SBJ Unpacks: The NBA’s expansion jackpot

Tonight in Unpacks: The assemblage of groups lining up to pay an expansion fee in the billions is singing a tune that’s “music” to Commissioner Adam Silver’s ears, as SBJ’s Tom Friend examines the names jockeying for what would be the NBA’s 31st team.

Also tonight:

• Fans become MLB salary cap battleground
• Marlins, Hard Rock Bet sign sponsorship deal
• A WNBA All-Star guide
• Op-ed: Owners’ AI ‘portrait’ sets franchise reputation

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where SBJ’s Abe Madkour discusses the World Cup Final’s record viewership showing that Americans love big sports spectacles and will tune into soccer, Canada’s plan to invest $1 billion into sports infrastructure, a Miami radio station carrying Bills games and more.

The conga line of NBA expansion groups is longer than anyone realized, especially in Las Vegas, where they’re placing $8 billion cards on the table.

“It’s music to my ears,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said during this week’s board of governors press conference.

If the song he’s hearing is Viva Las Vegas, it’s a perfect fit. According to Silver, there are more potential ownership groups in Vegas than the five who’ve already announced themselves. And as for the other possible expansion city of Seattle, Silver said Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena majority owner Samantha Holloway has similarly been joined by multiple unidentified bidders.

“Most of the groups that are interested have not been public,” Silver said. “So I wouldn’t conclude that because there aren’t other public groups coming forward, that therefore there isn’t other interest in Seattle. There is. And I would also say the same in Las Vegas. Some groups have been public. The majority of groups have not been public. So stop there on that portion.”

What is known, according to sources involved in the bidding, is that the NBA expects to have at least a 31^st franchise by the 2028-29 season — and that Las Vegas is a likely “yes” and Seattle could be a “yes,” a “maybe” or a “no.” And if Las Vegas does wind up as the 31^st franchise, it will be a most prescient development.

As he often has in the past, Silver said this week that the Las Vegas Summer League has “in essence, operated as our 31st team for 22 years.” In fact, even though the NBA will be the last of the major sports to place a franchise in Sin City (behind the Golden Knights, Raiders and A’s), the league was the first (other than minor league baseball) to take players there with its Summer League. At the time — circa 2004, with the slot machines and sportsbooks nearby — it was considered risky, unethical business.

But while there have been ups and downs for the league in the city over the years — such as the NBA Cup exiting Las Vegas next season for in-market semifinals and a final at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse — this year’s Summer League was perhaps the busiest ever.

Part of it might have been the deep rookie draft class, which included a head-to-head opening night matchup of No. 1 AJ Dybantsa versus No. 2 Darryn Peterson, plus similar debuts from No. 3 overall Cameron Boozer and No. 4 overall Caleb Wilson. So summer in Las Vegas has not only turned into the NBA’s version of MLB’s winter meetings, it’s literally become a tentpole event.

This year, for instance, behind lead operators Warren LeGarie and Albert Hall, Summer League staged a film festival, a student enrichment program and a sales training platform. Silver said the league set all-time attendance, merchandise and social media records. But behind the scenes, a main topic of board of governors meetings there was the city’s expansion free-for-all.

Indications are that there are two early leaders for the Las Vegas franchise. One is the Las Vegas Jacks group, fronted by former Suns owner and Basketball Hall of Famer Jerry Colangelo; ex-player and former Suns executive Vinny Del Negro; former Turner president and ex-Nets executive David Levy; former Duke and Bulls guard Jay Williams; and Prime Capital Financial Chair and Managing Partner Scott Colangelo (no relation), who put the consortium together.

The second-most formidable group is fronted by former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner. Both they and the Las Vegas Jacks have one purported advantage: ironclad financing in the vicinity of $8 billion (the Jacks have a $12.5 billion to $13 billion asset target) at a time the league is seeking bids between $7 billion and $10 billion.

A third group, led by Golden Knights owner Bill Foley, is an intriguing option as well, mainly because he has a 15% stake in T-Mobile Arena (AEG and MGM Resorts International split the rest) and could house the team temporarily in 2028-29 while his group puts up roughly $300 million to renovate the facility. That said, the sense from sources is that Foley may ultimately fold his bid into one of the other two top groups.

But make no mistake: The league wants a new NBA arena in Las Vegas — probably the No. 1 item on Silver’s expansion to-do list. Sources said there are open lots near the luxury Fontainebleau on South Las Vegas Boulevard; near the Mandalay Bay resort on South Las Vegas Boulevard; and near the Rio Hotel & Casino on Flamingo Road. Whoever wins the bid could play temporarily at T-Mobile (AEG and Co. could rent it out before an arena gets built).

Silver and league strategic adviser PJT Partners are likely to ask the following questions to bidders: Is your money secure? Where is your arena? Where is your practice facility? Who’s going to do the financing for the team? Who is your lead governor? Who is going to be the governor the commissioner ultimately reports to? All of those things will resonate with the board of governors when it ultimately votes on an ownership group by the end of this year.

The same priorities stand for Seattle, which hasn’t had an NBA franchise since 2008, although Holloway’s crucial advantage is that she and the umbrella she operates under — One Roof Sports and Entertainment — owns Climate Pledge Arena. No one expects a building to be constructed there, although there are so many unknown bidders and so much big tech money there, you never know.

“I think Seattle, we had an incredibly successful Sonics team there for years,” Silver said this week. “It’s an amazing market. We do a lot of business with Amazon and Microsoft. It’s probably the A.I. capital of the world right now.”

But that’s the point — bidders are “coming out of the woodwork,” one source said. Keep in mind this is the first NBA expansion process since the then-Charlotte Bobcats in 2004, so the bidders, or at least the ones from Vegas, see this as a once-every-quarter-century opportunity:

Turn Las Vegas summer league into Las Vegas winter league.

Major League Baseball’s labor battle might be in the early innings, but the league is already firing 100-mph fastballs.

In recent weeks, MLB has gone on an advertising blitz to gain support for a salary cap with a political-style campaign around the tagline “Level The Playing Field” on MLB.tv and social media, while rankling the union in the process.

It might be a battle between owners and players, but the league has been aggressively pushing fans into the equation months before the Dec. 1 expiration of the collective-bargaining agreement.

“It’s a very sophisticated, politically influenced approach. There’s a winner and a loser, and you go right for the jugular,” said Jeff Hunt, founding partner of Legend Labs, who has worked on media strategy and reputation management with high-profile athletes, including golfers Dustin Johnson and Jordan Spieth, tennis players Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, and NFL quarterback Cam Newton.

“You try to get the public on your side and get ahead of it,” Hunt said. “Whether it works or not, whether it’s right or not, it’s a smart and aggressive strategy.”

The one-minute commercial cites a Morning Consult poll from last year that found that 79% of avid fans support a cap.

The ad features fans of teams with the five highest payrolls in the majors — the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays — along with a few others, appearing to be interviewed at stadiums and opining on why a cap is the right solution.

“100% needs a salary cap, that’s the biggest issue in baseball right now,” a Blue Jays fan says.

“It needs to be more equitable,” a Dodgers fan adds.

“We are listening,” the ad says. “It’s time to fix it.”

A page on the league’s official website about the campaign reads, in part: “Fans overwhelmingly support a salary cap and floor, like all the other major American professional sports have long used, because they don’t believe a $446 million spending gap from top to bottom is a fair fight.”

The league declined comment on whether an agency was involved in creating the campaign, or how much was spent.

“We think we have a responsibility to communicate with our fans on every platform and reach fans wherever they are on what we’re trying to solve in this round of labor negotiations,” said MLB spokesperson Glen Caplin, a self-described “recovering political operative” who is viewed as the force behind MLB’s campaign.

In separate sessions about 15 minutes apart from the same podium in the Liberty Ballroom of the Philadelphia Marriott Hotel in the hours before the All-Star Game, MLBPA Interim Executive Director Bruce Meyer and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred provided their opposing views of the strategy, with a few pointed jabs along the way.

Meyer, taking the podium in the first session: “The supposed stewards of the game have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince those same fans that they don’t have hope or they shouldn’t have hope, or that the product that they’re paying to consume in record numbers is somehow broken. I think it’s perverse.”

Manfred, following in the second session: “When you have a difficult public issue, particularly when the other side on the issue is very public about what their views are on the negotiation, I think it’s incumbent on us to keep our fans informed of our view of the world. And particularly given sometimes the other side may not be completely accurate or fair in terms of their recitation of what’s going on. So it seems kind of like a basic thing to me. Not that hard.”

Finding what matters

Manfred said the league’s process of listening to fans is “very sophisticated,” and includes professional pollsters; demographics cut by market, age and avidity; and focus groups. Last year, the league established a central fan council featuring 90 die-hard fans from across the country. In November, the focus of its monthly meeting with the council turned to competitive balance in response to fan surveys in which the topic was consistently brought up.

“We need to make sure that fans in markets at the beginning of the season have a realistic belief that their team has a chance to win,” Manfred said. “And honestly, I think we need a system where there is a more robust free agent market. So, if you don’t want to go to New York or Los Angeles, you have a realistic opportunity to get a viable free agent contract.”

Greg Bouris, who served as director of communications for the MLBPA for nearly two decades before resigning in 2018, said MLB is painting the effort to add a salary cap as “doing something noble for the fans.”

“They’re only responding to what the fans want. They’re pinning this on the fans,” Bouris said of the campaign’s message.

Bouris also minimized the importance of what the fans think in the context of the union’s fiduciary responsibility to its membership. From the union side, the players are “the only audience that really matters in this negotiation,” he said.

The union has said it would be “more transparent than ever” regarding its CBA proposals after Meyer took over following Tony Clark’s resignation. Meyer has held multiple press conferences. The league has taken a quieter approach, but also used social media, with MLB having the substantially larger reach with 13.4 million followers on X, compared to the union’s 211,000.

On May 27, the MLBPA went public with its opening proposal in a press release. The following day, MLB introduced the salary cap and sent its own fact sheet to the media.

“I don’t think you’re going to see me or [lead negotiator] Dan Halem holding press conferences every time that we have a meeting,” Manfred said, pointedly. “But I do think it’s important to share information with our fans, because as the process unfolds, opinions shift, and that’s significant for us.”

Said Meyer: “We’re in a bargaining year. Both sides have engaged in media efforts. We do it. Sadly, we don’t own our own TV network.”

Keeping ‘momentum’

Less than 4 1/2 months before the CBA’s expiration, MLB is seeing gains in attendance and national television viewership. Droves of fans attended the All-Star festivities in the City of Brotherly Love, highlighted by Jordan Walker of the St. Louis Cardinals capturing the Home Run Derby in a thrilling finish. Yet, amid a growing gap between the haves and have-nots, the league believes the economic system in place requires a dramatic overhaul.

Meyer accused MLB of supporting “a form of subsidized mediocrity,” designed to increase profits and franchise values. “A salary cap is the ultimate excuse not to compete,” he said.

Manfred cited baseball’s momentum after implementing the pitch clock and the automated ball-strike challenge system to a largely positive reception.

“We got that momentum by listening to our fans and making changes that, candidly, the MLBPA was not interested in,” Manfred said. “Those changes have paid off in terms of creating that momentum. And the best way to lose momentum is to stand still.”

(It’s worth noting that “momentum” is a word likely to be heard often from MLB officials and partners as the deadline nears.)

Part of that effort is the campaign to rally public support.

“MLB fears that if fans take the players’ side, they will lose interest in the game even when the sport ultimately returns, potentially after a long lockout,” said Marc Edelman, a tenured law professor and sports ethics director. “Second, this is just one more means of trying to put pressure on the MLBPA.”

MLB’s advertising campaign has certainly caught everyone’s attention.

“Why does it make any sense to basically have fans throughout the game watching ads about how you should be in favor of a salary cap?” Meyer said. “Which I find ironic, since as the owners of the league have said, ‘Hey, we’re just listening to the fans, right?’ Yet somehow, they feel it’s necessary to spend millions of dollars running ads to persuade those fans that they should really be in favor of this thing.

“I had someone come up to me and say, ‘I saw more ads for the salary cap watching baseball games than for the All-Star Game.’ There’s something wrong with that.”

The Marlins have reached a three-year sponsorship deal with Hard Rock Bet that makes it the team’s official sportsbook over the course of the 2026-28 seasons.

The deal, which was completed in-house, features live odds integrations during Marlins.tv broadcasts, which will appear as soon as this weekend; fan-facing promotions; and on-site engagement at loanDepot park. Fans can receive a bonus bet on the Hard Rock Bet app if a Marlins player hits a grand slam at home.

Marlins VP/Partnership Development & Marketing Robert Gelman said the sides had been talking on and off for a year or two, with the deal coming together within the last six to eight months. Hard Rock Bet, owned and operated by the Seminole tribe, is the only legal sportsbook in Florida.

“They mean a lot to our state and they mean a lot to the industry,” Gelman told SBJ. “We want to be partnered with brands like that, so we’ve been working on this for a minute, and it’s finally come together. They’re starting to see what we’re building here, and they’re believers just like we believe in them.”

The tentpole event in women’s sports kicks off this week, with the WNBA All-Star Game and its dozens of surrounding activities and activations taking over Chicago. Not an exaggeration — there are literally dozens, and I have barely a window that’s not at least double-booked.

If you’re looking to fill your dance card, here’s a look at how agencies, brands and properties are showing up for the big event.

(This is a non-exhaustive list because there are more private parties and invite-only events that I have surely missed.)

Thursday

WNBA Live presented by AWS opens at McCormick Place, with 34 sponsors and licensees activating in the space — a record for the event. The showcase runs through Saturday.

The Chicago All-Star 2026 Host Committee has events throughout the week, with some at the recently opened Obama Presidential Center. Those include the All-Star Media & Innovation Summit on the center’s home court, with panel topics including:

• Game-Changing Growth: Innovation Across Women’s Sports and Media
• Smart Play: AI, Innovation, and the Future of Women’s Sports
• The Science of Her Game: Power, Performance, and Partnership

Pinterest, Gatorade and J.P. Morgan Private Bank are all sponsoring discussions. Confirmed panelists speaking throughout the day include Hall of Famer Candace Parker; PepsiCo VP/Sports and Entertainment Carolyn Braff; journalist Cari Champion; Togethxr co-founder and Chief Brand Officer Jessica Robertson; and Parity CEO Leela Srinivasan.

88 Vines and Chrissy Delisle are launching Full Court Press: Legends, a day of events at Avec River North. The event is raising funds for The V Foundation and includes:

• Syd Scott, the daughter of late ESPN anchor Stuart Scott, hosting a “Voices of the Game” panel with analyst Ari Chambers, Netflix anchor Elle Duncan, NBC Sports/Prime analyst LaChina Robinson and content creator Coach Jackie J.
• A live recording of the “Good Game with Sarah Spain” podcast, with Basketball Hall of Famers Ticha Penicheiro and Sheryl Swoopes and former WNBA President Donna Orender as guests.
• Culinary Tip-Off with chefs Stephanie Izard, Tracey Shepos Cenami, Dylan Patel and guest chef Storm’s Alysha Clark.

Chicago-based agency Intersport has set up the Intersport Hoops House, partnering with The Gist to produce the Women’s Sports Leadership Summit. It will include two panel discussions:

• “Building the Business of Today’s Female Athlete” with Des Dickerson, Uncommon Collective; Circe Wallace, The Team; and Penicheiro, Priority Sports
• “Investing in the Next Era of Women’s Sports” with Jason Wright, Ariel Investments; Micky Lawler, commissioner, Unrivaled; and Tara Bakhle, sports & entertainment marketing, JPMorgan Chase

AT&T will open its Pioneer Court on Michigan Avenue for the weekend, with the fan-facing activation offering a chance to play and meet WNBA stars.

VOICEINSPORT will present VIS Studio Live, with mentoring sessions matching WNBA players with young athletes ages 13 to 23. The event, held at Revel Motor Row, will include the Fever’s Monique Billings, Sky’s Maddy Westbeld, Mercury’s Sami Whitcomb and Storm’s Lexie Brown.

Brand Innovators and rEvolution will host a culture and entertainment summit, with a day of programming and panels. Featured speakers include Elyse Slayton, CMO of the Wings; David Picioski, head of marketing for team sports at Wilson Sporting Goods Co.; Andrea Wilson, director of sponsorships and experiential marketing at AT&T; Kay Bradley, CMO of the Chicago Stars; and Amanda Viscelli, senior director of consumer experience and influencer at Coach.

Friday

Unrivaled Coffee Club opens at Drip Collective, with the 3x3 league’s players serving coffee throughout the day to fans who’ve reserved a slot. Attendees have access to novelty memorabilia, activities and event-specific merchandise they can buy as well as VIP packages for the league’s third season.

The WNBA’s third annual Changemaker Day will see the league’s biggest sponsors making a local impact with events at the Obama Presidential Center. The league’s Changemaker Collective of sponsors Ally, AT&T, AWS, CarMax, Deloitte, Google and Nike will work with the host committee on an event for 150 girls from Chicago Public Schools. Programming includes a discussion with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison along with Linnae Harper, a former Sky player and now manager of athletics and sports leadership at the Obama Presidential Center. Later that day, AT&T will sponsor Jr. WNBA Day with a day of basketball development at the center. Tampax will also sponsor Jr. WNBA Clinics and a panel throughout the weekend.

Chase Freedom is bringing back Cashback Courts, with the women-led secondhand market pairing with events and appearances throughout the day. The market is open to fans who RSVP, and the venue at CineCity Studios will host podcast recordings of “Please Explain” with Aces’ A’ja Wilson, as well as the Just Women’s Sports podcast “Between the Lines with Lisa Leslie” with Parker as a guest.

Togethxr will open its own house with brand activations, fan experiences and shows on Friday and Saturday. Among the activations, the Dick’s merch shop which will have limited-edition drops, Pinterest will have a styling studio and Barbie and Reebok will collaborate on The Dream Closet, with a life-size Barbie box fans can pose in.

Parity will host its “Pre-Covery” party, with DNA Vibe sponsoring the event with athlete appearances and networking.

Arena, a networking platform, is hosting “In the Arena” at Centre Court Productions. The curated experience will include leaders from sports, media and entertainment. While spots are limited, the professional matchmaking opportunity allows attendees to share their business and career goals and for Arena’s algorithm to match them with aligned guests.

Vox Media takes over the Intersport Hoop House, with The Lineup offering back-to-back-to-back live podcasts of “Bird’s Eye View” with Sue Bird, “And Mom” with Sky’s Skylar Diggins and Prime Video’s Cassidy Hubbarth and “Megan Rapinoe Live.”

Partnering with Coach, Just Women’s Sports will bring together Basketball Hall of Famer Leslie and the Wings’ Azzi Fudd for a live conversation at Offshore Rooftop.

The WNBA State Farm 3-Point Contest and Kia WNBA Shooting Stars at Wintrust Arena close out the day.

Saturday

PlayMaker and Theory&Practice will get the day started with “Pilates & Partnerships,” an event that includes a full Pilates class, coffee and conversations.

In its second year as a Changemaker, Ally is opening its first standalone Ally House during a WNBA event. Held at the Chicago Illuminating Company, the pop-up fan experience will include discussions and meet and greets with Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier and Sydney Colson and exclusive merch created with Playa Society.

With Aflac sponsoring, Togethxr House will host the “Queens of the Court Panel” for a third consecutive year, with Chambers moderating a discussion with South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, WNBA champion Diana Taurasi and others to be announced later.

Just Women’s Sports will host “Chicago’s Unofficial Pregame,” with the fan event including player meet-and-greets, giveaways and exclusive merch. Held four minutes from the United Center at Bottom Lounge, the event will have DoorDash integrated into the experience and social content.

Deloitte, a WNBA Changemaker, is hosting the Unstoppable Women’s Sports Business Summit for its second year. The invite-only event will include women’s sports executives and team sponsors focusing around the theme of investing in women’s sports at scale.

The Female Quotient will host The FQ Lounge at Roof at theWit, with discussions around sustainable growth in women’s sports. Speakers include Just Women’s Sports CEO Haley Rosen, Sparks President Stacy Johns, Fever President Kelly Krauskopf, Dream co-owner Renee Montgomery, Valkyries president Jess Smith, ESPN SVP Flora Kelly, Delta head of global partnership marketing Emmakate Young and Edison.

The day wraps up with the AT&T WNBA All-Star Game tipping off at the United Center.

===

Start your day with SBJ Morning Buzzcast, bringing you the hottest stories in sports business every morning in under 15 minutes. Sign up for SBJ’s free newsletters, and dive deeper inside the industry with all the latest sports business news here.

Team owners, athletes and executives running sports operations should think carefully about the relationship between principal identity and franchise reputation.

For sports owners, athlete representatives, league executives and sports operations leaders reading this: The owner-level work is the primary lever. Not franchise marketing. Not team identity refresh. Not stadium naming. The principal’s AI portrait carries the franchise reputation across every commercial decision that touches the franchise.

Sponsors evaluating partnerships are increasingly running pre-partnership AI reputation baselines on the owners they are partnering with. Media partners evaluating rights deals are increasingly assessing owner-level AI rendering as part of the deal-economics conversation. The owner’s AI portrait is now part of the partnership-evaluation conversation in ways it was not three years ago.

The engines render the franchise through the principal’s AI portrait, not from it. This is the central finding of 5W AI Communications’ Reputation Index Sports Phase, a study scoring more than 100 named principals across NFL, NBA, MLB, and college football. Arthur Blank’s AI portrait carries the Atlanta Falcons. The Glazer family’s AI portrait carries Manchester United. Steve Cohen’s AI portrait carries the New York Mets. James Dolan’s AI portrait carries the New York Knicks. Mat Ishbia’s AI portrait carries the Phoenix Suns.

The franchise inherits the owner. The owner does not inherit the franchise. The implication for sports business — for sponsors evaluating partnerships, for media partners evaluating rights deals, for prospective athletes evaluating opportunities, for league offices evaluating ownership transitions — is significant.

What the findings show

Three structural patterns appear consistently across four cohorts.

One: Principals with deep pre-franchise, primary-source corpora inherit favorable AI rendering. Arthur Blank built Home Depot, the Blank Family Foundation, and a sustained Atlanta business community presence over decades before the Falcons purchase. Steve Cohen built Point72 and SAC philanthropy with depth before the Mets. Mat Ishbia built United Wholesale Mortgage, the UWM Sports Group, and Michigan State athletics legacy before the Suns. The pre-franchise corpus is what the engines retrieve when the principal takes the franchise role.

Two: Anchor events compress franchise rendering for years. The Brian Flores lawsuit anchors Stephen Ross’s portrait. The 2024 Tepper-thrown-drink incident anchors David Tepper’s portrait. The Glazer portfolio’s Manchester United association creates reputational contamination — the spillover of negative signals across all holdings — that anchors every Glazer asset. Former Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver, who resigned in 2022 following an NBA investigation into workplace misconduct, found that the investigation results anchored his AI rendering even after he sold the team. Once an anchor event sets in the engine corpus, adding tier-one earned media coverage does not move it. The remediation requires multiyear primary-source publishing that competes with the anchor event in the engines’ source corpus.

Three: Cross-portfolio contamination and cross-portfolio lift both apply. Tepper’s Carolina Panthers reputational drag affects his Appaloosa Management portrait at 38% of identity-prompt rendering. Cohen’s Mets ownership lifts his Point72 portrait at 40% of identity-prompt rendering, net positive. The mechanism is bidirectional. The principal’s most-rendered asset compresses or lifts every other asset the principal owns.

What sports owners are now doing about it

Five distinct workstreams have emerged across the industry:

One: principal-level Reputation Index baseline. Score the principal across all five dimensions (Accuracy, Sentiment, Completeness, Consistency, Control). Identify the anchor event the engines compress identity around. Identify the strongest competing primary-source layer the principal has produced — books, foundations, sustained interview presence, public-philanthropy reporting.

Two: cross-portfolio rendering analysis. For principals operating multiple commercial assets, measure how the franchise rendering shows up in identity prompts across every other asset. Identify which asset is moving the net rendering in which direction. Coordinate communications so the highest-rendering asset is positioned to lift the others.

Three: anchor-event remediation sequencing. Where an anchor event compresses the principal’s portrait, build the multi-year remediation strategy. Specific primary-source coverage. Foundation reporting investment. Ranking-organization placement. Wikipedia hardening. Schema deployment for the principal’s owned-property graph.

Four: cross-channel content calibration for franchise audiences. Franchise communications operate across fans, season-ticket holders, sponsors, league officials, media partners, and the broader public. Each audience needs different signal density and different message calibration. Coordinating across channels keeps the engine corpus internally coherent.

Five: quarterly cross-cohort benchmarking. Tracking where a principal sits within a measured cohort — reported quarterly — lets owners see how their score compares to peers and how the dimensional analysis is moving over time.

The discipline is buildable. The compound is durable. The owners who began the work in 2025 are already operating at advantage. The owners who begin in 2026 will close gaps against competitors who started earlier. The owners who wait will inherit whatever the engine corpus assembles in their absence.

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of “For Immediate Release.” Read the full Reputation Index Sports Phase.

• MLB issued around $40 million in new debt in May, reports SBJ’s Chris Smith, with Fitch assigning it an A rating. The funds will support team-level borrowing through MLB Club Trust Securitization, a league-controlled credit facility.
• World Team Tennis announced the first three teams for its return to competition in December, writes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer: N.Y., Miami and Toronto.
• Pathway Sports and Entertainment, which college sports business stalwart Casey Schwab founded last year, entered into a multiyear partnership with athlete-driven media company College Sports Co, notes SBJ’s Ben Portnoy.
• Spurs C Victor Wembanyama, Fever G Caitlin Clark and Bulls legend Derrick Rose will appear on the covers of 2K Sports’ NBA 2K27, reports SBJ’s Jason Wilson.
• GSE Worldwide is stepping up its use of AI, hiring Park City, Utah-based advisory firm Extraordinary AI to help weave the tech into everyday work across the agency, notes SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario.
• Mejia-Hilario also writes that former WME agent Kailey Edwards joined Lift Management to become its new VP/women’s sports and business development.