Mar 16, 2026

Welcome back to The Varsity, where March has already descended into madness. And, no, I’m not talking about college basketball. Yours truly was crowned Puck’s Oscars pool champion (that’s not a misprint)—a feat that surely will lead to a cameo on The Studio next season, right, Matt Belloni?

Pod alert: Mike Foss, who has been with ESPN for the better part of a decade and oversees its studio shows—lately earning a reputation in Bristol as the Pat McAfee whisperer—will join the Varsity podcast on Wednesday. Also, I received a lot of good feedback from yesterday’s conversation with Jessica Berman, during which the NWSL commissioner previewed the season and talked about the league’s enviable growth.

Also mentioned in this issue: Trinity Rodman, Tom Grant, Adam Silver, Gary Bettman, David Rubenstein, Eddy Cue, the Buss family, Jake Paul, Shohei Ohtani, and… Apple TV ratings.

This issue was assembled with contributions from Curtis Rowser and Maya Tribbitt.

The Triple Play

NBA expansion pack: It sure looks like Las Vegas and Seattle will get NBA expansion teams within the next two years, and the league is planning to hold a vote on the matter at its board of governors meeting next week. The two new teams would start playing in 2028, and expansion fees are expected to hit the $7 billion–$10 billion range. The upper end of that range is comparable to the price the Los Angeles Lakers fetched when the Buss family sold in 2025.

In other words, pro team valuations across all sports are failing to yield. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman recently spoke about how his league’s team valuations have more than doubled in the past three years, and Adam Silver’s NBA is following the same trajectory. Of course, these kinds of numbers are causing a potentially season-shuttering rift in Major League Baseball—where, despite climbing valuations, owners would like to institute a salary cap. My Baltimore Orioles were the most recent MLB team to be sold, to new owner David Rubenstein in 2024, for a mere $1.7 billion.

Should the new teams receive the nod from the board of governors, it would put an end to the long suffering of Supersonics fans, who have been pushing for an expansion team since that franchise pulled up stakes and headed to Oklahoma City in 2008. It would also add a fourth major pro sports team to Las Vegas, which as recently as 2017 had… none.
The Rodman rules of retention: In January, after a months-long standoff, the National Women’s Soccer League’s Washington Spirit re-signed star forward Trinity Rodman in a deal worth $2 million annually. The groundbreaking contract keeps the young superstar in D.C. through 2028, and makes her the highest-paid woman in professional soccer worldwide. Naturally, a new league bylaw inspired by the contract, which helped keep Rodman stateside amid a surge of interest from deep-pocketed European leagues, is already being dubbed the “Rodman Rule.” Beginning July 1, NWSL clubs will be allowed to spend up to $1 million annually above the salary cap to attract and retain elite talent.

On Sunday’s artfully named Varsity podcast, commissioner Jessica Berman offered some insight into the league-altering decree (technically known as the High Impact Player rule). “We’ve been thinking about this for years, including when we were negotiating our collective bargaining agreement in 2024, because we knew that we need to be a league that maintains a salary cap,” she said. “We also know that we are competing in a global labor market for talent—and those clubs in other countries don’t have the same rules we have. … It’s a critical element of our ability to put the product on the field that will put us in a position to be the best league in the world, which is critically important to our vision.”
Peacock stays gold: Has Peacock finally figured out how to keep audiences around after major live events conclude? That was the streamer’s big bet with what it referred to as “Legendary February,” the month in which NBCU hosted the Milano Cortina Olympics, Super Bowl, and NBA All-Star Game. Well, according to new data from analytics firm Apptopia, Peacock has so far retained 16.5 percent of new mobile app users gained during the Olympics. “A 16.5 percent new user retention rate sounds modest, but these are people who had never opened Peacock before the Olympics,” said Tom Grant, V.P. of research at Apptopia. “Getting one in six to stick around is a real conversion. The harder job is finding the next event that brings in the next wave.”

So far, it would seem that these users aren’t simply forgetting to cancel. Apptopia found that Peacock users were actually spending more time on the app this month than they did during the Olympics—a testament to the new season of The Traitors, maybe? No doubt the 30 Rock brain trust is now eagerly watching how the next three weeks will play out.

And now for the main event…

Can Netflix Be Big in Japan?

The streaming giant used the World Baseball Classic’s huge Japanese audience to test live sports, while MLB gained a deep-pocketed streaming partner ahead of its 2028 rights talks.

John Ourand

Last spring, just weeks after ESPN opted out of its MLB deal, league officials picked up the phone and called Netflix. The timing was crucial. MLB, which will bring all of its media rights packages to market in 2028, had just been publicly jilted by a broadcast partner of more than 30 years. Getting a show of interest from the biggest streaming platform in the world would be, in addition to potentially lucrative, a signal that the sport we used to call America’s pastime can still command premium value.

This was, in many ways, a big swing. Netflix has kept its sports strategy deliberate and narrow, preferring to focus on tentpole events and one-off spectacles it can market to a global audience, like the NFL’s Christmas games or Jake Paul boxing matches. Baseball, with its 162-game season, is the dictionary definition of a tonnage play. Still, MLB eventually packaged a trio of events and games that could be marquee events: an opening night game, the Field of Dreams game, and the Home Run Derby. The deal was announced last November.

But from the earliest conversations, it became clear that Netflix had another idea in mind, which led to a curious subplot that’s been playing out over the last two weeks. The streamer very much wanted Japanese rights to the World Baseball Classic, the triennial tournament in which the sport’s best professional players square off on national teams. (Or, if you’re Italy, a team composed mostly of American guys who’ve gotten really into espresso.) It’s easy to see why Netflix would be interested in being the only stop for the WBC in Japan, which won the most recent WBC title, in 2023, on the back of global baseball megastar Shohei Ohtani. The two-week tournament generated viewership numbers that stunned even seasoned broadcast executives in the country. Japan’s quarterfinal win over Italy drew 38 million television viewers. Japan’s win over the U.S. in the final in Miami—which aired at 8 a.m. in Japan—drew 62 million viewers, or about half the total population of 122 million.

The WBC had briefly become the kind of cultural event that stops a country. For Netflix, which has made international expansion a priority as its total addressable market has plateaued domestically, such events are big opportunities. Securing rights to this year’s WBC, in which Japan was once again a favorite, looked like a relatively inexpensive way to test the proposition that live sports could drive subscriptions and engagement in the country. In December 2024, Netflix had just 10 million subscribers in Japan, per The Asahi Shimbun.

Getting MLB on board required buy-in from the Players Association since MLB and the MLBPA hold equal ownership in the tournament. MLB also had to navigate its long relationship with Dentsu, the Japanese ad agency that it had contracted to sell MLB rights in the country. The 2023 WBC was broadcast by NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network, along with commercial networks like TV Asahi and TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System). Approximately 100 million people tuned in for at least some of the tournament, according to Yahoo Japan.

Around the Horn

When it was announced last August that Netflix had acquired exclusive Japanese rights to all 47 WBC games, for a price reportedly around $100 million, MLB’s decision to put the WBC behind a paywall generated plenty of bad publicity in Japan. On Saturday, after Japan lost to Venezuela in the quarterfinals, the phrase “Cancel Netflix” trended on social media sites across the country.

Netflix has not yet released statistics on how many subscribers it gained, but by all accounts, the deal was great both for the streamer and for Major League Baseball, which can now reach all 325 million of Netflix’s global subscribers. In the two years leading up to MLB going to market with media rights, its games will appear on ESPN, Fox, NBC, Apple, Netflix, and Warner Bros. Discovery, which, of course, is in the process of being bought by Paramount.

If those companies come to the negotiating window in 2028—along with YouTube, possibly, and Roku—the competition could allow baseball to significantly up its rights fees. After all, MLB is doing what every pro league wants in advance of such a big deal: getting as many media companies as possible to sample their programming in the hopes that they become hooked and turn into legitimate bidders.

From the Cheap Seats

On Apple’s F1 viewership: “I would be quite interested to see any ratings for the first F1 Grand Prix, and how it performed on Apple TV versus last year’s first Grand Prix on ESPN, which had 1.1 million viewers.” —A sports business veteran

[Ed. note: Apple doesn’t provide viewership numbers, but top Apple exec Eddy Cue told Alex Weprin last week that viewership is “up year over year for the first weekend.” Which leads us to the next From the Cheap Seats item…]

More on Apple’s F1 viewership: “If Apple wanted us to believe them, releasing numbers would be a good first step.” —A self-described “TV truth-seeker”

On Thanksgiving weekend: “With news of NFL selling the Wednesday Thanksgiving Eve game, and the common assumption that it will involve two teams coming off a bye (and thus shortening their byes), one option that makes more money for the NFL: Sell Amazon’s TNF doubleheader the week before Thanksgiving. Then have two of those teams rotate into the Thanksgiving Eve game. That gives the teams a full week off between games with no effect on byes. Plus, it opens up more game options and money for the league.” —A Varsity subscriber

On the Big Five: “Aren’t the Premier League’s U.S. TV rights worth significantly more than MLS rights? Last issue’s From the Cheap Seats comment about MLS being in the Big Five of U.S. sports seemed a bit off. If anything, Premier League would get that fifth slot!” —A media executive

[Ed. note: NBC pays the Premier League an average of $450 million per season. And Apple pays MLS about an average of $250 million per year.]

Have a great week. See you tomorrow,
John

Join Puck’s chief political columnist, John Heilemann, as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you beyond the headlines with the people who shape our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected… and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.

An essential, insider-friendly Hollywood tip sheet from Matthew Belloni, who spent 14 years in the trenches at The Hollywood Reporter and five before that practicing entertainment law. What I’m Hearing also features veteran Hollywood journalist Kim Masters, as well as a special companion email from Eriq Gardner, focused on entertainment law, and weekly box office analysis from Scott Mendelson.

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