Field Notes: 4 People Moves, 3 Announcements, 2 Things Worth Your Time, and 1 Stat That Matters in the Sports Economy.
Curated and delivered every other Thursday.
I had a last-minute opportunity to spend 24 hours in Miami speaking to some very impressive youngsters about the Sports Economy, so yesterday was a travel day. We’ve got a Friday Field Notes this week — please excuse the tardiness.
After work and weddings have taken me to Phoenix, Austin, Palm Springs, Little Rock, NYC, Chicago, New Orleans, and Miami in consecutive weeks, your boy is ready for a travel break (spoiler: he will not get one). It’s amazing how stretches like these can be exhausting and energizing at the same time.
4 People Moves
Fiona Morgan: Growing pains? Over the past 12 months, SailGP had one employee departure for every arrival across the Director, VP, and C-Suite ranks, with those who left averaging just 2.3 years on the job.
Andrew Cohen: After the Live Nation and Ticketmaster antitrust verdict, the case for alternatives in live event ticketing is getting louder. Fever has spent the past year positioning itself as the independent alternative, backed by L Catterton and Point72, fresh off acquiring DICE, and already ticketing for clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Tim Stemp: Stemp's resume is the tell here. As Chief Commercial Officer at Lagardère Sports, he ran the commercial side of the ITU World Triathlon Series, a format that, like HYROX, put amateurs and elites on the same course on the same day. The founders are openly chasing Olympic-grade legitimacy, and the elite tier is the piece that needs real broadcast and sponsor value. By his own description, Stemp is there to build its commercial framework as the sport scales.
Jon Werbeck: Werbeck lands at Cosm after running venue partnerships at Live Nation and a recent stretch on his own as a consultant. His brief is to lead corporate sponsorship strategy across Cosm's venues, the immersive "shared reality" domes the company is scaling from LA and Dallas into Atlanta. Bringing in a sponsorship operator with that venue pedigree is a clear read on where Cosm sees its next layer of commercial growth.
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3 Announcements
The Protect College Sports Act is the most serious federal attempt yet to bring order to the post-2021 landscape, giving the NCAA and the new College Sports Commission antitrust cover to enforce the cap, close NIL workarounds, and reset eligibility and transfer rules. It also collides with the hardest open questions in the sport, from the Big Ten and SEC revenue gap to whether athletes eventually become employees.
Look at Obsession: a $750K budget turned into $148M worldwide because Curry Barker brought his own audience, so the film carried almost no demand risk and almost no marketing spend. This is the CAC Hack in its purest form, where the audience is the acquisition channel and creators already own it.
Eli Manning’s private equity firm acquires licensing company for NFL Flag in bet on youth sports | CNBC
This consortium is the real asset. The Let Kids Play Act runs on a familiar villain, the faceless PE firm extracting fees from families, and a roster of Emmitt Smith, Larry Fitzgerald, and Jameis Winston is the cleanest counter-image money can buy. The prize underneath is flag football, where RCX already runs the largest youth league on the planet right as the sport marches toward varsity sanctioning and a spot in LA28. On that note, flag football is a fantastic development for girls’ high school athletics, with more than 20 states now recognizing it as an official varsity sport and plenty of room left to grow.
2 Things Worth Your Time
Matthew Jester is putting together a beast of a four-part breakdown on the past, present, and future of the NCAA. Knowledge → synthesis → pattern recognition. That’s Matt’s superpower. Even if you think you have a strong grasp on this system, you'll learn something here.
Northwestern is redefining college football by trading massive capacity for an intimate, premium experience. They have 35,000 seats, less than half of the Big Ten average (71,000+), where every fan gets a canopy-covered seat with elite sightlines and feels closer to the field than at any other venue in the conference. They're prioritizing quality over quantity, building a year-round community hub through vertical stacking, living-room boxes, and roughly twice the square footage per fan. Brian Kopp, a partner at Ryan Sports Ventures, talked about the project on the pod in December. The Ryan family's $480 million gift to Northwestern is one of the largest in the history of U.S. higher education.
1 Stat That Matters
> $103,000 – Current price for a courtside ticket for Game 3 of the Finals at Madison Square Garden Monday (People)
A similar seat in San Antonio’s Frost Center goes for roughly $55,000 less. The gap is the story: this is the Garden's first Finals game since 1999, a rematch of the very Spurs team the Knicks lost to that year, and you cannot stream the room. That scarcity is the Presence Premium priced in real time.
Pull of the Week
Art Modell buys the Cleveland Browns for an unprecedented ~$4 million in 1961.
Two weeks ago, Arctos took a 3% stake in the team at a $9 billion valuation.
ICYMI: This week’s episode with REAL SLX Co-Founder Gary Spitalnik ⬇️
I’ll be publishing Field Notes every other Thursday.
Share this with someone who should be paying attention to where the Sports Economy is headed.
If you’re building, investing, or advising within this ecosystem — please reach out!
Email: [email protected].
– Brent
