What we learned this week 🟢

1. $12.5 billion for the Lakers is the most anyone has ever paid for a sports team. Ever.

The number is the number. Mark Walter bought control at a $10 billion valuation less than two years ago, held it, and flipped it to Josh Kushner’s Thrive and former Disney boss Bob Iger for $12.5 billion. That is $2.5 billion in profit for basically sitting there. And it is not the roster and it is not the building; it is the audience. Purple and gold on a jersey in Manila, in Lagos, in a driveway in Ohio. You are not buying a team, you are buying permanent attention. It didn’t stop there either: Sportico put the Cowboys at $15.5 billion (the most valuable team on Earth, and they have not sniffed a title in 30 years), the average NFL team jumped 31% in a single year, and Apollo poured $2.6 billion into the Yankees the same week. Everybody with capital is buying a piece of sports right now. Why? Attention. Distribution. The last thing everybody still watches at the same time.

📺 Thursday’s episode @ 11:40 · 📰 NBC News, CNN, Sportico NFL valuations (ESPN broke the Lakers sale)

2. $100 million for about 10% of LSU’s football media rights: a public school just sold its television future to pay for right now.

Reported by On3, LSU closed a private equity deal worth north of $100 million tied to future football media rights, structured a lot like the ones Utah and Michigan State already did, with a call option to buy the stake back after five years. LSU is staring at a projected $25 to $35 million athletic deficit, so when you are broke today and somebody waves real money, the easiest thing in the world is to sell tomorrow to fund today. Is it a done deal? Some LSU sources flatly denied it, and the governor said he turned down more than 50 private equity firms…. so, we’ll see. But notice who is not on the cap table in any version of this story: the kids generating the television product. They are the inventory being financed, not the owners.

📺 Wednesday’s episode · 📰 On3 (reporting disputed by some LSU sources)

3. $6 billion: the NFL sold a record pile of ads before a single game that counts.

Per Sportico, the league’s media partners booked a record $6 billion in advertising before a meaningful snap, up 7% on last year. The season had not started and the NFL already won. Advertisers are not paying for football; they are paying for simultaneity, the one moment left where 30 million people look at the same screen at the same second. And here is the part that should sit with you: that $6 billion flows to the league and the networks. The upside on the machine belongs to the owners. Players get their share of defined revenue, sure, but there is a cap on what teams can spend on them and no cap on what owners can make.

📺 Tuesday’s episode @ 17:42 · 📰 Sportico

4. The Cavinder twins’ new brand outsold their operating partner’s best launch ever, because they stopped renting the audience and started owning it.

Haley and Hannah Cavinder were NIL pioneers, and instead of cashing checks until the attention faded, they used the deals as a classroom. Per Forbes, their wellness brand Go Two outperformed its operating partner’s best launch ever by 7x in its first few days, and they cofounded a tequila brand, Azucar, on top of it. Read the road map, because it’s what we talk about every day: build an audience, take equity - not just a check - learn the operations while somebody else pays for your education, then own the entire thing. They didn’t wait to be LeBron. They used the distribution they already had, in the window they were given.

📺 Friday’s episode @ 19:08 · 📰 Forbes, Front Office Sports interview

5. Disney paid to sponsor Gary Neville’s podcast instead of Manchester United, and got United’s global audience without a deal with the club.

Read that last line again. Disney+ signed a one year deal to be the headline sponsor of Gary Neville’s The Overlap (the show Stick to Football, plus a brand new Stick to United with Wayne Rooney). Neville was a right back but figured out a long time ago that his value was not only his feet; it was his voice and the audience that came with it. So he built the distribution and now Disney pays him for access to it while the club sits there as a bystander in its own audience’s attention. This is the play, and it is the whole thesis in one deal: you don’t have to own the team, you have to own the audience. So which retired athlete has the most under-monetized audience and has not built the show yet? Might be you.

📺 Friday’s episode @ 25:07 · 📰 Deadline, Disney UK press release

Thanks to this week’s guest. Mario Phillips joined on Wednesday: a former baseball agent (we met back in my More Than Baseball days) turned certified leadership coach who now works with founders and athletes. His line stuck with me: it’s not what you know or even who you know anymore, it is who knows you. He even offered pro bono coaching to athletes in the Open Athletes community. Find him at Phillips Leadership Coaching and on LinkedIn.