SBJ Unpacks: ESPN taking its Super Bowl talents to Santa Monica

Tonight in Unpacks: Disney touted ESPN’s return to the Super Bowl during its Tuesday night upfront presentation, but it also had plenty of other announcements for “Monday Night Football,” “College GameDay,” “30 for 30,” and “Dancing with the Stars,” reports SBJ’s Austin Karp.

Also tonight:

• Airbnb sponsors five NASCAR tracks
• Fox, Sesame Street sign World Cup deal
• Football in focus at upfronts
• Op-ed: Sports isn’t beating the economy — it’s transcending it

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour discusses how George Pyne’s investment in Matchroom could boost its global ambitions, a soft market for the Seahawks, a speedbump for the Moda Center’s renovation in Portland and more.

NEW YORK CITY — It wasn’t all Super Bowl for Disney’s upfront on Tuesday afternoon, but the company’s return to the event couldn’t be missed. That included Jimmy Kimmel lightly roasting Disney ad sales chief Rita Ferro about the coming year to close things out at the event.

“We’re gonna milk the bah-gee-bus out it,” Kimmel joked to advertisers gathered at Javits Center.

Ferro made a point onstage of noting the power of ESPN’s sports portfolio, and that with the addition of NFL Network, football impressions would increase even more.

The upfront hit on the NFL early on, with Commissioner Roger Goodell joining Joe Buck onstage to promote the Super Bowl and lay out Broncos-Chiefs as the first “Monday Night Football” game of the season. Other talent and former players taking the stage included Jason Kelce, Troy Aikman, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Steve Young, Emmitt Smith, Desmond Howard, Jerry Rice, Hines Ward, Kurt Warner and Nick Foles.

Other Super Bowl news included the announcement of “ESPN Beach,” which will be the hub for the network’s weeklong Super Bowl coverage, with a setup on Santa Monica Beach and Santa Monica Pier. That will be just one of the SoCal locations, including Disneyland, to have an ESPN Super Bowl presence that week.

Some other highlights:

• Josh D’Amaro made his upfront debut as Disney’s CEO and made sure to note his Celtics fandom in a room full of New Yorkers.
• The Savannah Bananas kicked off the presentation, with one of their players even being announced as a celebrity for the next edition of “Dancing with the Stars.” Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole took to the stage twice during the upfront, and made an announcement that ESPN+ would air a championship game.
• While technically still TNT employees, “Inside the NBA” members Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith took to the stage, alongside NBA Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg. They were then joined by Jalen Brunson, who had the night off after the Knicks swept the 76ers.
• Women’s sports was highlighted by the announcement of a new “30 for 30” on Billie Jean King.
• The sites for the first two “College GameDay” shows were announced by the crew — Clemson-LSU on Sept. 5 and Ohio State-Texas on Sept. 12 — and then Rece Davis had Pat McAfee, Nick Saban, Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard make their picks. They were joined by WWE superstar Cody Rhodes. ESPN also announced a documentary coming in the fall on Nick Saban.
• The link between the NFL and Disney was also apparent on the drama show side, as Hulu’s upcoming “The Land” was highlighted onstage. That will be a fictional show set around the Browns (complete with colors and IP) and produced by Skydance Sports.

Airbnb is getting into the NASCAR realm, reaching a deal with NASCAR Holdings and Speedway Motorsports to embed its listings into some of their tracks’ websites. The various agreements are being announced Tuesday by the five tracks and through an event in South Carolina, where one of the involved venues, Darlington Raceway, is based.

The deal will start with the 2027 NASCAR season, and the tracks are Darlington, Martinsville and Talladega from NASCAR’s portfolio and Bristol and North Wilkesboro from Speedway Motorsports’. Airbnb gets the category of official lodging sponsor.

Founded in 2007, Airbnb says that 63% of U.S. housing tracts have listings from homeowners who use its service but no nearby hotels. NASCAR often races in rural areas, and the sides appear to have strategically chosen tracks in less urban settings. The pact also highlights how NASCAR and its fellow racetrack operator SM are working together on marketing and sponsorships.

Fox Sports and Sesame Street have struck a deal around the FIFA World Cup, with Elmo, Cookie Monster, Big Bird, and other characters set to appear on Fox programming and World Cup telecasts this summer. Characters will be integrated into Fox’s World Cup programming through special content segments. The integration will run from June 11-July 19.

Segments include “The Count Down,” featuring Count von Count, breaking down World Cup stats, as well as “Trash Talk” with Oscar the Grouch in a highlight show setting. Then there is a “Broadcaster Bootcamp” where Grover teams with Fox Sports broadcasters to learn the nuances of calling soccer games.

Fox Sports VP/Production Zac Kenworthy and Sesame Workshop VP/Marketing & Brand Strategy Samantha Kennedy took the lead on the deal. Exact financial terms were not available.

Sesame Street has done a number of sports collabs over the years, including a line of New Balance shoes and partnerships with the USOC for the 2014 Sochi Games and 2024 Paris Games. Elmo even made an appearance on the SBJ Sports Media Podcast during the 2024 Paris Olympics.

NEW YORK — Coming off a year in which NBC had the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics, it was natural for sports to be somewhat less prominent at the company’s upfront presentation Monday. However, Mark Marshall, NBC chair of global advertising and partnerships, still talked about the power of sports alongside the network’s other marquee live events, like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and emphasized how NBC has started to own Sunday nights during the entire year with its lineup of NFL, NBA and MLB games.

“Football Night in America” was where NBC specifically highlighted sports during the event at Radio City Music Hall, as Mike Tirico and Bob Costas welcomed the show’s newest analyst in former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin.

The deal to bring NBC another NFL game came too late to be part of the upfront announcements, as the league had to shift plans late last week on where those extra games would go after a deal with YouTube fell through, sources told Sports Business Journal.

Telemundo and Peacock also have Spanish rights for the FIFA World Cup this summer. Famed announcer Andrés Cantor was brought in to hype up that event for NBCU.

New sports > prior entertainment shows in 18-49

While entertainment shows were the focus of ad buyers, brands and affiliates at NBC’s upfront, it’s important to remember that sports draws the bigger live audiences.

“SNF” has been the No. 1 show in prime time for 15 straight seasons, because, well, it’s the NFL. But numbers for the recent run of 10 prime-time NBA Playoff games on NBC (April 19-May 5) show that NBC averaged 4.75 million viewers and 1.57 million viewers among the advertiser-friendly adults 18-49 demo. NBC was up 145% among all viewers compared to the same period a year earlier, and the 18-49 demo saw a 6x increase. Those games also delivered NBC wins among all networks in prime time among adults 18-49, 18-34 and 25-54.

And it wasn’t just the playoffs beating last year’s NBC entertainment Sunday night programming. The NBA regular season and other sports did so, too:

• “Sunday Night Basketball” averaged 823,000 viewers among adults 18-49, up 31% from the same windows last year.
• “Coast 2 Coast Tuesdays” for the NBA averaged 766,000 among adults 18-49, up 87%.
• NBC’s lone “Sunday Night Baseball” game this season averaged 520,000 in the 18-49 demo, up 77%. NBC’s MLB opener averaged 749,000 in the demo, up 126%.

In every period of economic headwinds, the playbook says the same thing: When consumers get squeezed, discretionary spending slows. Entertainment is always among the first casualties. Someone should tell sports fans.

Despite years of rising inflation, geopolitical unrest, and tariff fears, the NHL just broke its attendance record for the fourth consecutive year. The NBA did too. MLB posted its fourth straight year of growth. And none of this is happening because fans suddenly got richer. It’s happening because sports have quietly crossed the line from simply entertainment into something closer to a basic need.

The big question is, “Why?”

Of the biggest economic trends we’ve watched over the past five years, none has been more impactful than the deepening impact of emotional well-being on consumer behavior. As Americans emerged from the trauma of the pandemic, their spending habits anchored increasingly on goods and services that — quite simply — make them feel better. The massive acceleration and resiliency of the beauty and cosmetics industry is a prime example.

Sports is another.

CivicScience has been tracking sentiment — including economic and emotional well-being — among millions of U.S. sports fans since 2012. In the years after the pandemic (2021 to present), the relationship between sports fandom, economic optimism, emotional well-being, and spending has risen to new levels.

Passionate sports fans have reported meaningfully higher well-being than the general public every year for the past five years. It’s not just slightly higher, either. Consistently, durably, year after year, across happy years and hard ones alike, sports fans just feel better. Non-fans, by comparison, sit at the bottom of that well-being curve.

Fans aren’t irrational for spending on tickets when their grocery and utility bills are up. They’re making a calculated trade-off — and they know exactly what they’re trading for. Among adults who increased their sports consumption since 2020, one in three cites stress relief as the primary driver. When we ask fans what role sports play in their lives today, the answers cluster around three things: a distraction from stress, a source of joy, and a way to feel connected to other people. For 78% of regular TV sports viewers, it’s one of those three.

The economic data backs this up. In Q1 2026, fans who describe watching sports as a passion are 11 percentage points more optimistic about their financial futures than non-fans. Across every major professional league — MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLS — fan bases outpace the general population in economic sentiment. NHL and MLS fans lead the pack.

This brings us to their spending behavior, and why it looks so different from other discretionary categories. When we asked sports viewers how their spending on live events has changed year over year, 62% said they’re spending the same or more, inflation be damned. They’re not oblivious to prices; 57% say concession costs factor into their ticket decisions. But they’re absorbing the headwind rather than dodging it. Some are buying merchandise instead of attending. Some are adding streaming subscriptions — 25% of U.S. adults now hold two or more sports-specific services, and the majority keep them year-round rather than churning after a season. Wallets are merely moving around inside the fandom ecosystem, not leaving it.

Gen Z, ever the disrupters, adds an additional layer to the story. Sports’ importance among U.S. adults has risen from 21% to 29% over the past five years, and Gen Z is disproportionately driving it — 55% report increased viewership since 2020, and 50% call sports their primary entertainment choice. When we ask Gen Z fans how they expect their sports engagement to change over the next three years, one in four says it will increase further.

That’s not a trend. It’s a pipeline.

I’ll share one final stat to hammer home the point. Sports fans whose favorite teams are performing “better than expected” are twice as likely as those whose teams are doing “worse than expected” to say their overall (meaning not just on sports) spending is “higher than usual.” The connection between sports, emotions, and economics is indisputable.

None of this means the sports industry can be complacent. Costs matter, access matters, and there’s real fragmentation happening as streaming rights scatter across platforms. But the underlying consumer psychology shows no signs of weakening. When a product provides stress relief, community, and a sense of optimism that other products can’t replicate, it stops competing on price. It starts competing on something closer to meaning.

In the 2026 economy, meaning is the last thing people cut back on.

John Dick is founder and CEO of CivicScience.

• The Kings made Sutter Health their jersey patch sponsor with a wide-ranging, multiyear deal that also installs Sutter Health physicians and orthopedists as the franchise’s team doctors, writes SBJ’s Tom Friend.
• U.S. Ski and Snowboard signed an eight-year deal with The North Face, bringing in the popular brand as its official apparel sponsorship, reports SBJ’s Rachel Axon.
• Football and futbol drove the conversations for the upfront presentations from Amazon and Fox Sports, writes SBJ’s Josh Carpenter.
• Kalshi is sponsoring Nate Diaz in Netflix’s debut MMA card this weekend at Intuit Dome, as the predictions market continues to pepper the marketplace with deals, reports SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• Cisco and the USGA extended their longstanding technology relationship for an additional five years and are plotting new, AI-focused initiatives together, writes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.
• Foot Locker is bringing together athletes from basketball’s biggest brands to power “Hoops Lives Here,” a year-round marketing campaign reinforcing the retailer’s position as a central distribution and storytelling hub in hoops culture, notes SBJ’s Na’Andre Emerson.
• A five-part docuseries chronicling the USMNT’s journey to the 2026 FIFA World Cup debuts Tuesday night on HBO, four years after cameras started rolling, writes SBJ’s Alex Silverman.