Paul Rabil is probably the greatest lacrosse player of his generation—and almost certainly its most important entrepreneur. Back in 2019, Paul and his brother, Mike, co-founded the Premier Lacrosse League, betting that the sport could sustain a modern professional circuit built from the ground up. After eight seasons, the PLL has an ESPN deal, is expanding its youth business and launching a women’s league, and has the 2028 L.A. Olympics on the horizon.

I recently sat down with Rabil to discuss the various challenges associated with growing a league in an overcrowded sports media landscape. We got into the changes coming this season, and what it actually takes to build a league that lasts. He also named the women’s superstar he believes could transcend the sport, à la Caitlin Clark. As always, the full conversation will be published tomorrow on the Varsity podcast, but loyal newsletter subscribers get it here first. Our conversation has been slightly edited for length and clarity.

John Ourand: The easiest thing to do in sports is to say you’re launching a new league. The hardest is to actually launch it. You’re about to start your eighth season—how did you get here?

Paul Rabil: The amazing thing about building a sports league from scratch is that you can act as a chemist and attempt to take the best of the big sports leagues’ successes and jam it into a picture that might work for, in our case, lacrosse. The hard part about it is you’re fighting for relevance—not only from an attention standpoint, but also from a commercial and attendance standpoint. If you’re going to be successful, you also have to function as a governor of the game. It’s not enough for us to just grow the PLL. We have to work hand-in-glove with our governing body, with the global governing body, with LA28, with college lacrosse, and certainly with youth lacrosse and the coaching development at the younger divisions—ultimately, all of that feeds up.

Are you out of the startup phase? Are you into the next phase?

As a founder-led league, we will always have that startup insurgent mentality. That’s how we’re able to grow. Mike [Rabil] and I are in sales meetings. We still pick up the phone and call ticket holders. We travel the country to pitch agencies and brands. We work hand-in-glove with ESPN and Disney around our most recent deal, which is kicking off this summer. Nothing is beneath us—and I would say, like most founders, nothing is above us either.

Last year, our year-over-year broadcast [audience] was up 43 percent. We hit an all-time peak at 822,000 viewers on an ABC broadcast, and our average ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 linear viewership was around 277,000. Our audience across digital grew 25 percent. Our youth business is up about 100 percent—and that’s not only getting sticks in hands and goals on the field, but new participants to the game. And to top it all off, we have a nice merchandise business. These numbers aren’t easy to get as an emerging discipline. So we’re really proud of that growth.

Still, our model is a challenge at times, in that we are a C corp. We carry the freight of player wages to venue costs to marketing—and you can go down the line. But that’s enabled us to build I.P. faster than our predecessor in pro lacrosse, and certainly faster than the other major leagues did pre-internet. We’ve created a bunch of commercial value around our teams, so when we decide to sell teams, we’ll be a lot further along [as far as] the asking price.

Like most new leagues, PLL is a single-entity league, in which the league owns all the teams. Is moving toward individual team sales the next phase?

That wasn’t necessarily always the destination. We were really venturing out on a limb in 2019 as the first of the modern, emerging sports leagues. The difference between our league and many emerging leagues is that we are the tier-one property of the discipline. The challenge is audience development, which is what we’ve been investing in pretty seriously. When we think about team sales, that’s an example of how we could potentially pursue audience development. But I think impatience is a chip on the shoulder of a lot of founders.

Team sales is more of a market signal than anything else. When sophisticated capital starts moving toward an asset class, that tells you something about where the market thinks value is headed. In a post-A.I. world where the analog, in-person experience is becoming more and more appetizing, we’re in a really attractive position by owning our global I.P. that I alluded to. While it might be a little early as we continue to see growth trends, it’s easy to say, “Let’s hold on to optimize value for shareholders.” We have the Olympics in 2028 as a major top-of-funnel moment, and we’re talking more seriously about when it might be right to begin that process.

You’re one of the greatest lacrosse players in history, and this is a real passion for you. But how do you stay dispassionate enough to run a business?

My brother Mike is our co-founder and C.E.O., and being in the bunker with your co-founder who’s also your brother is genuinely helpful. Our largest shareholder, Joe Tsai, is as connected to lacrosse as anything in his life—and that’s a huge reason why we’re here today. You have to have a little irrationality when you tackle these things. But you also need the business projections to back it up, and you need some luck.

We launched at exactly the right moment for streaming. We wouldn’t have been able to raise money and start the league in the early 2000s because every linear network’s inventory was spoken for. Streaming opened unlimited inventory. And now we’re at another inflection point, where technology has created a real appetite for the analog experience.

What storylines do you think will break through this season and pull in casual fans?

People fall in love with characters. So when we think about storytelling this year—on air during live broadcasts and in our scripted and unscripted development—it all comes back to characters. On the broadcast side, we’re in our third rights deal, second with ESPN, and we want to significantly elevate production. I think our closest look-alike is the NHL. So we’re studying what the NHL has done. For example, Michael Eisner and Disney leveraged the success of Mighty Ducks to acquire the Anaheim Mighty Ducks and do activations at Disneyland. We can do unique things like that more freely because we’re wholly owned.

From an ESPN standpoint, we want to try player tracking, ball tracking, rules animations, lower cameras. And as far as content, Fate of a Sport on ESPN+ and Disney+. And we’re working on more projects.

What specifically are you changing this season based on what you’ve learned over the past few seasons?

Two things: an expanded schedule reaching earlier into the spring, and the launch of the Women’s Lacrosse League. We’ve expanded to 54 total games, beginning in May, with 19 linear windows—eight of them on ABC. And the WLL is going to take shape in a way that is highly anticipated, not just from fans but from our partners at ESPN.

The breakthrough moment for us is Los Angeles 2028, and we’re not waiting for it. That means working closely with our governing body and LA28 on scheduling and positioning, working with NBC on broadcast and streaming distribution, and co-developing scripted and unscripted programming that tells players’ stories. There’s a sophomore at the University of North Carolina right now named Chloe Humphrey who won the national championship and earned Most Outstanding Player as a freshman. She’s a very bright star, and has an opportunity to be our sport’s first crossover superstar. She’s like Caitlin Clark meets Livvy Dunne. I hope she has a Gabby Thomas moment in 2028—her 200,000 followers going to 2.5 million overnight. We need to be prepared to sustain that momentum.

On Dave Roberts’s ESPN retirement: “Dave changed the trajectory of my career. He was tough but consistent. The only time he truly made me sweat was during an editorial meeting. At the end he looked over at me and said, ‘Don’t go anywhere, I need to talk to you.’ Everyone rushed out the door. He closed it and said, ‘I hear you’re running a March Madness pool.’ I gulped and meekly said, ‘Yes.’ I was worried I was about to get in trouble. Then he said, ‘I want in! How much?’” —A broadcast executive

On Don Garber’s successor: “Former NASCAR chief Steve Phelps would be a good hire. The truth is that FIFA screwed MLS with its price gouging around the World Cup.” —A journalist

More on Garber’s successor: “Judging by your story, it seems like Korn Ferry is not seriously interviewing female executives for the role? Hopefully they have, because there are some incredible female executives out there!” —A league executive

On the prediction markets: “Let me make sure I understand this. The leagues think they are qualified to have a seat at the table to help govern something as complex as prediction marketplaces; at the same time, they continue to show no competence in addressing/correcting something as simple as their local broadcast blackout restrictions? Got it.” —A Varsity subscriber

See you Thursday,
John