Welcome back to The Varsity, my private email on the sports business, from the backroom deals to the step-and-repeat handshakes—and all of the gossip in between. I’m writing to you from my hometown of Washington, D.C., where I’m helping my daughter pack for her semester abroad in Dingle, Ireland. And by helping, I mean that I’m reporting from the basement.

🚨Consider this your weekly reminder that The Varsity, my new Marchand-free podcast (brilliant title, right!?) is kicking off next Wednesday. The inaugural episode will feature an in-depth conversation with none other than fledgling broadcaster Peyton Manning. Make sure that you subscribe here and here. I couldn’t be more excited to get this thing rolling.

Now, let’s get to it…

1. Soccer to ’em: The new labor deal that the NWSL signed with the league’s players’ association made plenty of headlines today: No player drafts. No maximum salary. Charter flights. It’s a sign of how far the league has come, buoyed by the massive international success of the U.S. women’s national soccer team. I recommend reading Steph Yang’s recap in The Athletic about the deal and how it came about.

   Recently, I sat down with NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman for a wide-ranging conversation about the run-up to the deal. You’ll have to wait until Monday’s edition of The Varsity to read our conversation in full, but given today’s headlines, I wanted to share Berman’s response when I asked for her biggest takeaway from the deal. “I came from men’s sports, and I respect those institutions tremendously,” Berman told me. “It is also true that not every single thing that they do will make sense for our business.” The decision to abolish the draft and grant players full free agency, she explained, “is probably the boldest example of that. Those constructs don’t make sense for our business.”

2. Entourage redux: In a scene that feels pulled straight out of Entourage, the three agents who made up Excel’s sports broadcast division emailed their resignations at 8:30 p.m. Sunday night. The next day, all three had already set up shop at Athletes First, a rival agency. As you might expect, dear reader, lawyers got involved.

   Late Monday night, Excel filed suit against the agents—Gideon Cohen, William Petok, and Katherine Cutler—accusing them of taking some of their clients (including Lisa Byington and Kevin Kugler) with them and trying to convince others. Filed in the Supreme Court of New York, the lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction against Cohen, Petok, and Cutler. Per the filing, Excel management says it had no idea that Cohen and Petok were considering leaving—though it also says that it had been negotiating with both for months.

   Cohen, who joined Excel in 2021 from The Montag Group, had his Excel contract end on April 19. Excel hired the well-respected Cohen to build a broadcast business to help its athlete clients that were nearing retirement—the same reason Athletes First is looking to launch its own broadcast business. Athletes First counts several NFL superstar players (Aaron Rodgers, Dak Prescott, Jordan Love) and coaches (Mike McCarthy, Matt LaFleur, Kyle Shanahan) as clients.

3. Sunday Ticket in P.R.: Last year, as YouTube TV started its Sunday Ticket deal, it told the league that it wouldn’t have its service available in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands until November—more than two months into the season. After some minor bickering, the NFL convinced YouTube TV to allow the former Sunday Ticket rights-holder, DirecTV, to offer the out-of-market service to residential customers in those two markets.

   I checked back in with the NFL this week to see how the situation has changed for P.R. and U.S.V.I. residents. I was told that DirecTV will, once again, provide Sunday Ticket to residential and commercial subscribers in both markets this season. When DirecTV agreed to step in last season, it signed a two-year deal. Sunday Ticket’s P.R. and U.S.V.I. rights are expected to head to YouTube by next season.

4. More Venu fallout: The reckoning has only just begun for Disney, Fox, and WBD after suffering a significant, if temporary, legal setback in their fight to launch Venu, their joint sports streamer. In the lawsuit brought by FuboTV, the federal judge overseeing the case seemed amenable to the notion that other distributors shouldn’t be blocked from creating skinny bundles of their own. Some of those companies are now planning to push hard for that flexibility—and they plan to use Venu executives’ own words to hammer home their point. “That’s the highest priority for us,” said DirecTV’s chief content officer Rob Thun.

   As renewals come up with DirecTV, Thun said one of his main pushes will be to win the right to offer streamlined bundles, like a sports bundle, news bundle, kids TV bundle, etcetera. “They always told us that they didn’t want to do these skinnier bundles because they are afraid to trade down and cannibalize themselves,” Thun said. “Clearly, they weren’t afraid of that. In fact, they believed in the ‘ocean of opportunity,’ as the title slide of their deck said.”

   Thun suggested that the ultimate fate of pay TV will be determined by the next couple of deals that get signed. (He would not comment on my recent reporting that DirecTV’s deal with Disney is up within the next month.) “If we stay the course and we don’t change any dynamics in our current licensing relationship, we’ll continue to see this churn increase because as prices keep going up every year, customers are just going to get more and more fed up,” Thun told me. “This is an existential problem. I don’t think that’s an overstatement.”

5. Sunday Ticket’s legal moves: Despite its resounding Sunday Ticket victory earlier this month, the NFL still faces legal jeopardy with the out-of-market service. Here’s my Puck partner Eriq Gardner’s explanation:

   “On Monday night, the plaintiffs pointed out that while the head-turning ruling a few weeks ago addressed monetary relief for NFL teams conspiring with each other on TV licensing, it said nothing about injunctive relief for ongoing wrongs. The plaintiffs want an opportunity to make the argument that the NFL’s current deal with YouTube TV for out-of-market games should be halted. Whether or not this amounts to a tactical play to salvage a settlement, it should be taken seriously. For starters, as shown by last week’s injunction involving Venu, sports broadcasting has become hot antitrust ground.”

It was a little over a month ago, after all, that Redstone interrupted the East Hampton, Montana, and Saint-Tropez holiday weekends of Hollywood’s executive class by announcing she’d finally accepted an $8 billion deal from David Ellison’s Skydance Media and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital, under which Paramount would be merged with Skydance, elevating the 41-year-old Ellison to the Hollywood mogul status he’d always dreamed of. He’d install RedBird’s operating partner Jeff Shell, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, to actually operate the company, and perhaps bring in Jeff Zucker to fix CBS.

The well-known qualms Shari had about parting ways with her late father’s media empire were eased somewhat by the fact that Ellison’s own paterfamilias is Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is worth some $150 billion. She was flattered by the notion that Skydance—producer of Top Gun: Maverick and the latest Mission: Impossible—would bring high-tech upgrades to Paramount’s streaming service and film studio. And it seemed Shari had finally come to terms with her profound failure to build Paramount into a media colossus to rival Disney and Netflix in the streaming wars.

Redstone also seemed assuaged by a couple other, less romantic, factors. After the initial talks broke up, the Ellison-RedBird deal team came back to the table with another ~$400 million that would alleviate debt at the parentco level. Also, the new conquerors capitulated to providing a significant legal defense fund to deploy against any aggrieved shareholders who might feel screwed in the deal. Shari, herself, would be walking away with $2 billion. (Which, of course, will be subject to tax consequences, estate matters, etcetera.)

In any case, the fraught sales process finally seemed over, subject to a year of closing considerations, regulatory review, and a (relatively good-natured) request for more transparency from Mario Gabelli, Paramount Global’s largest non-Redstone holder of Class A voting shares. There simply remained a 45-day go-shop period.

As my partner Bill Cohan noted, previously interested parties Apollo and Sony appeared to have moved on. And while Bronfman, the Seagram heir, former music mogul, and current FuboTV chairman, had also been circling the deal, Wall Street doubted he’d be able to cobble together the financing within the go-shop window. Now, of course, it turns out that he has. Naturally, having already spent years contemplating a sale, Shari’s people have asked for a few more weeks to look it over.

The deck, itself, is short on specifics, but nevertheless promises to double Paramount’s EBITDA by next year and nearly quadruple its stock price by 2026. Presumably the finer points were left for the live pitch, but Bronfman suggests he’ll achieve those gains by slashing $4 billion in costs (which Paramount and Skydance have already started), a push for “digital transformation” (which the deck does not define), and cutting better deals for Paramount’s intellectual property. Not exactly novel stuff. “Paramount has under-utilized its leading I.P. library, and we will change that,” the deck says, adding that it will grow international licensing agreements, “modernize legendary I.P.” through remakes, sequels and spin-offs, and expand the I.P. on its legacy networks.

The pitch deck focuses mainly on the bid, and doesn’t dwell on how Bronfman would run the company moving forward. In fact, the truth is that Bronfman himself wouldn’t be running the company. Instead, perhaps befitting this stage of his career and his wealth, he’d be overseeing Paramount from the board level. The deck notes that he’s assembled a management team that includes a bunch of heroes of the old school: former News Corp and AOL executive Jon Miller, film executive Steven Paul, and former Turner C.E.O. John Martin. The deck doesn’t outline their roles in the new company, but it’s pretty clear that Miller would be C.E.O. or president, responsible to Bronfman; Paul would oversee the studio; and Martin, a well-liked executive who got out of Dodge when the AT&T guys took over the WarnerMedia assets, would oversee the television business. “We have the management capabilities in-place via a team led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and are prepared to work quickly,” the deck states.

It’s not quite The Jeffs, sure, and these sorts of on-paper management teams get assembled all the time in the bidding stage, so it’s fair to assume that neither Miller, Paul, nor Martin have been able to conjure any brilliant ideas for a resurrected Paramount Global in the weeks that they’ve been attached to this proposal. Ellison, Cardinale, and Shell, on the other hand, have had about a year to fantasize about their reign. (And perhaps another year to fantasize, too, as it winds through the regulatory process.)

Meanwhile, new details of Bronfman’s bid have been leaking out. According to The Wall Street Journal, Bronfman is offering $6 billion for National Amusements and a minority stake in Paramount. That includes $1.7 billion for “a tender offer that would give non-Redstone, nonvoting Paramount shareholders an option to cash out at a premium of $16 a share.” Essentially, Bronfman’s proposed deal would pay Shari roughly the same amount of money as Skydance would. But the offer would be significantly better for shareholders, a clever gambit, because he wouldn’t make them absorb the cost of the value of Skydance. Nevertheless, it does not appear to offer Shari the sort of veritable indemnity that Ellison and RedBird have.

It’s a pitch geared more toward shareholders than toward Shari, who holds the majority of voting shares in NAI, allowing her to effectively overrule the special committee and the board. To that end, the deck promises to focus on “cost reductions (as opposed to integrating another film studio)” and highlights the fact that Bronfman would appoint an “independent board of directors with all shareholders interests in mind.” It also includes a slide cherry-picking the (admittedly plentiful) damning quotes from the financial press about the Ellison deal, such as, “Paramount-Skydance deal is lousy for shareholders. Too bad they don’t get a vote.”

Of course, that’s the fundamental dilemma for Bronfman, as he well knows. Shareholders don’t get a vote on this deal, and while they can sue Shari, the indemnity she would receive from Ellison takes the sting out of that threat. The eclectic list of investors involved in Bronfman’s group appears to be a reflection of this long-shot reality: a bunch of family offices, wealthy individuals, and a child-star crypto entrepreneur, plus Fortress Investment Group and BC Partners, a British private equity firm. Most tellingly, Bain Capital, which had originally backed Bronfman’s bid, is sitting this one out.

On the high cost of Sunday Ticket through Apple’s app store: “So accounting for the Apple fee, that’s $204 on a $680 package. I’m a journalist, but can still do simple math… it means a $476 drop to the bottom line. $476 is still more than the $379 YouTube TV charges for Sunday Ticket. The hell?” —A journalist who’s mad as hell

On Bezos to the Celtics rumors: “Do Bezos and Wyc have any type of relationship? I know they both went to Princeton, but they graduated far apart (I want to say 9-10 years) so they definitely didn’t overlap on campus. Would they have crossed paths anywhere else?” —A consultant

[Ed note: Days after Bill Simmons’s report, The Information’s Nick Wingfield wrote that the world’s second-richest person has no plans to bid on the team, citing “a person close to Bezos.”]

On the Cable-pocalypse: “Broadcast is still king, but they are not going to continue to get bloated retransmission fees when the industry is also trying to boost next-gen ATSC 3.0 with free over-the-air 4K that will never come through a coaxial cable. Free broadcast and pay TV streaming are the future.” —A former NBCU executive