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Welcome back to The Varsity. And let’s go, USA! I know we’re already through to the next round,
but I can’t wait for tonight’s game against Turkey. Our boy Peter Hamby will be at SoFi—look for that handsome mug in the stands tonight.
Pod alert: Marchand returns to The Varsity this weekend for what I expect will be a lot of talk about Zlatan and Alexi Lalas. Also, make sure to listen to yesterday’s episode: FanDuel president Christian Genetski
talked about the World Cup boon.
In today’s issue, a talmudic reading on the sports documentary market, which roared out of Covid, spawned a ton of investment in new production companies, and has since been totally recalibrated. As always, my Thursday send is exclusive to Puck Inner Circle subscribers. Upgrade
here, if you haven’t yet.
Also mentioned in this issue: JT Batson, Cindy Parlow Cone, Mauricio Pochettino, Arthur Blank, Michele Kang, Tom Dundon, Micah Nori, Alex Ovechkin, Wayne Gretzky, Chris Evert, Martina
Navratilova, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Colin Jost, Pat Summitt, and more. |
Player(s) of the Week: JT Batson & Cindy
Parlow Cone
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There’s something special going on right now with the U.S. men’s national soccer team,
which is set to advance to the World Cup’s knockout round after its first consecutive victories in the tournament in almost a century. Much of the credit goes to two U.S. Soccer executives: C.E.O. and secretary general JT Batson and president Cindy Parlow Cone. They made the hires, including coach Mauricio Pochettino; built a training center outside of Atlanta; and convinced big-time donors, including Arthur Blank and
Michele Kang, to open their checkbooks. U.S. Soccer has done well on the field so far—but it’s also made a really good business case off the field, too. |
Down to the J.V.: Tom Dundon
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Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon appears very comfortable playing resident heel in
the NBA. First came news that he lowballed new coach Micah Nori with a contract filled with win-based incentives. (Terms, by the way, that drew a public rebuke from the National Basketball Coaches Association.) Then he demanded that the $600 million in renovations he’s seeking for the Moda Center be 100 percent publicly funded. Dundon has been portrayed as a notorious cheapskate since buying the team from the Allen family in March, and these two stories—from the
same week, no less!—will do little to change that narrative. |
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- Attack of the ad tiers: Flipping through Morgan Stanley’s 16th annual streaming survey this morning, my eyes immediately went to the data on ad tiers, which are rapidly growing across every single streamer. At Netflix, the ad-tier user base has grown from 17 percent to 47 percent during the past three years. For Disney, ad-tier subscribers grew from 23 percent to 48 percent of the file during the same period. Amazon Prime Video was ahead of the curve, hitting 50 percent ad-tier
adoption last year—not surprising, since Amazon automatically opted in all its subscribers. But I was interested to see how that number barely budged in 2026, ticking up to 52 percent. It’s probably too early to say whether that suggests a ceiling, but it’s worth watching. Anyway, sports rights will only become more valuable to these platforms as they build relationships with advertisers and look for inventory opportunities.
- Rolapp’s media
play: Earlier this week, C.E.O. Brian Rolapp announced the PGA Tour’s two-series competition model: an A-level Championship Series with up to 24 events, filled with the best golfers, and a Nike Tour–style, B-tier Challenger Series that will have at least 20 events with golfers that nobody has ever heard of. Rolapp suggested that the new format will better position the Tour to negotiate its next media rights package in 2030, but sources have told me that the proof will be in
the pudding. They all support some kind of format shake-up, but it’s too soon to say whether this will be the silver bullet.
After all, the two-tiered promotion-relegation system has definite flaws. To wit: I wonder which of these propositions will draw more serious bids from TV executives. Then there’s the state of the Tour’s current partners: CBS and NBC currently hold most of the PGA Tour’s rights, but CBS is about to enter a synergy phlebotomy after Paramount’s
highly leveraged WBD deal, and after the Versant spinoff, NBC now runs independently of Golf Channel—any golf deal NBC makes going ahead will have to be profitable on its own. - Finally… baseball’s labor dispute: Here’s the big takeaway from today’s back-and-forth between MLB and the players association. The two sides are talking, and that’s a good thing, but they’re also, unsurprisingly, very far apart. Look, a lockout after the season is
inevitable. But deadlines spur action, and the question is how close the two sides can get before regular-season games are missed. ESPN has a good primer on what went down today, but my suggestion is not to get too lost in the details just yet.
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Since their pandemic-era Last Dance peak, sports documentaries have
become harder and harder to get greenlit—even at Netflix. Superstars and monoculture nostalgia plays can still find a home, but the bar has been raised while the payouts have fallen. So what’s a sports doc producer to do? |
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Last spring, as Alex Ovechkin closed in on Wayne Gretzky’s
all-time NHL goal-scoring record, every streamer and TV network was pitched on an all-access, behind-the-scenes show about his pursuit of the threshold. A documentary series seemed like a no-brainer given all the hoopla. During games, ESPN even ran “OviCast” on its streaming service, devoting one camera to the hulking left-winger. The team’s R.S.N., Monumental Sports Network, also developed a ton of programming, branded as “THE GR8 CHASE.” When Meadowlark tried to sell the docuseries, however,
it was quickly checked against the boards by the present realities of the genre.
Coming out of Covid, when cash was cheap and streamers needed inventory, sports docs enjoyed a veritable gold rush. Back in 2019, Netflix caught lightning in a bottle with F1: Drive to Survive, the Box to Box Films–produced series that became the envy of the low-cost, high-upside model that everyone was trying to replicate—Quarterback spawned Receiver; then there was the Patriots
hagiographical series, Federer, Simone Biles Rising, yada yada yada. For a while it seemed as if every niche of the sports universe was bound for the Drive to Survive treatment. Netflix ordered series on track and field, golf, cycling—even position-specific series on NFL quarterbacks.
But oversaturation and price inflation recalibrated the business, and TV networks and streamers have become much more selective about the types of documentaries they buy. “There
are so many of these out there,” one executive told me, “that viewership stagnated and they just don’t feel fresh and new anymore. I wouldn’t say that the market has dried up. There’s still a desire for people to watch longform sports documentary programming. But we’re all looking for the next iteration of what it will be. We had 30 for 30, then 24/7, then Drive to Survive. What’s next?”
They’re not willing to pay the same premiums, either. One production
executive confirmed that the prices for high-end documentaries have all but cratered. “Documentaries that used to go for $7 million or $8 million are now getting $2 million,” one executive said. The main reason that the Ovechkin doc died in the room was price. Ovie wanted an upfront fee north of $2 million to participate—much less than the amount that Apple paid Steph Curry three years ago for the Underrated doc, but much more than media companies are willing to pay
now. “It’s the middle of the pack—like the Ovi idea—that are struggling now,” one executive told me. |
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Yes, documentaries with legendary names are still finding distribution; tomorrow, Netflix will
release Chris & Martina: The Final Set, and I’m told that Paramount+ bought a doc on Coach K from Connor Schell’s Words + Pictures. There’s also still a market for smaller docs that can be tucked under the Netflix Untold or ESPN 30 for 30 banners. But the space got oversaturated by too much content, excessive choice, and customer fatigue.
This new dynamic has forced even some of the busiest sports doc production companies to
pivot into new business channels, including branded content and live events. And it’s made success less certain for everyone else. Consider the fate of a would-be project from Box to Box Films surrounding this year’s World Baseball Classic, a surprisingly popular event whose championship game attracted nearly 11 million viewers to Fox back in March. Netflix, still one of the most-active sports documentary buyers, picked up the WBC rights in Japan and, presumably, would’ve been interested in the
doc as supportive shoulder programming. Instead, Netflix joined every other major media company in passing on a behind-the-scenes series. |
The not-so-secret element of Drive to Survive’s success was its application of
tried-and-true reality TV mechanics to the world of F1. The series’s presentation of the circuit’s various rivalries was immediately familiar to veteran viewers of Laguna Beach or Vanderpump Rules. That novelty probably wore off by the third or fourth time around, however, and proved less effective with less-compelling sports.
Authenticity matters more than ever, too, and the storytelling yardstick for documentaries is beginning to look more like that for feature films.
Media executives say they’re looking to tell rich stories with inherent tension, like Netflix’s popular Hulk Hogan: Real American doc, co-produced by Words + Pictures in partnership with WWE. One of the problems with the Ovechkin documentary idea, I’m told, is that producers were asking media companies to commit to a story before they knew the ending. “The ones that work have a lot of nostalgia,” one executive said. “There needs to be a beginning, middle, and end to a story. Where
everyone got trapped in the past few years is in being asked to follow a season where you don’t know if the ending is going to be exciting or dull.”
That’s not to say the bottom has dropped out for everyone. The top production companies still have a robust slate of sports docs, but they have to find inventive ways to replace enough of their lost revenue so they can keep making them. Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions has a strong slate of annual documentary
projects, like Quarterback and WWE Unreal, both of which are on Netflix, plus Eli Manning’s The Undercovers on Amazon. But to supplement that slate, Omaha has also branched into branded and live content. It produced a morning show hosted by SNL’s Colin Jost around last fall’s Ryder Cup, pitching it first to the PGA of America, who’d been looking for younger content; the PGA of America then found one of
its sponsors, T-Mobile, to fund the whole thing. In fact, Omaha has produced commercials and branded work for more than 40 brands, including a Pat Summitt documentary funded by Eli Lilly.
Production companies are also filling up their slates by producing live events. Take Ian Orefice’s EverWonder Studio, which, alongside Meadowlark Media, produced the Evert–Navratilova doc. It launched three years ago as a pure
documentary play, but today, it brings in more revenue from live events like the Players Era college basketball tournament, the Eternal City Tip-Off in November, and the Golf Channel games. Live events offer a more structured and profitable business than documentaries can—especially when they occur annually and the companies control the I.P.
Projects like Drive to Survive and The Last Dance were luxury products in their way—expensive, splashy plays built to woo sign-ups.
But the current phase of the streaming wars has been largely about cost control, and Netflix, while still trying to deliver to the sports-obsessed viewer, is figuring out that it’s a lot cheaper to have Bill Simmons or Ryen Russillo live podcast from their home studios. And, of course, much of those cost controls are in the interest of streamers allocating capital for the ultimate prize: actual live sports, themselves. |
On the NBA Draft: “The second round of this draft is a joke. Last night, 29 of the 30
teams traded their picks. It’s impossible to follow, and it makes for an unbearable telecast. ESPN should stop televising this thing in protest.” —A marketing executive
On NBC’s U.S. Open coverage: “I was taken aback by your positive review of [NBC’s] U.S. Open broadcast. They are absolutely dreadful. Production is scattered and behind the times. They have way too many voices and the entire thing is a haphazard mess.” —A golf media member |
Have a great weekend. See you Monday.
John |
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Puck fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you deep behind the scenes of this
multitrillion-dollar biz, from creative director switcheroos to M&A drama, D.T.C. downfalls, and magazine mishaps. Fashion People is an extension of Line Sheet, Lauren’s private email for Puck, where she tracks what’s happening beyond the press releases in fashion, beauty, and media. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Friday. |
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Ace media reporter Dylan Byers brings readers into the C-suite as he chronicles the biggest stories in the industry: the future
of cable news in the streaming era, the transformation of legacy publishers, the tech giants remaking the market, and all the egos involved. Also featuring a weekly dispatch from Puck’s crack streaming/media analyst, Julia Alexander. |
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