek game pacing behind and knows a promotional offer is needed. Marketing has a few ideas of which segments might respond best and wants to run tests but needs access to the data. The data sits in the CRM, but someone has to pull it, another team has to develop the campaign assets, and it ultimately has to be approved across departments and deployed. By the time everyone is aligned and the work gets done, the match has passed.

Audience selection, pricing, campaign building, testing, approving and executing are separate steps. Each one adds delay at the exact moment speed matters most. In sports, timing is everything. Ill-positioned marketing leads to weaker financial results and a worsened game atmosphere. Promotions that miss their window also generate lower per-caps, reducing overall revenue.

When teams cannot act quickly, the cost is real. Revenue that could have been captured disappears.

The compression of decision cycles

A new generation of technology is collapsing that gap. Agentic AI is introducing a new operating model where instead of surfacing insights, these systems can adjust pricing, target audiences, and launch campaigns autonomously.

In practice, this compresses decision cycles from days into minutes as conditions shift in real time. A weather-affected match can be followed immediately with a recovery offer to bring fans back. If demand for an NBA game drops due to player availability, a team can immediately adjust its pricing, game narrative and packaging to reignite interest. And when something works, teams can quickly apply those learnings to future opportunities.

Teams have never been short on ideas for what to do in these moments. The difference is how quickly they can execute, and if they are equipped with the right tools to make it happen.

That shift — from delayed execution to immediate action — is the next competitive advantage in sports.

When speed compounds, so do advantages

In many areas of sports operations, success depends on experimentation. But experiments only create value when you can learn from them quickly enough to implement the winning adjustments.

If one team runs 10 meaningful experiments in a season while another runs 1,000, the learning gap is unmeasurably big. Faster teams accumulate insights that turn into business results that slower organizations can’t match.

Speed is always an economic advantage. In sports, minutes mean missed revenue. Teams hold meetings to review data, schedule campaigns and align across departments. These processes create structure but slow execution.

As agentic AI-driven systems become more integrated into sports business operations, much of that work will be automated by a human with strong system-thinking skills. Campaigns and pricing strategies will be adjusted dynamically based on real-time signals and objectives programmed in the software.

The result is fewer bottlenecks between insight and action, allowing teams to spend less time coordinating execution and more time deciding where to focus.

The new edge in sports

None of this eliminates the traditional drivers of sports success. “Talent on the field, strong leadership (on and off the field), and novel strategies will always matter.

But as AI reshapes the way every business in the world operates, some organizations will move faster. They will test more ideas, adapt quicker and execute faster while others will remain constrained by the status quo: slower processes and fragmented systems.

Not only will the difference become obvious to fans, but over time it will also show up in revenue, fan engagement and organizational agility.

Sports leagues have spent years engineering competitive balance on the field. Off the field, there is no such system. As technology evolves, teams are gaining more access to their data.

But more data won’t separate the best businesses from the rest. Access and speed will. The clubs that build the best businesses will be the ones that use agentic AI to act on insight while the opportunity still exists.

Jordy Leiser is co-founder and CEO of Jump, a fan experience and ticketing platform that launched in 2025 with clients in the NBA, MLS, WNBA, NWSL and USL.

• About 12,000 individuals seeking a U.S. tourist visa to attend the 2026 FIFA World Cup opted into the administration’s FIFA Priority Appointment Scheduling System, and coupled with Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) application data, SBJ’s Alex Silverman reports this does not indicate a clear early surge in travel to the U.S. for the tournament.
• Cadillac F1 Team hired Excel Sports Management to become its agency of record, moving to an exclusive model after previously working with a host of different firms, writes SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• MSG Networks signed a deal with the Team Boxing League (TBL) to bring the remainder of Season 4 fights to the RSN, starting with Friday night’s NYC Attitude-Boston Butchers match from Boston, notes SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• In this week’s Talent Pool roundup of agency signings, SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario notes that WNBA legend Sheryl Swoopes signed with Roc Nation Sports.