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Happy Thursday! Let’s all take 5 minutes away from Kate Middleton conspiracies and catch up on sports this week.
In this 28th edition, you’ll find…
💰🏫🌎 Pro league revenue breakdowns
🏒🪙🤝 Bitcoin-esque trading in the NHL
🥞📈🤢 Pancake data visualizations
We also added a new “Quick Bites” section at the bottom for some easy conversation points.
LEARNING MODULE 💡
Tax Season 🧾
It’s that time of the year. The Man comes breathing down your neck asking questions about your personal life, how much money you made this year, and how many gambling losses you want to write off as expenses.
This time we’re flipping the script. 🔀 Now we’re the ones doing the digging on the finances of professional sports leagues. Doesn’t feel so good, does it @NFL?
This data from Sportico breaking down the different income streams for each league is paramount to understanding the business of sports and we’ll walk you through it in 2 ways.
🎯 Focus on what each league cares about the most
📣 Comparing each league to archetypes of LinkedIn influencers
NFL 🏈
Focus Area: National Media 🌎
The NFL generates the most revenue of any league with a majority sourced from humungous TV deals. Each year the league is paid $12.4B by the good people of ABC, FOX, CBS, Amazon, and YouTube to broadcast their games. 📺
Sure, getting fans in the stadium is great, but if no one showed up to a single game next year the NFL wouldn’t lose sleep. 😴
📣 LinkedIn Personality: “I automated my company with AI”
The NFL has built a media flywheel system that leads to more people watching the game and big companies paying for those eyeballs. Now they just sit back and watch the dollars flow in.
Like the generic LinkedIn-fluencer who keeps bragging how their company runs on ChatGPT now and they don’t have to work anymore.
NBA 🏀
Focus Area: National Media 🌎
Basketball has broken free from the shackles ⛓️ of in-person attendance dependency in the past decade, with over 50% of revenue coming from combined local and national media.
Plus, something is brewing behind the scenes… 🧙 A new national media deal is expected to be finalized next year, and depending on its magnitude, this deal has the potential to more than double the league's television revenue.
📣 LinkedIn Personality: “Stealth mode startup”
Everyone’s favorite LinkedIn post. “I’m working on something big. I can’t talk about it right now but when it launches everything will change 😎.”
Sounds a lot like the NBA toting its secretive media deal we can’t know the details of. The question is how much we roll our eyes at this one.
MLB ⚾️
Focus Area: Regional Media 📺
Among all leagues, MLB relies most heavily on regional media deals. This reliance turned problematic recently when Diamond Sports Group, the primary regional media provider, declared bankruptcy. 🏦
This left several teams scrambling to find alternatives to address the resulting gaps in their finances, an issue that will persist for seasons to come.
📣 LinkedIn Personality: “I’ve found my happy place by giving up the corporate world”
The MLB was once the unrivaled champion of sports in America. However, over the years, its viewership has consistently declined. Regional media going off the grid is reminiscent of our favorite influencer boasting about achieving more with less.
NHL 🏒
Focus Area: Tickets 🎟️
Hockey overwhelmingly relies on in-person attendance for 44% of yearly revenue. 👨👩👧👦 Their media deals are modest and the league is therefore much more exposed to disruptions like COVID that halt their foremost revenue stream.
📣 LinkedIn Personality: “Let me show you how to make money owning 8 Airbnbs”
You’ve seen the person selling the course on passive real estate investment a million times. Maybe you’ve even been close to trying it yourself.
Then COVID hits and no one travels, turning the one-trick-pony into a no-trick-pony, almost exactly like the NHL.
Here’s the full article and data source from Sportico along with Lev Akabas’ visualizations ⬇️
THIS PAST WEEK ⏮
To the Moon 🚀🏒
Crypto wasn’t the only bull run last week, deal activity in the NHL also spiked 📈as the trade deadline came and went.
Every sport has a trade deadline - we’ve gone into detail on the implications here - and the NHL’s takes place later than any other league. At 81% of the way through the season, ⏰ players on new teams only get one month to adjust and fit in with the rest of the group.
Throughout the year, teams will casually make trades here and there, but when the deadline comes they ratchet it way up. 🆙
The added “transaction liquidity” leads to a trading spike each year and last Friday we saw 23 trades right at the deadline, making up 31% of the season total.
Some of the blockbuster trades were:
Jake Guentzel: 🐧 Penguins → ⛈️ Hurricanes
Noah Hanifin: 🔥 Flames → ⚔️ Golden Knights
Tomas Hertl: 🦈 Sharks → ⚔️ Golden Knights
Tyler Toffoli: 😈 Devils → 🛩️ Jets
Now we wait and see which ones pay off!
ATHLETE OF THE WEEK 🏆
Me
It’s true, I lost my fantasy football league this year.
Every league has a punishment and our league’s was the IHOP challenge.
🥞 IHOP Challenge
Go to an IHOP and stay in there for 24 hours or eat 24 pancakes. Each hour takes off a required pancake
Confusing? Good thing we visualized it below. ⬇️
I ate 20 pancakes in 4.5 hours to gain freedom from the pancake palace and have never felt worse in my life. 🤢
QUICK BITES ⏭
🏈 🏙️ Russell Wilson found a new team! Our favorite, most expensive employee will be signing with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
🏒 🏆 The NHL MVP race is heating up. It’s a three-horse race between Nathan Mackinnon, Nikita Kucherov, and Connor McDavid with a month left.
🏈 📝 NFL Free agency has begun and over $2 billion worth of new contracts have already been signed. We’ll have a viz on it soon.
🥊 📺 Mike Tyson and Jake Paul agreed to a boxing match that will be aired this summer on Netflix.
Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next week!
— Claire and Riley
Keywords: March Madness, NCAA basketball tournament, Pro league revenue breakdowns, Bitcoin trading NHL, Pancake data visualizations, Tax Season sports leagues, NFL revenue sources, NBA media deals, MLB regional media deals, NHL ticket revenue, NHL trade deadline, NHL trades 2024, Athlete of the Week, Russell Wilson Pittsburgh Steelers, NHL MVP race, NFL Free agency 2024, Mike Tyson Jake Paul fight, Netflix boxing match, Sports news updates
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