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.
4 People Moves
John Dooley: After nearly a decade at IMG and a year and a half as general counsel of Diamond Baseball Holdings, the Silver Lake minor-league rollup, Dooley takes the top legal seat at Playfly Sports, the multimedia-rights platform consolidating commercial control of college and local sports, even as schools increasingly pull those rights in-house to keep all of their sponsorship, licensing, and NIL revenue in the revenue-sharing era.
Brett Weitz: Fourteen years across Turner and WarnerMedia, where he ran TNT, TBS, and truTV as general manager, then global head of content, talent, and brand sales at X. Weitz now takes the CEO seat at BZZR, the first verified all-sports social platform, which launched in April.
Jake Dexter: Range Media Partners, full of ex-CAA talent, made a massive splash when it launched in 2020 and has since successfully pushed through a contentious lawsuit. Dexter joins Range Sports as VP of sports content, from Paradigm.
Stefanie Markman: Led by Jesse Sisgold, Paramount stood up its Sports Entertainment division last fall. Markman joins from Hello Sunshine, where she was general counsel. Before that she spent nearly eight years at Netflix on the scripted side, in the building as the company proved out sports content with Last Chance U in 2016 and Drive to Survive in 2019.
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3 Announcements
Scott Dahnke must have read last week’s essay. His $40-billion, LVMH-backed firm has a knack for timing wellness trends. It put $75 million into Peloton’s Series D in 2015, then watched membership grow 28-fold and revenue 30x before an $8.1 billion IPO four years later. After buying supplement maker Thorne for $680 million two years ago, it’s now exploring a sale for up to $4 billion.
CAA, TPG Form $250 Million Holding Company to Acquire Businesses Led by YouTubers and Other Creators | Variety
A $250 million vehicle aimed at creator-led businesses reads as firmly on-trend and particularly timely given the box office success of YouTube-bred features like Obsession and Backrooms. The risk is that CAA and TPG are early rather than wrong, because outside a handful of whales like Dude Perfect, the number of creator operations that are genuinely acquirable companies is still thin, for now.
Flying knee diplomacy? I suppose arm bars are better than arms deals. I actually love the idea of sports-as-soft-power infrastructure, particularly as the US is in the midst of the “Decade of Sport” with the 2026 World Cup, the 2028 LA Olympics, and the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Games stacked on the calendar.
2 Things Worth Your Time
They actually pulled it off. Jason Gay’s dispatch reads like a skeptic who came to bury the thing and ended up half-charmed by it, somewhere between The Claw and Tyson Fury’s “Sex on Fire” walkout. Yes, the timeline we live in can be absurd. Some nights it’s also a blast.
FIFA set an $11 billion target, but the hosts argue the last $2 billion is being extracted straight from fans. Dynamic pricing, blindfolded ballots, and alleged fake scarcity have now drawn AG subpoenas and a real risk of empty stadiums.
1 Stat That Matters
812 million – The number of people across Asia who have played Pickleball at least once. 282 million play at least once a month. (UPA Asia)
These are mind-blowing numbers. When I think of Pickleball, I immediately think of Boomers in American suburbia, but the global growth is undeniable. My wife and I went to Zambia last year and spent an afternoon dinking with kids in Lusaka.
Pull of the Week
Foreigners experiencing America for the first time and documenting it on social media has been one of the highlights of my past few weeks. If you haven’t been following the travels of Freddy, you are missing out big time. This German dude has spent the last ten days discovering the wonders of SEC stadiums, Bass Pro Shops, and late night Waffle House. He may never go back, and given his newfound love for the USA I’d personally love for him to stay.
ICYMI: This week’s episode with Barrick Prince, Co-Founder of Creator Sports Network
I’ll be publishing Field Notes every other Thursday.
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– Brent
