Dec 8, 2025

Welcome back to The Varsity. I’m John Ourand in Washington, D.C., still trying to figure out the fallout from Notre Dame getting snubbed by the College Football Playoff. And there will be blood. During an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show, Fighting Irish A.D. Pete Bevacqua put the A.C.C. on blast for attacking Notre Dame while supporting Miami, which narrowly beat the Irish at the start of the season. Of course, the Irish are a partial member of the A.C.C.—maybe not for long! “They have certainly done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame,” Bevacqua said. “It raised a lot of eyebrows here that the conference was taking shots at us.” More to come on this beat, that’s for sure.

Pod alert: Puck’s Super Friends return on Wednesday for another Year in Review show. This time Julia Alexander, Dylan Byers, Eriq Gardner, and I debate who should be considered the executive of the year in the sports business space. Also, I’ve received a ton of good feedback about yesterday’s pod with MLS commissioner Don Garber. Click here to listen.

Mentioned in this issue: Jake Paul, Brian Fuhrer, Major League Soccer, Trey Gowdy, TNT Sports, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, Paramount, Tim Leiweke, the Village People, Trinity Rodman, the Big Ten, David Beckham, Don Garber, Alyssa Thompson, and many more…

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Let’s get started…

The Starting Five

Trump pardons Leiweke: As the Village People’s “YMCA” echoed through the Kennedy Center at the end of the FIFA World Cup draw on Friday afternoon, news trickled out that Donald Trump had issued a pardon to Tim Leiweke, who was about to stand trial over alleged bid-rigging at a University of Texas arena. The soccer crowd, which views Leiweke as one of their own, was notably interested in the news and murmured approval. As the former C.E.O. of AEG, which owns the Galaxy, Leiweke had helped convince David Beckham to join the club some two decades ago.

How did the pardon come about? WSJ’s Dave Michaels and Katherine Sayre reported that former Rep. Trey Gowdy, who happened to be Leiweke’s lawyer, lobbied Trump during a November 16 round of golf at Mar-a-Lago. Gowdy “brought up his client’s case, first asking for help getting a meeting with one of the federal prosecutors handling it,” according to the WSJ. “Over the next few weeks, Gowdy advocated for Leiweke to be granted his own nonprosecution deal. Trump instead issued a pardon.” Hey David Ellison, you gotta hire this guy!
Media rights whispers: A few weeks ago, I was surprised by reports suggesting that Netflix had expressed interest in picking up the Premier League’s U.S. media rights after the league’s deal with NBC ends in 2028. The EPL offers a ton of volume but doesn’t fit with Netflix’s eventized strategy, whereby the streamer focuses on one-off and highly differentiated events, like Christmas NFL games and Jake Paul boxing matches. So I made some calls and discovered that Netflix executives have not engaged anyone on the EPL rights. Sure, a lot can happen between now and 2028, but it doesn’t appear as if Netflix will be an interested bidder.

Meanwhile, with Indiana’s win over Ohio State now in the rearview, NBC’s plan to sell Amazon the rights to next year’s Big Ten Championship game is slowly advancing. Apparently, the conference has not put the kibosh on NBC theoretically subletting its rights to a streamer. But the deal would still need approval from Fox—a majority owner of the Big Ten Network—which isn’t crazy about the idea of helping a deep-pocketed streaming competitor. More to come on this one. But NBC surely wants to sell in the afterglow of Saturday’s nailbiter.
U.S. soccer’s $21B valuation: Last week, MLS commissioner Don Garber dropped by The Varsity for a live taping at the University of Maryland’s Povich Symposium and waxed expansive on what’s next for the league. Of course, we talked about MLS’s newly revised partnership with Apple (which I chronicled in Thursday’s private email), but what really stood out was Garber’s vision for what’s been dubbed “MLS 3.0”—the league’s next phase of growth that aspires to put American soccer on the global map. “Unlike almost all of [the other leagues], we’re competing in a global market, where the rest of the [soccer] world is very established,” Garber said. “We need to get closer to the international standard.”

He continued: “We have three new stadiums coming on in Chicago, Miami, and New York City—right next to Citi Field, a $1 billion project that’ll be our 29th stadium. All of these things will position us post-World Cup to ride that momentum and get a little rocket fuel to hopefully build MLS. The tailwinds of that will affect college soccer and hopefully lift up the women’s game even more. If you believe in globalization and where demographics are shifting in our country, regardless of politics, soccer is moving in the right direction, and that’s why our teams are valued at over $21 billion collectively.”
About those 57 million viewers…: Last week, my partner Matt Belloni hosted Nielsen Global Media executive Brian Fuhrer on The Town, his inimitable podcast, for a lively discussion about the NFL’s record-breaking ratings, evolving sports viewership metrics, and the leagues that are truly gaining steam. When CBS announced that this year’s Thanksgiving Cowboys-Chiefs game drew a staggering 57 million viewers, some skepticism followed. Fuhrer acknowledged that the measurement landscape has shifted—out-of-home ratings are now measured over the entire U.S., up from about two-thirds last year—but said the underlying data remains surprisingly steady. “When you look at the contribution that that’s giving, it’s not as stunning as you might imagine,” Fuhrer said. “Out-of-home is giving an advantage, I will admit that. But when you look at the whole environment of Thanksgiving and people viewing in communal environments and getting together and watching in that way, it probably contributes even more.”

He continued: “A key point we need to make sure we emphasize here is it was lightning in a bottle because all the games were close on Thanksgiving, so the audiences continued to build. I think that is what really drove the result more than any kind of methodological changes we can throw out there.”

Matt asked Fuhrer which sport he sees expanding fastest. “I think the whole MMA area is the area that’s growing very quickly,” he said. When pressed about whether the Ellisons were smart to shell out $7.7 billion to bring UFC to CBS and Paramount+, Fuhrer kept it coy: “Can’t comment on that one.”
People moves: Congrats to former ESPN executive Nate Ravitz, who will head up Penn Entertainment’s theScore media app, reporting to his former Bristol colleague Aaron LaBerge, now Penn’s chief technology officer and head of interactive. Ravitz will oversee content and ad sales for Penn Interactive’s media business. During his 17-year ESPN career, Ravitz rose to become senior vice president of digital content and audience expansion.

And now for the main event…

TNT Sports’s No Man’s Land

No matter which company wins the battle for parentco WBD, TNT Sports could face an unappetizing future. The leagues may feel the pain, too.

John Ourand

When it’s all over, the battle for Warner Bros. Discovery, which redoubled on Monday via Paramount’s hostile takeover attempt, will have rewritten Hollywood’s future, determined the fate of one of the planet’s most well-regarded news brands, and potentially dealt a death blow to movie theaters. So the long-term prospects of TNT Sports—the WBD division whose live sports portfolio includes MLB playoffs, the Stanley Cup Final, NASCAR, the French Open, and March Madness, among other rights—hasn’t exactly been front of mind. But whether Netflix or Paramount prevails, Warner Bros. Discovery’s future could present a lose-lose scenario for both TNT Sports and its league partners, according to analysts I spoke with today.

To wit: If Paramount’s $108 billion hostile bid is successful, TNT and CBS Sports will likely become sister brands, and sports leagues and conferences will essentially lose one potential bidder for their rights. “Consolidation means a smaller number of buyers,” said Michael Morris, an analyst with Guggenheim Securities. “And fewer buyers means a less competitive bidding process, which arguably will put pressure on your future rights revenue potential.”

If the Netflix deal holds, however, TNT Sports will be orphaned alongside WBD’s other legacy cable holdovers in the remainco, Discovery Global. Today, David Ellison argued that WBD’s cable networks business should be valued at around $1 per share, which is a far cry from the $5 price affixed by BofA Securities’ Jessica Reif Ehrlich. Either way, it’s an impecunious outcome that suggests more Savannah Bananas content might be in the cards. TNT Sports’s MLB and NHL deals both come up in 2028, so the uncertainty surrounding this deal will affect some of the country’s biggest leagues.

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For old sports media hands, this has truly been an underappreciated inflection point. TNT Sports has been a big player in sports media for decades, using the growth of cable to quietly amass a significant rights portfolio. But the cord-cutting trend has taken a big bite out of TBS, TNT, and TruTV. “The amount of money that can make its way to the rights-holder is always going to be ultimately limited by the amount of money coming in at the top of the funnel, which for the most part is subscription fees and advertising,” Morris said. “Whether you merge Paramount and WBD or not, given the rate of cord-cutting, there is going to be pressure on the top line of those businesses. Just look at the financials and you can see the trend. Eventually, it is likely that they will not be able to bid up for sports rates on their linear channel revenue alone, regardless of whether they merge or not. In fact, maybe merging gives them a better chance of being able to bid in the future.”

I also chatted this afternoon with MoffettNathanson’s Michael Nathanson, who pointed out a silver lining in all this. “It’s hard to say that losing a bidder is a good outcome,” he said, hypothesizing about a Paramount-WBD lockup. But he also imagined the appeal of a synergized TNT-CBS. “If I were MLB or the NHL, and I had the opportunity to get my games on the CBS broadcast network, that seems like a good outcome to me.” Indeed, Paramount Skydance won the exclusive rights to UFC partly by leveraging CBS’s scale.

Ultimately, though, Nathanson doesn’t feel like these deals will have a significant impact on the sports rights business, which has remained frothy, most recently evinced by Paramount’s seven-year, $7.7 billion UFC deal and the NBA’s 11-year, $76 billion deals across Amazon, ESPN, and NBC. “I’ve been surprised, given the state of the linear business, that the price of sports keeps going up,” Nathanson said, “I’m not sure if it’s going to cool anytime soon, even without TNT Sports in the middle of it.”

Given the increased attention streamers like YouTube, Netflix, and Apple are giving to sports, any prediction that the sports rights marketplace will stay bullish seems like a safe bet. Whether TNT Sports will help drive the business—as it has for the past 30 years—will be one of the key points to watch in the sale process.

From the Cheap Seats

On Trinity Rodman: “The NWSL example is part of a bigger problem for American soccer leagues. The salary-capped business model is great for owners, leading to valuations well above their European counterparts. But European leagues without salary caps are far more competitive for players, paying higher transfer fees and salaries on both the men’s and women’s sides. That makes those leagues better and helps to draw better media deals. Until American soccer leagues realize that the NBA/NFL/MLB don’t have global competition so their salary cap rules work fine, it’ll be hard to maintain a ‘best league in the world’ in the U.S.” —A sports executive

On NWSL problems with keeping star players: “Don’t forget Chelsea’s Alyssa Thompson. That was a major exodus this season. Twenty-one-year-old national team member. First overall pick, and first-ever pick of her hometown Angel City FC. Even her sister being a teammate was not enough to keep her in Los Angeles.” —A broadcast executive

On NBA ratings: “Why is no one discussing the NBA’s huge year-over-year ratings increase so far this season? I know Nielsen changed their formula and much more is available on broadcast, but this same time last year everyone was lampooning the NBA’s temporary ratings dip. Is it just that negative stories fly farther than positive stories?” —A Varsity subscriber

On NFL ratings: “Comparing ESPN’s Monday Night Football to Amazon’s Thursday Night Football is apples to oranges. It’s a Nielsen number, but the methodology they use to come up with it is different.” —A sports business executive

On the NFL’s flex scheduling: “Is NBC really going to have two teams that won’t make the playoffs on Sunday night (Minnesota vs. Dallas) instead of Stafford vs. Goff or Bills vs. Patriots?” —A Puck partner

Have a great evening. See you tomorrow,
John

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.

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