Tonight in Unpacks: Workers are facing an evolving market when it comes to what employers are looking for, shaped by forces such as private equity and AI. In this week’s cover story, SBJ looks at the skills and other traits leagues, teams, commissioners and CEOs are looking for.
Also tonight:
- Philadelphia setting the pace for FIFA Fan Festival attendance
- PWHL adds Ilitch, Tanenbaum-led Kilmer as first outside investors
- FIFA finds community on Roblox
- Op-ed: Every sports team is about to become a software company
Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour discusses the impressive display that Seattle is putting on for the FIFA World Cup, the PWHL raising outside capital from two heavy hitters, NASCAR’s willingness to take risks with a race at San Diego’s Naval Base Coronado paying off and more.
SBJ Jobs Roundtable: The Future of Jobs in Sports
In a post-COVID, increasingly AI- and private equity-driven world, the sports business is facing the potential for disruption. Where those disruptions intersect with hiring — in volume and the type of skill sets that are valued — will affect those in leadership roles and early-career staffers alike.
Last month, Sports Business Journal convened a roundtable discussion at the Penn Club of New York that included C-level executives, a chief people officer from a major league and Power Four athletic director. Led by SBJ Publisher and Executive Editor Abe Madkour, they examined ways the talent makeup of the sports industry is evolving; how disruptive forces such as AI and private equity are accelerating that evolution; and the traits they believe the next wave of sports commissioners and CEOs should embody, among other topics. The following is an edited transcript, along with other coverage, of the discussion.
Topics
Trends in hiring and talent recruitment
Skills for the next generation of commissioners
How the role of team CEO has evolved
Panelists
Matthew Caldwell, chief executive officer, Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx
Sabrina Ellis, executive vice president and chief people officer, NBA
Matt Hong, president of USA Sports, Versant
Chris Marinak, president, Playfly Sports
Len Perna, chairman and chief executive officer, ZRG Turnkey
Max Siegel, chief executive officer, USA Track & Field
Deepali Vyas, global head of data and AI sector, ZRG Partners
Danny White, athletic director, University of Tennessee
Philadelphia setting the pace for FIFA Fan Festival attendance
Nearly 55,000 people visited the FIFA Fan Festival in Philadelphia on Friday, by far the highest single-day attendance figure for any of the 13 official public World Cup viewing spaces across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The record turnout coincided with the city hosting a group stage match between Brazil and Haiti that drew a sellout crowd of 68,324 at Lincoln Financial Field.
In addition to setting the single-day mark, Philadelphia’s Fan Festival is also among the leaders in terms of overall attendance. Through Sunday, 242,883 people had passed through the sprawling 23 acres of activated space at Lemon Hill in East Fairmount Park. Its single-day total has eclipsed 35,000 three times so far, a mark that no other host city had reached as of Friday.
FIFA sponsors activating at Philadelphia’s Fan Festival include Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Michelob Ultra, The Home Depot, Kia and Diageo’s Casamigos tequila brand. The footprint also features a 10,000-square-foot FIFA merchandise shop, where transactions paid using a Visa card receive a 10% discount.
PWHL adds Ilitch, Tanenbaum-led Kilmer as first outside investors
After being financed by Mark and Kimbra Walter through its first three seasons, the PWHL has raised outside capital for the first time from a pair of prominent sports industry investors: Ilitch Companies and Kilmer Sports Ventures. The investments in the single-entity league follow its second round of expansion in as many years, bringing it from eight teams to 12 beginning in 2026-27.
The investments are stakes in the enterprise as a single entity rather than any individual team.
Ilitch Companies is the parent company of Ilitch Sports + Entertainment, which owns the Red Wings and Tigers. It also operates Little Caesars Arena, which will be the home of the PWHL’s new Detroit-based team.
Kilmer Sports Ventures is led by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Chair Emeritus Larry Tanenbaum. The firm owns a 25% stake in MLSE, as well as controlling interests in the WNBA’s Toronto Tempo and French soccer club AS Saint-Étienne.
The PWHL, which recently completed its third season since debuting in 2024, has grown far faster than Walter and its founding board members -- Stan Kasten, Royce Cohen, Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss -- initially anticipated. After launching with six teams, primarily in the Northeast U.S. and Eastern Canada, the league is now a 12-team outfit that spans from coast to coast in both the U.S. and Canada.
That rapid expansion has prompted the need to take on additional capital.
“When we would get to 12 teams -- which we thought was kind of a tipping point -- we thought it’d be Year 10 or 12,” Kasten said. “We never envisioned being able to scale up here two and a half years after our first game.”
The PWHL’s decision to solicit investment in the enterprise as a single entity rather than sell individual franchises is a departure from the traditional ownership model employed by major North American team sports leagues. Even MLS, which is also a single entity, sells team operating rights to individual ownership groups.
Kasten cited the PWHL’s centralized ownership structure as the “most important element that has allowed us to grow this quickly,” saying it has allowed the league to be nimble through its first three seasons.
“I understand it’s a different construct, and some people are so used to thinking of the old construct -- new owners in different cities with separate agendas and separate budgets and separate things going on in their unique cities,” Kasten said. “We’re not dealing with those issues, at least not at this stage in our development.”
The PWHL did not disclose the size of the equity stakes of Ilitch and Kilmer or the valuation at which the firms invested in the league. The PWHL said, however, that the Walters and the original board would continue to oversee operations and strategy while benefiting from the advice of the new partners.
“Having one really super prominent Canadian investor and one super prominent American investor is something that we think is ideal for us as we continue the growth of our business,” Kasten said. “We are a startup. We’re not where we want to be yet with sponsorships or with merchandise or with media deals. That is coming, but both of these new additions will help us grow in all those areas.”
PWHL games drew 1.1 million fans during the 2025-26 regular season, with average attendance coming in at 9,304 per game. The league said it increased its sponsor count by 35% year-over-year, while e-commerce merchandise revenue grew by more than 50%.
Roblox provides the community FIFA wants for the World Cup
Engagement has the currency of the realm in sports, and gaming has long provided a path for teams, leagues and sanctioning bodies to find fans who not only interact with what’s on the field but also what’s on the screen. But increasingly, everyone is chasing a new currency: Community.
For years, EA Sports’ FIFA series was how the soccer body decided to engage gamers and get those not already attending and watching matches or buying merch to do so. Nowadays, its video game platform of choice is Roblox and Gamefam’s FIFA Super Soccer (it was Super League Soccer before a branding change in December). Thanks to Roblox’s ubiquity, you can play it on just about any machine that plays games (consoles, PCs, smartphones, tablets ... heck, like Doom, I wouldn’t be surprised if it someday played on my fridge).
Chris Volk, FIFA’s director of gaming and esports, told me earlier this week amid the World Cup that the turn to Roblox a few years ago was about engaging with a different sort of player than those picking up EA’s game every year — they were seeking the next generation of fans. And those youngsters were increasingly turning to Roblox over console platforms, and playing with their friends in ways they hadn’t before.
“We estimate at roughly 1.8 or 2 billion gamers to the football affinity. So that naturally brings us to the questions. Where do they sit? What kinds of games do they play? And the answer is basically everything from hyper casual to triple-A and everything in between,” Volk said.
So, how did FIFA land on Roblox?
“There was one kind of vertical that was very important for us to understand. What’s the size of the opportunity for us as FIFA, but also for us as a football organization, how can we help our constituents, the member associations, to lean in and also get in front of this audience?” Volk said.
The second point: “Sports fandom usually forms between the ages of 8 and 12. I think the sweet spot is around 11. That’s a very important data point for us.”
And why soccer may have the biggest fandom of any sport around the globe, Volk said FIFA didn’t want to take that for granted. It wanted to help foster it. And where were kids spending their time? With over 160 million daily active users, it was Roblox.
Another aspect of FIFA’s gaming strategy that goes hand-in-hand with Roblox? Ditching the walled garden of publisher exclusivity. Yes, FIFA Soccer might have been on multiple console platforms, but with EA locking down the naming rights, it meant the soccer body couldn’t work with others on games.
“We’re finding the right partners, such as Gamefam in this case, and the right platforms, like Roblox in this case, for this specific cohort. We will measure the performance and see what works and what doesn’t work,” Volk said.
It’s been working with Gamefam and FIFA Super Soccer. It has over 1.1 billion gameplay sessions since its 2023 launch, averaging 1.5 million sessions a day ahead of the World Cup (stats since the tournament kicked off still need a little time to bake).
And the stat FIFA may dig the most: 74% of FIFA Super Soccer players 11-13 are footy fans.
“The latest number was around 68% of players said they definitely or probably will watch the FIFA World Cup. So that’s huge, right?” Volk said.
Some are even playing together while watching World Cup matches.
“Ultimately, Roblox has become more than gaming. It has become community,” Gamefam Chief Business Officer Ricardo Briceno said. “What you go and do in Roblox and in FIFA Super Soccer is play the game, but it is different in that you play the game with your friends. You play as yourself with other people on your team. It’s very much a social and community experience.”
Community, after all, is now the currency of the realm.
Every sports team is about to become a software company
The next competitive advantage in sports won’t come from a better sponsorship deal, a renovated premium club or a new ticket package. It will come from organizations that think and operate like software companies.
For years, teams have invested heavily in improving the fan experience through venues, technology partners, and marketing campaigns. Yet many still struggle with a fundamental problem: They don’t actually know their fans.
At one Division I athletic department, thousands of one-time ticket buyers had never been approached for a donation — not because the development office chose to ignore them, but because it didn’t know they existed. Their purchase history lived in the ticketing platform while donor records sat in an entirely separate system. The two never connected.
This isn’t unusual. Across sports, ticketing, sponsorship, loyalty, merchandise and donor information often live in different databases that don’t talk to one another. The same fan exists as several different records across several systems, which leaves an organization without a complete picture of who that person is or how they engage.
The teams that solve this will build a real competitive advantage. For decades, though, building custom software to unify these systems was unrealistic for most organizations. It took years of development, serious investment, and ongoing maintenance that only the largest franchises could justify. So sophistication tracked market size: the biggest organizations built, and everyone else rented disconnected tools.
That equation has changed. Advances in AI have dramatically cut the cost and time it takes to build and maintain custom internal software. Capabilities that once required years of work and massive budgets are now within reach of much smaller organizations.
So software stops being something teams buy and becomes something they have to own. Not ticketing, not the CRM; the layer above all of it, the one that pulls every interaction into a single view of the fan. That layer is now a core capability, not an IT project, and everything that follows depends on having it.
Because the real opportunity isn’t simply connecting data. It’s the ability to learn from it and improve continuously. Too often, organizations go hunting for one great marketing campaign or one brilliant idea. In reality, the biggest gains come from iteration and that’s the one thing software is built for. Everything else a team invests in is a bet you place once: the building, the signing, the deal. Software is a bet you get to revise every day, against real data. At that same athletic department, we tested more than 10 outreach approaches across different channels (voice the main one), refining and redeploying as we went. Most underperformed. We adjusted, relaunched, and adjusted again, and it was the last cohort, the most personalized one, that converted at 95%.
That number wasn’t the product of a single clever campaign. It came from fast feedback loops built on owned data. You cannot iterate like that when your information is fragmented across platforms, and your results arrive months later as a report. You need to test, learn and improve in real time.
This is also why so many AI initiatives fall short. AI is only as good as the information it can see. Fragmented systems produce fragmented insight, and incomplete data produces generic output. Every organization will soon have access to the same models. What separates the winners won’t be the model, it will be the quality of the data underneath it and the ability to keep improving.
The greatest opportunity, ironically, is where budgets are smallest. A Double-A baseball club, an MLS or NWSL side, a mid-major athletic department — most run with lean business staffs that simply don’t have the people to constantly segment audiences, sharpen donor outreach, or personalize communications. For these organizations, software doesn’t just make existing work better. It makes work happen that otherwise wouldn’t.
For two decades, sports have run an analytics arms race on the competitive side, player evaluation, scouting, performance. The business side has barely started, which is exactly why the opportunity is so large and so few are chasing it.
Fans will feel the difference. They already expect personalization from nearly every business they touch. Streaming platforms recommend what to watch next. Retailers anticipate what they’ll buy. The sportsbook on their phone reads their behavior down to the dollar. Yet a fan who has bought tickets a dozen times still gets the same marketing email as someone attending a first game. That gap exists because the team can’t see the whole picture of who that fan is. Once it can, personalization becomes possible for everyone, not just the premium client.
None of this means teams should build everything themselves. Best-in-class ticketing, CRM, commerce and marketing platforms are essential, and good vendors are real partners. The mistake is believing any one of them can unify your business. Every vendor optimizes its own product. Only the organization itself can connect every interaction into a complete understanding of the fan, enrich it over time, and use it to improve.
That is the difference between buying technology and owning a capability. A bought tool is a cost that ends. A capability you own compounds season after season, the data deepens, the loops get faster and the advantage grows. Organizations that invest in it now will pull steadily ahead. The ones that don’t won’t fall behind overnight; they’ll just slowly become indistinguishable from everyone else running the same stack.
The question facing every team president and athletic director is no longer whether sports organizations will become software companies. It’s whether they’ll lead that shift while the advantage is still there to take or spend the next decade chasing the ones that did.
Jack Phifer is the co-founder and head of engineering at FanFeed, where he leads the development of its AI-powered platform that helps sports organizations identify and engage previously invisible fans.
Speed reads
- As part of its longstanding technology sponsorship with the All England Lawn Tennis Club, IBM added multiple AI-powered features for Wimbledon’s app and website during the 2026 edition of the tournament, reports SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.
- Monumental Sports and Entertainment added a theater box product that’s part of the billion-dollar-plus renovation of Capital One Arena, writes SBJ’s Bret McCormick.
- Pat McAfee made his first food and beverage investment, joining PB&J brand Jams as a co-owner, notes SBJ’s Jesse Gordon.
- Omnicom, the holding company with the most sports/experiential agencies after its acquisition of Interpublic Group six months ago, will on Tuesday introduce Acxiom Fan Graph, a “sports marketing intelligence” platform designed to “uncover actionable insights into what drives fan engagement,” reports SBJ’s Terry Lefton.