Juan Soto, media deals, and more sports business

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

PABLO TORRE: Juan Soto, the new New York Met slugger, just signed a $765 million contract, the richest contract in the history of sports over 15 years. The reason he has gotten that contract is because his boss is Steve Cohen, one of the 100 richest billionaires on Earth. We have gotten to a place where big money has, I think, begun to eat away at the fiction that sports was a mom-and-pop business in which we needed everybody to civically feel like we were on the same team. To be an athlete in professional sports and to watch them in the modern Coliseum is to watch something so alien from your day-to-day life that you’re just trying to figure out: How can I watch this? Do I really need to pay an arm and a leg to watch it?

And so we are testing the tolerance, I believe, of everyday Americans, to support something that feels increasingly divorced from the thing they, certainly their parents, had signed up for.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Pablo Torre, sports journalist at ESPN and elsewhere, and host of the podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out. The sports business has been hit by several waves of convulsions this year, from player mega deals to media rights deals, to the emergence of Caitlin Clark as an almost Taylor Swift-like celebrity.

I wanted to talk to Pablo about how the business of sports and fandom is changing, from college football to the NBA to the Olympics. Pablo draws out lessons that span Amazon and ESPN, the NFL, and the World Cup. It’s a fun romp through the state of sports fandom with useful business insights, even for those who don’t tune into SportsCenter.

So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

SAFIAN: I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Pablo Torre, longtime sports journalist for ESPN and others, and host of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out. Pablo, thanks for being here.

Copy LinkCautiously rooting for the Knicks

TORRE: Bob, it has been a year.

SAFIAN: Yeah, there’s been a bunch of sports-related, sports business topics that I want to ask you about. Big shifts in 2024 have implications for the year ahead, but first, I have to ask you, as a long-suffering New York Knicks fan, I know you have left the team, but do you think they’re for real? The highest-scoring team in the NBA? Is this something I can hang my hat on?

TORRE: Yeah, you’ve activated various traumas that I’ve done a lot of work to close.

Frankly, Bob, I don’t appreciate how we’re starting this. The Knicks are good. And in my voice just then, you can hear the lilt of somebody who does not trust a team that does not need to be good to sell out every single game.

Madison Square Garden is always good, leading the league, it seems, in commerce, despite being often abjectly terrible. But this Knicks team, what I will say cautiously is that last year proved that the New York Knicks, when they are good, are responsible for the most fun atmosphere in the NBA.

So, yes, but baked into that premise is pain. So just know that. Know that they will disappoint you, break your heart, and you will be like me, even though there will be these dollops of optimism, as I am sharing one with you.

Copy LinkThe rise of women’s sports in the mainstream

SAFIAN: Let’s dig into some big doings in sports business. Arguably the biggest happening this year was the rising attention and money for women’s sports. I mean, 2021 felt like the year women’s sports finally broke into the mainstream.

Caitlin Clark, a key part of that, breaking records at Iowa, bringing a spotlight to the WNBA. How much of this year is like the Caitlin Clark effect, and how much was sort of destined to happen?

TORRE: I think this is a yes-and kind of situation here. Caitlin Clark, though, I want to begin with her because no professional athlete in America, I believe — and I think the numbers, forget belief, the numbers will bear this out — nobody individually has had more of an impact on an increase in eyeballs in terms of stuff they are associated with. We saw it at Iowa, as you referenced, where her NCAA tournament run broke records for ESPN basketball period, which is to say, including the NBA, she outrated NBA games. And then had a similar effect when it came to the WNBA draft, her entry into professional basketball, and then into her games with the Indiana Fever.

Caitlin Clark is sui generis. I don’t think anybody else has this effect. And that includes Patrick Mahomes and LeBron James, in terms of plugging her into something, and you suddenly have a thriving business based on her almost unprecedented talent alone. So that is one part of it. But the second part is that this is a larger trend line for women’s basketball, specifically women’s professional basketball, the WNBA that we’ve been tracking for years now.

When it comes to the WNBA finals, it’s worth noting that Caitlin Clark was not in those games, and those games had, I believe, a 100 percent or so increase over last year and a similar jump from the year before that. And so there is just something happening where the conversation, Bob, has gone from, you should appreciate women’s basketball because the game is fantastic, and there is this culture that is underrated and all of that, to now, it’s more of a capitalistic proposition. If you care about business, you should be in the business of women’s basketball because you make money. That has been truly a phenomenon that has taken root this year specifically.

SAFIAN: Now the WNBA inked a $2.2 billion broadcasting deal this summer, which was a huge leap for them. But the NBA’s new deal is like 35 times higher, around $75-76 billion. Is WNBA viewership that much smaller?

TORRE: It’s a fascinating thing. So the WNBA has basically been hiding underneath the umbrella of the NBA’s rights since the inception of the league. And so what is happening, and it’s going to happen in the next couple of years, the thing to sort of earmark here in terms of paying attention to the business of is the WNBA wanting to break out of that larger collective bargaining agreement, these multi-billion-dollar rights deals. The NBA just tripled its, in the most recent deal for ten years signed this fall. The WNBA has been inside of that, but the WNBA is saying, actually, we can stand on our own if we were allowed.

This is a familiar business plea you might recall: if we were just allowed to be spun off into our own entity, we could make money that we have been throttled from being able to make. And so, yes, right now we’re looking at some leading indicators like, okay, viewership is up, the cultural relevance has always been underrated, but that is certainly up. You have these stars, these transcendent stars now, with more in the college pipeline, and the college game has also been more popular. And so we have yet to test this, but the players in the league and the WNBA are dying for this because that means that their salary scale — by the way, it’s still crazy, a rookie contract for the WNBA is about $80,000 at its ceiling right now, which is crazy, but that’s what it is given the current economics, which are a holdover from previous economics inside of the larger NBA

SAFIAN: The spin-out part of it, like, is the NBA not wanting to have to compete with the WNBA? Is that part of it?

TORRE: So it’s been a relationship of mutual — the NBA, to be very clear, has always been —again, I’m going to use some familiar patriarchal metaphors here—they’ve always been the breadwinner. The WNBA has been operating at a loss year after year. And that is still true today. The question is, what would happen if the incentives were to change? What if they could eat what they killed? What if they could do that? And in that world, Bob, I think you’re looking at a different economy. But to be very honest, the WNBA has benefited from hiding inside of the NBA’s largesse. And now, for the first time, that proposition, if you’re a women’s basketball player professionally, you want that to change.

SAFIAN: I know you’re friendly with Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, legends in women’s sports and sports overall. What do you hear from them about where they think women’s sports is? Does the WNBA have a sort of rollover effect on other women’s sports, or is it all sort of all helping each other?

TORRE: I think it’s certainly a larger phenomenon this year in terms of a larger awareness of people being like, “Wait a minute. This isn’t what I was told it was, which was lame and lesser and JV and frankly, not worthy of the time of somebody who goes to sports to watch the best.” That has been true in the National Men’s Soccer League, which has also been ascendant. Certainly true in basketball, as I said. But you talk to Megan and Sue and people who have been lifers, literally have been playing these sports their entire life, and what they’re reporting is a very funny thing and a sad thing, in a way, which is, you know, they didn’t used to be the cool kids. You would be trying to plead with people, please, men, pay attention to us, almost as if it was a charity.

And now, they feel like there is actual economic momentum behind them. There’s a real parallel phenomenon happening, too, which is larger than just women’s sports, which is we are living in an age of media in which you don’t need to be the NFL to be profitable. You don’t need to be the biggest thing to make money. The economy of individual media members with Substacks, right? I’ll just reduce it down to the most granular level, right? We’re all kind of OnlyFans creators at this point. Do you have an audience that wants to pay for your stuff? The audience that you have does not need to be enormous billions of people for you to make a pretty penny.

And in women’s sports, what they’re realizing is: Wait a minute, we can play the sports that we’ve been playing this entire time and build an audience that is there for us. We don’t need to be bigger than the NBA. We don’t need to be bigger than the NFL, but if you are going to enable us to create a customer base that will pay on an ad hoc basis for the products we create, then suddenly we have a business.

In the age of the internet, that didn’t used to be possible when you had to go through, again, conglomerates that were trying to only service the biggest tents in American sports.

Copy LinkHow the NIL deals are changing college athletics

SAFIAN: I mean, and this sort of atomizing in some ways of the sports business. Narrowing it down, as you’re talking about it, makes me think a little bit of the NIL boom in college. The Name, Image, and Likeness deals for college athletes, which also kind of came of age this year. For listeners who don’t know, can you explain what NIL is? Am I making the right connection here in what you’re talking about?

TORRE: Completely. Name, Image, and Likeness is the term of art. This was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court. College sports had been operating with a black market that throttled the earnings of workers responsible for multi-billion-dollar enterprises. So Name, Image, and Likeness was sort of the first step towards allowing those players to monetize their brands. So this is not quite, we are paying salaries to college athletes, because that, of course, is a bridge too far still, although that seems to be the next bridge to fall. What we’re talking about is, would companies pay these individual athletes? Would boosters pay these individual athletes? Based on who they are, based on how good they are. And the answer resoundingly has been yes. Fascinatingly, some of the highest earners in college sports, which we assumed would have been the quarterbacks and the football players, have been female gymnasts, have been female volleyball players. These smaller sports for whom there is still certainly an online audience that can be monetized.

Bob, this is exactly the through-line that we’re talking about. The internet has opened up, and the law has now opened up, revenue streams that were not available to quote-unquote, non-revenue-generating sports, which is a kind euphemism for Olympic sports, which is another euphemism for women’s sports. Now, actually, money is being able to be generated on the basis of being good and popular at those smaller sports.

SAFIAN: I was thinking about this too, in relation to the new college football playoffs with the new 12-team system. I was looking this morning at the brackets and thinking, oh, if you’re a player on one of those teams, like you could have three or four nationally televised games in a relatively short period. There is a big potential for some of those players to become even more famous, right? Celebritized.

TORRE: No question. We had on my show, Pablo Torre Finds Out, we interviewed the attorney for the class action suits that are representing a lot of players from days gone by who are saying, wait a minute, we were the stars of some of the most watched television shows annually in America.

If you’re a player in this 12-team playoff, because again, there is nothing more inelastic in American life than a demand for football games. This is something that your boosters, sponsors, and your monetizable internet followings are all salivating at because this is yet more attention drawn to you.

SAFIAN: Yeah, I mean, the way the college sports business is being impacted, a lot of universities are relying on college sports, or college football and basketball, to cover the costs of a lot of other programs.

TORRE: What’s happening is, okay, you look at who’s making money on a sport-by-sport basis in terms of the TV deals, the media rights deals, which are billion-dollar properties, and it’s football, and then an enormous drop-off to basketball, and then an enormous drop-off again to these sports that are the Olympic sports that are non-revenue generating in the way that I referenced before. When it comes to who’s funding that, when the market was throttled, when you could not pay players, you had the ability, again, and this is a common theme I’m realizing as I talk to you, for these other sports to hide inside the umbrella of these larger deals. And now, because things are getting broken out and monetized individually, you’re realizing, wait a minute, okay, does the American Olympic system actually have the same potential as it used to? Because the American Olympic system was the college system. It was the University of Michigan. It was Stanford down the line, these unpaid athletes, college football players now because they weren’t getting paid, allowing those resources to go towards the funding of swimming and diving and fencing and gymnastics and wrestling and down the line. Everything is this incredibly arcane puzzle and they all fit together, and now it’s all getting blown up.

Like a lot of other things, a lot of other sectors in American life, it’s a lot easier right now to be a popular individual than a company that used to rely on these individuals to provide their bottom line. All I know is that in the world of college sports, the rule of thumb has always been to expect chaos.

This has been a series of sports followed by obsessives with tribal investments, caring deeply about the actions of teenagers. Now you have seemingly a commensurate financial level of flux that is going to track right alongside those outcomes.

SAFIAN: I love Pablo’s ability to be a fan, which he clearly is, but also to unpack how economics is impacting players, leagues, and all of us. As he’s talking, you see how sports both leads culture and reflects it. It’s part of the larger marketplace, something we’ll talk more about as we dig into streaming services and media rights deals, the mindset of players versus owners, and what Pablo says is the strongest house of cards in America. We’ll be right back.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, we heard sports journalist Pablo Torre talk about how the business model of sports is in flux. Now he explains how record media rights deals and the role of streaming services will drive the next wave of change in sports business, plus why sports is a metaphor for the human condition, how private equity will alter the NFL, and more. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkHow streaming services reshape sports viewership

So, you mentioned TV deals. They are the lifeblood of sports business, and streaming services are kind of ratcheting things up that much more. You’ve got Peacock scoring big with the Olympics, Amazon taking over some NBA coverage from Turner, Netflix has a slate of NFL games for Christmas.

Not to mention that fabulous Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight. ‘m not sure if that’s sports or not, but it does feel like we’re at an inflection point in sports broadcasting. Are we? I mean, you’ve been with ESPN, so you’re on this train already.

TORRE: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I do a show called The Sporting Class, and my cohost is John Skipper, who is the former president of ESPN, who was the architect of lots of these multi-billion-dollar rights deals from days gone by. What John has always told me, and it is true, is that this was cable television, and ESPN specifically, the greatest business in the history of media. And we can go through the reasons why, but you’d have cable bills paid by people who sometimes didn’t even watch ESPN, who were paying premiums for ESPN, because that’s how the technology of cable television on a linear basis worked. And now in a world in which everything is a la carte, Bob, what you’re describing is a series of individual decisions that we all are making.

Do we want to subscribe to Netflix and Peacock and Amazon and Apple and Disney Plus and go down the line? What has been true since the beginning of that golden era of cable TV, which John presided over at ESPN, is still true now, but just diminishingly, which is there is nothing more valuable than these games when it comes to drawing mass quantities of Americans together under what still remains the biggest tent in American life. So if you’re the NFL, you feel fantastic because every time you put a playoff game on Peacock or certainly on Amazon. You are breaking records for those streaming platforms because people still, regardless of your politics. By the way, we can’t say this about many things, but regardless of what you care about politically, musically, pop culturally, you will gather alongside people who disagree with you feverishly to watch these games. That said, the tech platforms, the tech companies, as is true across so many aspects of media, they are penny-pinching and optimizing, big scare quotes there, in a way that the linear cable television business, media companies of the industry, never had to.

What you’re seeing is, I believe, the beginnings of a turn towards a world in which these tripling of NBA rights, and the unending fountain of money, they will, I believe, be tightening. Apple and Netflix and Amazon, for as much money as they have — they have more money than God at this point — they don’t need it in the way that cable television needed it, that Disney needed it, that Comcast and CBS needed it. And so that’s going to be the big inflection point when the actual cable television and linear television in general eventually does give way.

SAFIAN: And from a customer point of view, I think about this too. Do fans care about what the network is? Like, do you care whether it’s on TNT or ESPN or Amazon? You don’t necessarily have any loyalty to that brand.

TORRE: Not at all, and you can see that in the extreme popularity of pirated content. I mean, look, at a certain point, I’m talking to you in the same era when Juan Soto, the new New York Met slugger, just signed a $765 million contract, the richest contract in the history of sports over 15 years. The reason he has gotten that contract is because his boss is Steve Cohen, one of the 100 richest billionaires on Earth. And so the point is we have gotten to a place where big money has, I think, begun to eat away at the fiction that sports was a mom-and-pop business in which we needed everybody to civically feel like we were on the same team. Everything is suggesting that to be an athlete in professional sports and to watch them in the modern Coliseum is to watch something so alien from your day-to-day life that you’re just trying to figure out. How can I watch this? Can I watch this? Do I really need to pay an arm and a leg to watch it? So we are testing the tolerance, I believe, of common people, of everyday Americans, to support something that feels increasingly divorced from the thing they, certainly their parents, had signed up for.

Copy LinkPrivate equity enters the NFL arena

SAFIAN: One other looming change in sports business has to do with the NFL. In August, the league voted to allow private equity to invest in teams. The last big sports league to open things up this way. Now, outside of sports, private equity is often associated with cost-cutting and restructuring.

Doesn’t seem to happen so much in sports, but any sense of what we should expect in the NFL? Is it going to become more professionalized financially? Like, what happens?

TORRE: It’s really interesting what the NFL has done. They were the last ones into the private equity pool, and they have created these terms that are incredibly friendly towards the people who already own the teams. Basically, what they’ve said is there’s a half dozen number of PE firms that we have allowed to invest. It is a privilege and an honor to give your money to the NFL. They’re also saying that you guys are non-voting part owners. The reason it’s happening is interesting because we have gotten to a place where these teams, for instance, the Washington Commanders bought by Josh Harris and his fellow private equity princes. By the way, that was the headline in the New York Times describing Josh Harris when he bought the Sixers, again, another billionaire.

These guys are so singular relative to the other bidders in the marketplace where if you’re trying to wring more money out of this asset that you bought, you kind of have to go to private equity. What they’ve realized is, “Okay, wait a minute. What I want out of owning a pro sports team is I want to go to the games. I want to make the decisions. I want to have great seats.” Okay. They’ve realized they can do that if they own 51%. In the meantime, “Okay, wait a minute. Now I have an $8 billion asset, 49% of which can be sold off in various bits and parts to people.” It’s a great deal for the NFL. It’s a great deal for those owners. It reflects again, this ascent in terms of evaluation of these teams that hinges again on the broadcast rights and the whims of tech companies that are saying, keep pace, we’re in this with you. But when things change down the road, as they inevitably do, I think the feelings about private equity will be a lot like the feelings that people in media have had or people in fast food have had towards private equity, which is, wait a minute, suddenly these people want to optimize us.

SAFIAN: I mean, as you talk about the way the sports business works, it sounds a little bit like a house of cards. There’s all this money that’s coming into the leagues, that’s coming from the networks who are getting the money from advertisers in order to reach an audience that maybe is getting smaller or is moving to clips, although it’s still the only way you can get a mass audience to show up. Right?

TORRE: The biggest house of cards left. We are living in a country full of houses of cards that happens to be, for all of the doom and gloom I have just prophesied, it happens to be the largest and yet somehow still most structurally sound. That, I think, owes to the unique place that sports has in American life. I’m not telling you that this is pre-peak, right? I think we’ve probably passed it. That would be my personal pessimism and cynicism around the long arc of this business. I don’t think we’ll ever get to numbers that we’ve seen in the post-television era. But if you want a large mass of people to care about something like it is religion and politics and race and gender and everything rolled into one with all those attendant feelings, sports is the only place you can get it for better or for worse.

Copy LinkHow have finances in sports changed in the last 15 years?

SAFIAN: I do want to note for everyone, I mean, Pablo wrote a terrific breakthrough piece for Sports Illustrated way back in 2009 called “How and Why Athletes Go Broke” about athletes losing their money to mismanagement and financial naivete. I remember that you reported that most former NFL players were bankrupt or under stress. Most NBA players were broke within five years of retirement. I’m curious, have you continued to follow this? Have things changed in the 15 years since then?

TORRE: Recently did an episode on the 15-year anniversary of this story, which still remains the thing that I think I still get the most incoming messages about of all the stories I’ve written. I’m going to actually talk to — again, here is a mix of self-indulgence and also journalistic investigation. I talked to a financial advisor who now advises all of these first-round picks in the NBA who was inspired to do the job because he read that horrifying story I had reported. It was just this sort of weird thing of so much has changed, and yet so little has.

But yeah, look, sports business to me is a deep abiding curiosity, and it goes down to the personal finances of players who are now making money earlier in the college system, as we said, and yet are not supported in the ways you might expect. Athletes are often metaphors for the normal mistakes of us normal people who don’t have those athletic gifts or those bank accounts, but they’re exaggerated because of the funhouse mirror of celebrity and wealth.

So for me, business and sports are inextricable from one another. That is the era that I grew up in, and that’s the era that I remain super, super interested in.

SAFIAN: I mean, we see a lot more stories of high-profile athletes getting into business and being entrepreneurs and investors. I’m just never sure whether that is just the folks at the very top, and so many athletes move through these leagues and are there for a few years and sort of don’t get any support and it doesn’t become a nest egg for them.

TORRE: Yeah. I mean, look, the part about being an athlete, and this is the psychology that I found so compelling. The very thing that made them a professional athlete, which is a defiance of statistical chance, right? Vanishingly small percentages of people ever get to the point that they are at, which is to say maybe a benchwarmer in the NBA or a second stringer in the NFL. And that same mentality for success, they are carrying that over into business. And so no second stringer thinks, you know what? I’m not LeBron James. Everybody is thinking to themselves, wait a minute. I also shouldn’t be here. Why am I going to take an L? Because the numbers are telling me so. And that is a familiar syndrome in that regard. But then when you add to that the utter and almost dystopian transparency of earnings — where I can go and find out, wait a minute, okay, that guy in the NBA, that small forward that is otherwise anonymous, is making $7.3 million a year, and he has a trade kicker, and he has — I can get the forensic accounting of that person’s contract because sports, again, is not merely just rich people doing stuff. It’s a thing where we all expect to have visibility into those decisions because we too are helping run these teams, or so the fiction goes. And so we know all of their intimate contractual details, which is not true of anyone else in business at that level, by the way, but we know exactly their contractual clauses. And so that also makes them, of course, targets and prey for predators who are realizing the things that made them so good at sports are actually, in many ways, dissimilar, if not opposite, from the way they should be approaching personal finance.

SAFIAN: Is there a common mentality like that you see for sports owners as opposed to athletes?

TORRE: Sports owners, the reason they get into owning a team is that they want to be winners. One of the things that was so fascinating to me, I did a story once about the Philadelphia 76ers. I’ll spare the longer explanation here. But basically, in the NBA, like many professional sports, if you lose more, you get a better draft pick. It’s a funny form of socialism in an otherwise capitalistic enterprise. The worst get the most in order to level the playing field. And the Sixers, under Josh Harris, an aforementioned Apollo Global Management, what he decided to do was co-sign a plan to tank. We’re going to lose games, effectively, on purpose to get the worst record for several years in a row, and in that way, we would get better draft picks and save our franchise. It was a better system that way. And his logic was not wrong. What was underestimated, though, was that people, these fans, cared so much more about the Philadelphia 76ers than they did about the cost of polypropylene or any of these other things that Josh Harris was trading.

And he realized the public pressure on this, the attention, and the spotlight has made it so that my logical brain cannot function in the same way. Which is to say that sports is both a beautiful thing, a metaphor for the human condition, especially among Americans. It is also something that eats away at your brain. And I caution everybody who looks to sports for those lessons, because sometimes sports is extreme in ways that you should not follow when it comes to lessons you want to apply in the rest of your life.

SAFIAN: It’s like it is a business. And it’s run in business-like ways, and it has business impact. And yet at the same time, it’s emotional, right? And it has its own sort of reasons for being that even if you’re trying to approach it in a financial way, you kind of can’t. You get distracted.

TORRE: Yeah, go talk to the head coach of Ohio State right now, by the way, who has had a great season, and this program is rolling in money and all of that is so. But he couldn’t beat Michigan, the hated rival. Hasn’t done it in four years, and that dude is probably going to get fired, right? And by the way, Michigan, whose new booster, Larry Ellison, has just paid for the acquisition of the new star quarterback coming in next year as a freshman because his partner, his romantic partner in life, is a Michigan superfan. That’s why that happened. That is not a logic that accompanies rational decision-making. That is a logic that accompanies mania. And the mania is the magic that is underpinning the entire economy that sometimes is anti-economic.

Copy LinkThe 2025 sports event that Pablo Torre is most excited about

SAFIAN: So last question: Is there a 2025 sports event that you’re most looking forward to? Like the Super Bowl in February, FIFA World Club World Cup this summer, the launch of League One Women’s Professional Volleyball in January? Is there something that sort of gets your heart going?

TORRE: Yeah. Look, I am looking at the World Cup when it comes to America. Looking way ahead, soccer is a fascinating thing. Soccer is easily the most popular sport in the world. It has always been the sport of the future in America for about three decades running. At some point, it’ll get to us. Bringing it actually geographically to the United States and to North America, Mexico included, Canada, it’s probably the greatest test of a hypothesis that lots of people have been trying to monetize for decades now. So I’m looking forward to that. And I’m always looking forward to the fact that the New York Knicks are going to convince a lot of people that this is totally fine to root for, and you should do it. And then, you’re going to realize as you leave Madison Square Garden one day, I’ve made a horrible decision.

SAFIAN: Well, Pablo, this has been great. Thanks so much for doing it. I really appreciate it.

TORRE: Bob, thank you for forcing me to reflect upon the industry I have chosen.

SAFIAN: Listening to Pablo, I have two opposing thoughts at the same time. First, that the sports business is its own unique universe, with the spotlight of celebrity and public attention distorting everything. But at the same time, I also see it as a direct replica of what happens in business everywhere, just more visible to us.

So, yes, Larry Ellison’s investment in Michigan football may be fueled by the fandom of his romantic partner, as Pablo says, and team owners may be motivated by emotion over economics. But doesn’t emotion play a major part in all business and all leadership decisions? I think sometimes we hide behind the numbers when assessing business decisions, or maybe we use numbers to rationalize our emotional decisions.

Regardless, when it comes to the brands we buy, the companies we work for, the stocks we’re invested in, we’re all fans to some extent, hardcore and diehard or fair-weather only as we cheer, complain, and try to find our place in the tumultuous game of business. It’s good to remember that there’s more at stake than just winning and losing.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.