SBJ Unpacks: Preparing for World Cup’s marketing blitz

Tonight in Unpacks: The biggest World Cup tournament in FIFA’s history has three nations preparing for a marketing effort unlike any seen before, as SBJ’s Terry Lefton reports in this early look at next week’s magazine.

Also tonight:

• Why the CFP is stuck in a stalemate
• Levine: Bipartisan bill gives schools tools to stabilize
• The intricate business of OKC playoff T-shirts
• Op-ed: Stretching the sports betting truth

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour wraps up the week with Sacramento’s effort to bring an MLB expansion team to the nation’s 20th-largest media market, the NBA’s Draft Lottery changes aimed at tanking, Elevate leading the search for the next Big East commissioner and more.

It can be difficult even for sponsors to get their arms around the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Derek Aframe, Octagon executive vice president/head of integrated marketing, who is working his 10th World Cup (men’s and women’s), likens the event that starts June 11 and features 104 matches over 39 days in the U.S., Mexico and Canada to “hosting a few dozen Super Bowls over a few months.”

Other than the world’s biggest soccer tournament now having 50% more teams (32 to 48) and 40 more games, there’s additional pressure on sponsors. They’re paying tens of millions per year and more, with matches being played in a North American-compatible time zone for the first time since 2014. The most recent men’s World Cups were staged in markets not necessarily meaningful to every sponsor, like Russia and Qatar.

It’s quite a contrast this time around, with the World Cup largely in the world’s largest economy and in the place where sports marketing was perfected, if not invented.

Aframe and Octagon are activating for eight FIFA sponsors, including Anheuser-Busch/InBev, Aramco, Bank of America and The Home Depot.

“Over the past few [World Cups], we’ve been in markets where some sponsors didn’t have much of a presence,” Aframe said. “Now, it’s about capitalizing in the largest market and a place where sponsors have internal-established marketing groups of some size.”

Echoed PepsiCo Foods CMO Hernán Tantardini: “Being in the host country makes it significantly different.” Activations on behalf of Pepsi’s Quaker brand, “Official Breakfast” of the World Cup, include sponsoring the player escort program before each match.

For Frito-Lay’s salty snack offerings, World Cup limited-time offers in the U.S. include Lay’s potato chips in Brazilian-Style Garlic Sauce, Wavy French Onion Soup and Argentinian-Style Steak with Chimichurri. Around the world, 40 new flavors are being marketed for the tourney.

“What’s different in North America is that we have to appeal to people who may only watch soccer every four years,” Tantardini said. “We know consumers will be gathering to watch and 70% of those are watching sports with snacks, so we need to keep on nurturing.” PepsiCo Foods North American retail activations number in the hundreds of thousands, he added.

“With this event, the difference is that you start thinking about the next World Cup as you are getting through the last 45 minutes of the previous one,” said Jason Howarth, Panini’s senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations.

Panini’s activations include a massive on-pack promotion — more than 300 million 20-ounce bottles of Coke and Coke Zero Sugar — for its World Cup stickers, of which it is printing more than a billion. There will be a four-truck mobile tour and additional promos with World Cup sponsors Adidas, The Home Depot and Unilever.

“What’s maybe unique this time is that now there’s enough fandom in America that you are going to have people here looking to watch [Lionel] Messi and Argentina, [Cristiano] Ronaldo and [Portugal] or Kylian Mbappé with France,” Howarth said.

Some brands without global reach found the North American footprint ideal. The Home Depot is the only home improvement chain with stores in the three host countries.

“For us, this was about the number of local communities the World Cup will touch, versus a big event like the Super Bowl, where you focus on one or a few markets,” said Allison Kolber, Home Depot’s vice president of integrated marketing.

The Home Depot is activating in each of the 16 host city markets with David Beckham in ads (“Build It Like Beckham”) and “Beckham’s Backyard” zones at fan fests, FIFA-logoed versions of its ubiquitous orange buckets and, with pass-through rights, a World Cup scarf gift-with-purchase program with Makita. Its KPIs are linked with the fact that its core “pro customers” over-index by 50% or more when it comes to soccer.

“We’re looking to grow brand preference and purchase intent from core customer segments,” Kolber said. “The question we’ll be asking is whether a sponsorship like this resonates with customers enough to make a meaningful difference.”

“What’s entirely different about any World Cup is size and cultural relevance,” said Rick Pineda, vice president of global sports at Diageo, FIFA’s first spirits sponsor that is marketing a variety of special-edition World Cup bottles. “We need to ensure that this builds brand health, awareness and salience so we are being talked about during Word Cup, and that we use this to expand our important retail relationships, like Total Wine in the U.S.”

Diageo will activate across 36 countries. Three brands will lead in the U.S.: Casamigos, Don Julio and Buchanan’s Scotch.

Of course, in the U.S., you’ll have some brands activating that aren’t necessarily used to leveraging “the beautiful game” as a sponsor.

“Sheer size and scale of the World Cup are the foremost concerns for any sponsor, especially new ones,” said John Kristick, the co-head of Playfly Sports Consulting who has worked on every men’s World Cup since 1994. For this tournament, Playfly worked with each host city and four FIFA sponsors.

“For a lot of them, soccer is not a 365-day brand presence or activation focus, so they have to find their windows, perhaps for the first time, in some cases,” Kristick added.

Any glam sports event attracts its share of clutter from non-sponsors.

“If we were going into this as a branding exercise, I would be more concerned, but we’re building it into our business,” said Caroline Clayton, American Airlines senior vice president of communications and CMO. “The redemption we got offering tickets for miles to our loyalty customers made this almost a no-brainer, even though going into [the sponsorship] was kind of a leap for us. … We’ll look at new loyalty members and track how many we are flying to host cities as key indicators.”

AA’s activation includes the paint-out of a Boeing 737, additional flights between World Cup host cities and U.S. Soccer-themed amenity kits on flights through July.

First-time World Cup sponsor Bank of America is another non-endemic trying to find that elusive connection between brand and property domestically.

“There are always sponsors using this as a badging exercise, but you need to build something more broad and integral,” said Brad Ross, Bank of America’s managing director of global marketing partnerships who is working on his fifth men’s World Cup, with the prior ones on behalf of Coca-Cola. “Its always a balancing act.”

“There’s more clutter than even a Super Bowl, but it’s on a much grander stage, so you work the tradeoffs there in order to successfully leverage an event where most of the world is involved.”

—  John Tatum, CEO of Genesco Sports

BofA is another FIFA sponsor employing Beckham as a World Cup endorser. Other activation plans include community street soccer parks in every U.S. World Cup host city, in conjunction with Visa and Street Soccer USA, with the hopes of expanding access to the sport.

Teaming with U.S. Soccer, BofA is pledging to make soccer available at every school in the U.S. by 2030. “The pay-for-play model is one of the biggest barriers to entry in the U.S.,” Ross said.

Clutter and rights infringement are nettlesome for any large sports property. With America’s soccer IQ heightened exponentially since 1994, more of those problems are anticipated. Even outside of FIFA, there has never been more soccer marketing inventory available in America.

“There’s more clutter than even a Super Bowl, but it’s on a much grander stage, so you work the tradeoffs there in order to successfully leverage an event where most of the world is involved,” said John Tatum, CEO of Genesco Sports who’s working with World Cup sponsor clients Qatar Airways, PepsiCo Foods, American Airlines and Verizon.

“As a brand, you have to assume you’re going into a cluttered environment, so you’d better make your supporting ads and activation stand out,” said Kolber, citing The Home Depot’s “College GameDay” sponsorship and its work with Shaquille O’Neal around the NCAA men’s and women’s Final Fours as paradigms.

“We are expecting a lot of [marketing] noise,” added Octagon’s Aframe. “Our advice to clients was to avoid clutter by getting out in front early. Some of them were out there as early as the end of last year.”

Obviously, performance matters as far as grabbing eyeballs, a sponsor imperative. The question is how much, especially with expectations for the U.S. team not set particularly high. In 1994, the last World Cup here, the U.S. advanced to the round of 16 for the first time since 1930, drawing a then-record TV rating that has since been eclipsed by subsequent men’s and women’s World Cups.

“If our 1994 team hadn’t performed competitively, it would have been a lot tougher to get MLS up and running then,” said Alan Rothenberg, the U.S. Soccer president during the 1990s who also oversaw the 1994 FIFA World Cup and the 1999 Women’s World Cup in the U.S., along with the launch of MLS in 1996. “This time, a bad showing would be a disappointment, but it won’t have that same potential negative.”

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — Sandwiched between talks of new-look governance and rising basketball costs, SEC administrators met this week on the Florida Panhandle with the College Football Playoff’s future still hanging over the room.

The league’s stakeholders departed with no decisions and, more pressing, a deeper understanding of the CFP’s real question — whether there’s actually enough new money to justify a jump from 12 to 24 teams.

“When professional sports have added to their postseason, it’s always been a small adjustment,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “Four to 12 [teams] was monumental, but I think it was justifiable. You want to be careful about how far you go.”

That question sits at the center of a CFP stalemate. The SEC and Big Ten wrested control of future format discussions during the most recent media rights negotiations. The result: two conferences at odds over whether to push the field to 24 teams, remain at 12 or find a middle ground — with little agreement on what comes next.

The rights opening

The central issue is whether new playoff inventory would command enough in the media rights market to justify expansion.

Terms of the ESPN agreement that runs through the 2031-32 season grant the network control over new inventory up to a 14-team format. Beyond that, any new games would likely be open for bidding — an avenue competitors such as Fox and others would jump at.

“Twenty-four solves an enormous amount of problems,” Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks said at the CAA World Congress of Sports in April. “You’ve had people in the SEC come out and say that their championship game has run its course. … It’s probably inevitable that it expands, and hopefully, at least from the research we’ve done, the best model we’ve seen is 24.”

That said, Fox would have difficult rights calls to make, as the company faces future decisions on the FIFA World Cup, MLB and even the Big Ten and Big 12 — not to mention a looming increase for its NFL deal.

There’s also no guarantee Fox, which had the Bowl Championship Series from 2007 to 2010, would get CFP rights without stiff competition. College football has solidified its place as the No. 2 sport in the country in terms of viewership, and there would be plenty of suitors ready to pounce.

“There is an opportunity of course for Fox to participate, but at the same time it’s open then to anybody,” said Tag Garson, president at Excelsior Sports & Entertainment, who consults on media rights and worked on BCS deals while at ABC/ESPN. “At that particular point, the metrics and the dynamics could be very, very different, which would then lead to it not necessarily being just a traditional broadcast partner.

“It could be an Amazon or Netflix that could also raise their hand and say, ‘Look, we’re interested in this and we don’t want it to be a sublicense, and we want to have some of the bigger games as the tournament progresses.’”

The championship game tradeoff

Conference championship games sit at the center of CFP expansion discussions. Industry insiders suggest the Power Four conferences generate roughly $200 million in revenue from league title games: SEC, $100 million; Big Ten, $50 million; and Big 12 and ACC, $25 million each.

How much the eight additional games in a 24-team format are worth is a bit of a guessing game — though CFP leaders are expected to receive more tangible projections during a meeting in Denver later next month. Even a $400 million to $500 million valuation might be optimistic, which would create only $200 million to $300 million in new money.

Would spreading roughly $200 million to $300 million across the leagues justify the additional games and the potential devaluation of the regular season? That much is less clear.

What the first round showed

The viewership value of the early-round games is also an important factor. Last season, the four first-round contests averaged 9.9 million viewers, but the audiences varied widely.

ESPN’s two first-round games avoided NFL competition and averaged just under 15 million viewers — shy of the two most-watched games of the regular season (Ohio State-Michigan and Ohio State-Texas), as well as the SEC and Big Ten conference championship audiences.

Meanwhile, TNT Sports’ first-round games — which involved Group of Six teams Tulane and James Madison — notched less than half the audience ESPN received (both games pulled under 6.5 million viewers with NFL head-to-head competition). Those figures put TNT’s games well outside the top 30 regular-season game audiences, and even less than the TCU-North Carolina game on Labor Day on ESPN.

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“First of all, we are under contract with ESPN for a while,” Texas A&M Athletic Director Trev Alberts said. “But, secondly, without that data point, how do you make an informed decision? That’s all that Greg Sankey has been saying, ‘Before we run to decision making that we later regret, let’s do the work to have the data to understand what that value really is.’”

ESPN is adamantly opposed to expansion beyond 16 teams, sources said, given the trickle-down effect it might have on the regular-season inventory it controls. ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips acknowledged the network’s opposition to 24 teams during his league’s spring meetings in early May.

Downstream upside

Still, getting to 24 teams in the CFP could have downstream benefits for media partners who may not be bidding for the playoff but have ties to the sport.

“There’s games of more consequence toward the end of the regular season — that’s where the upside is for us,” said Mike Perman, senior vice president of sports at The CW Network, which has the ACC, Pac-12 and Mountain West. “It’s a matchup that may not have been good a year or two years before, but towards the end of the regular season, we’re getting a better matchup for a P4.”

Though CFP rights might not align with The CW’s strategy, that doesn’t mean Perman and his team aren’t paying attention to prospective avenues should a 24-team CFP come to pass.

“With expansion, there might be other opportunities,” he said. “We’re trying to be creative on other opportunities around that.”

As fall approaches, the SEC is in no hurry to move off its preferred stance of a 16-team field. Sankey and SEC administrators have preached patience and a desire to see all available information before committing.

“Studying all the options is the most important thing,” Vanderbilt Athletic Director Candice Storey Lee said. “We have access to more data than we’ve ever had, for better or worse. It’s a great opportunity for us to study and review all of our options and then do what’s best.”

What is best? No one is quite sure — and no answer seems to be on the immediate horizon.

“We’re the No. 2 sport in America on the football side,” said Tennessee AD Danny White. “There’s huge opportunity. We’ve just got to clean up some of our structure, the relationship with athletes and get the postseason right.”

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School officials wanted reform in college sports, and Yankees president Randy Levine said that’s exactly what they received this week.

Levine, a leader of President Trump’s Council on College Sports, told Sports Business Journal the feedback he received from his committee and others was that the Protect College Sports Act, introduced Wednesday in the Senate, covers 80% of what is needed to solve the problems caused by an NCAA system that is broken and unsustainable.

“Are we going to be sending people to college to be student-athletes or professional athletes?” Levine said. “That’s basically what it comes down to. Everybody says they want to protect the system and keep student-athletes. Well, the tools are there to do that. It’s their choice.”

The bill, which is expected to be discussed during a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee next week, includes a slew of provisions designed to wrangle the largely decentralized forces that have created a chaotic college sports landscape.

Among the topics the bill touches:

• Re-institutes the one-time transfer policy while allowing wiggle room for athletes whose sports have been discontinued or head coach changes jobs;
• Creates a five-year athlete eligibility clock that also prohibits professionals from participating in college sports if they earned money beyond prize money as pros;
• Allows for the pooling of media rights should at least 75% of FBS schools agree to do so;
• Gives the NCAA and CSC grounds to create scrutiny around and prohibit third-party NIL deals.

The legislation drafted by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is notably neutral on the topic of athlete employment -- a classification that has been the subject of stiff debate from the NCAA, conferences and athlete advocacy groups.

Levine noted the employment component to the bill was among the more debated discussion points in the legislation’s drafting.

“I personally spoke to 1,000 student-athletes, and not one of them wanted to be an employee or in a union. They wanted to be student-athletes,” Levine said. “That’s not to say there are others who feel differently. But the fact is this bill calls them student-athletes and leaves that decision to the student-athletes and the schools in the future. It doesn’t foreclose anything.”

The bill also calls for noticeably stricter regulations around agents, requiring certification and capping their commission fees on NIL deals at 5%.

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===

Levine pointed to agents charging 20% fees and student-athletes not getting paid on contracts because there are no protections and enforcement. Those sentiments have been shared by coaches, athletic directors and commissioners across the college sports landscape in recent months.

“I ask a lot of these groups, where have you been when these agents were allowed to charge these fees?” he said. “I don’t hear any criticism of it. Where have you been as far as getting players paid for the contracts they’ve signed? Where have you been when 40% of players who go into the transfer portal don’t get new NIL deals and many have lost their scholarships? Where have you all been? The answer is all of those problems are solved in this bill.”

Levine, formerly the chief labor negotiator for MLB, also addressed the lack of collective bargaining in the bill, with student-athletes possessing the right as non-union members to arbitration or the court system to enforce their rights.

“At the end of the day, I think this is the real test for all of these school officials to show whether they were really sincere in wanting reform or were they not?” Levine said. “Because if they were, they now have a framework to work around it and get something that’s very, very sustainable.

“That’s the lesson that has to come out. We’re going to see whether the NCAA, the conferences, the school presidents, the ADs and the student-athletes really want to reform the system or they don’t.”

SBJ college sports reporter Ben Portnoy contributed to this story.

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A would-be Oklahoma City Thunder front office job listing:

Must be willing to work long hours in April, May and June.

Must know how to keep a secret.

Must know how to fold T-shirts.

If that sounds unrealistic -- along with another prerequisite: must have friends who can fold T-shirts, too -- it’s not. The Gameday experience in OKC has become a low-six-figure corporate ritual that has wives, girlfriends and the 9-to-5 crowd dialing Thunder employees at playoff-time looking for answers.

“Season ticket holders call us days in advance,” said Brian Byrnes, the Thunder’s Senior VP of Business Operations who 16 seasons ago brainstormed a playoff tradition that puts a mystery T-shirt on every Paycom Center seat. “They want to know what color the shirt is. They want to plan their outfits to go with it. They want to plan their accessories, what color shoes to wear, what color pants, what earrings, what purses."

So now it can be told, as the NBA approaches a Western Conference Final Game 7 Saturday in the Sooner State. One of America’s most thankless jobs is ... Thunder receptionist.

“They have to say with a straight face, ‘We don’t know the color,’” said Jennifer Watson, the Thunder’s director of community engagement who doubles as Lord of the Thunder T-shirts.

It’s a tough gig, but somebody’s got to do it.

A tradition begins

Who knew? In 2010, the Thunder were a 2-year-old brand playing their debut playoff series against Kobe Bryant and the defending champion Lakers. Down 2-0 and returning home for Game 3, the Thunder’s naming-rights sponsor at the time -- Chesapeake Energy -- bankrolled Byrnes’ idea to lay a T-shirt on every seat. As a gift for the fan. As a way for the fan to “suit up.”

They weren’t the first to it, or the last. The Heat had popularized color-coordinated T-shirts with their “Back in Black” in 2004, their “Red Zone” in 2005 and their “White Hot” in 2006. The “We Believe” Warriors were famous in 2007 for their T-shirt gold rush. But the Thunder were up next, a blank slate.

Watson’s task, for that first Lakers game, was to “T-shirt” the arena with 10 to 12 employees. “I think there was four of us here in our department,” she said. “We got a couple from accounting and maybe one or two from our events crew.”

The day prior to tip-off, they waited for the team’s practice to end, and started shimmying shirts over the seats, one by one. They stopped at 5:30 p.m., returned the next morning and weren’t finished in the upper 300 level as game-time approached.

“We were literally getting calls, ‘The door’s are opening in a half hour!’” Watson said. “It took us two days.”

When Russell Westbrook entered the court and saw 18,000 in Thunder blue, he mouthed a “wow.” The team defeated L.A. (“The city was in a state of euphoria,” Byrnes said), and at midnight inside the Courtside Club, Thunder execs couldn’t stop raving about the crowd. “Everybody had worn the T-shirt -- from front row to last row,” Byrnes said. “We were struck by how galvanizing that was. So conversation turned to: ‘We got to do Game Two!’”

Slight problem: The game was in 48 hours, and they needed a sponsor to appear out of thin air. One did -- Cox Communications, a corporate partner whose marketing team was on the other end of the bar. “So we were having live conversations,” Byrnes said. “They said yes in the moment.”

Through their local supplier, Oklahoma Shirt Company, 18,000 T-shirts arrived on gameday morning, when the baton got passed to Watson. She didn’t have two days; she had half of one. “So we did a huge all-call,” she said. “I’m saying, ‘This friend of mine has a church group that might want to come in or some sponsors.’ We probably had about 60 people helping.”

The rest is history: 79 straight T-shirted playoff games (and counting) over 16 seasons, with some fans even deciding to make quilts out of them. It’s an official word now in OKC: “T-shirting.” Starting in mid-to-late March, the team contacts its sponsors and asks them to pay the cost -- low six figures for each game -- in exchange for marketing rights, storytelling, media value and branding on the sleeve of the shirt.

Sponsors such as MidFirst Bank, Riverwind Casino, Devon Energy and Loves Travel Stop have lined up, and the ones with the highest financial commitment to the team get dibs, in order. First up this year was founding partner MidFirst, whose Executive VP of Marketing and Products Derek Caswell swears by the ROI. “I’ve seen our Thunder T-shirts at the zoo, the airport, at the places kids go play,” he said.

On T-shirting days, maybe 25 to 30 of MidFirst’s staff head to Paycom Center to help, where they see Watson on a live mic booming instructions. Boxes of shirts are next to each section. One group of people lays the shirts over the seats; another group neatly folds the sleeves behind the shirt; another group puts “fan bammer” noisemakers on top. The section-by-section process takes 75-minutes on a good day, two-to-three hours on a sideways day.

Other franchises do T-shirting, too -- the Spurs, for instance, while the Trail Blazers did terrible towels -- but, in OKC, almost 100% of the fans wear the shirt, or else. If they waffle at all, they might be shown on the video screen, with the whole arena chanting: “Put it on, put it on.” Peer pressure.

Sixteen years later, the team still keeps the fans guessing -- Will the shirts be navy blue, sky blue, sunset orange, white or have a hint of turquoise? -- and, for this Saturday’s 80th consecutive T-shirt game, will do a dramatic reveal Friday (usually 24 hours before tipoff) through the mayor or celebrities or social media.

The Thunder have already eclipsed 1 million shirts printed and could reach 1.5 million if they make this year’s NBA Finals.

But the Lord-of-the-T-shirts record that may never be broken is when Watson recruited 100 people from her database a couple years back -- church groups, PTAs, a conga line of Thunder employees -- and immaculately laid down 18,000 shirts in 45 minutes.

Must know how to fold T-shirts … fast.

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from “Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting,” by David Bockino. (Pegasus Books, June 2, 2026)

This chapter begins and ends in a Costa Rican villa. It’s just not the same villa. Actually, the first villa might not even be real. There’s a chance it’s just a regular house. Maybe even a small apartment. But the second one is definitely real. In fact it’s one of the most luxurious villas in the world. Fancy enough for the Kardashians. Literally — they’ve stayed there. And the two villas, even if one of them isn’t exactly a villa, do have at least one thing in common: They were both built with money from American sports bettors.

Let’s start in the first villa, a supposed “ten-thousand-square-foot hacienda in the rolling green hills of Escazú” owned by an American named Steve Budin. Why the skepticism? Because everybody who knows him says that Steve Budin likes to exaggerate, embellish, stretch the truth. In his memoir “Bets, Drugs and Rock and Roll,” Budin claimed that he became the “biggest bookmaker in the world” and “forever change[d] the way people bet on sports.” Neither of those things are true. But the story told in Budin’s memoir provides a path to an even more interesting tale, one in which offshore bookmakers help launch one of the first sports websites in the United States. And because of that alone it’s worth telling.

Sports gambling was a Budin family tradition. Steve’s father, David, was a former college basketball player who worked as a betting agent, somebody who procured new bettors, and as an actual bookmaker. Steve looked up to his dad and saw him as gambling royalty. “When my dad spoke to fellow gamblers at a craps table,” he wrote, “it was like Gandhi addressing a peace conference in India.” According to his son, David “was an expert’s expert,” working with Gil Beckley, the prolific bookmaker who “‘spent’” time in Newport, Kentucky, and with Bob Martin, the renowned Las Vegas oddsmaker. He was undoubtedly well-connected. In the early 1960s, David Budin was arrested along with the notorious Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal for attempting to fix college basketball and football games.

Steve hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps not by fixing games but through bookmaking. He just wanted to do it on a bigger scale: “I wanted money in the bank, not cash under a mattress.” In 1992, when he was twenty-two, Budin began working for Caesars Palace, hosting the company’s high rollers in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. His job was to get his clients drunk, get them laid, and get them to gamble. Budin was, according to Budin, “the biggest and best in that division of the industry.” During his Caesars gig, Budin was introduced to a Panamanian man who claimed to possess his country’s only sports gambling license. Spinning tales of untapped riches, he convinced Budin to upend his life in Miami and fly to Panama to start the business.

It was a disaster. Budin was suckered, scammed, and taken for tens of thousands of dollars. The politicians were corrupt, the technology was shoddy, and few Panamanians wanted to actually bet on sports. Budin soon figured out that the more profitable path was taking bets over the telephone from Americans. With a new revenue model came a change of scenery as Budin left Panama to set up shop in Costa Rica. Everything fell into place and business exploded. With (allegedly) nine thousand active customers and two hundred active phone lines, Budin was practically printing money. “You think my ego wasn’t the size of the Chrysler Building?” he wrote.

Then came another idea. “If we could offer betting on the Internet,” Budin writes in his memoir, “it wouldn’t matter how many bettors there were at once, because nobody would ever get a busy signal!” Budin’s supposed invention of online sports betting (the first online bet was actually placed at least two years before this revelation) came around the same time he received an offer from an American company named SportsLine to purchase the valuable Sportsbook.com domain name for a million dollars. In his memoir, Budin claims that SportsLine, one of the country’s first sports websites, was about to be acquired by the television network CBS and needed to shed its connection to gambling. Budin knew the domain name was a potential goldmine, the most obvious place to build the world’s largest online bookmaking business. This was it. The road to millions. Maybe even billions. Everything was coming together …

And that’s where we have to pause. Because according to multiple former SportsLine executives, Steve Budin was never offered the rights to Sportsbook.com. The dates he mentions in his book don’t even match up with the CBS-SportsLine partnership. It’s possible Budin just made the whole thing up. It’s also possible he was misremembering a very chaotic time, the so-called “dot-com boom” of the late nineties. Or perhaps Steve Budin was just trying to envision an alternate reality, one in which he did buy Sportsbook.com, ran it successfully for several decades, and built a gigantic fortune through which he could live out his wildest dreams. Because someone did do that. It just wasn’t Steve Budin.

David Bockino is an associate professor of sport management in the School of Communications at Elon University.

• The NHL hired Sean Eggert as its new SEVP and CMO and Julie Yufe as EVP and managing director of international amid a major reorganization of its business staff, reports SBJ’s Alex Silverman.
• Silverman also reports average attendance across MLS is up 1% from roughly the same point last season, putting the league on pace to record its second-best mark even before a potential World Cup bump.
• Uber Shuttle will provide FIFA World Cup fans a ride home from matches played at MetLife Stadium ($49 per person), Hard Rock Stadium, AT&T Stadium and Gillette Stadium ($45) in the face of high public transit costs, notes SBJ’s David Broughton.
• SailGP is staging an event in N.Y. for the fourth time in its history this weekend, with two days of racing set to take place off Governors Island on Saturday and Sunday, writes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.
• College baseball had its best regular season on ESPN airwaves since 2012, as the sport averaged 130,000 viewers for games on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU this season, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp in this week’s Audience Analysis.
• Karp also notes that the Premier League drew its second-best season average on record during the 2025-26 campaign, with NBC and USA Network averaging 535,000 viewers.
• In this week’s Talent Pool agency roundup, SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario reports that free agent WR JuJu Smith-Schuster signed with Rosenhaus Sports. He most recently played for the Chiefs on a one-year, $1.4 million veteran-minimum contract.