Issue 1

Opening Take

While most of the industry is racing to bolt AI onto every fan touchpoint, TKO's Mark Shapiro just made the opposite bet. On this week's earnings call, he framed the company's life event holdings - WWE's SummerSlam among them - as a hedge against AI, not a use case for it.
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I don't think that's a rejection of AI infrastructure. I think it's a bet on scarcity. If AI makes synthetic and on-demand content infinitely available, the thing it can't replicate is being in the building when something actually happens live. That might be the more durable moat than the AI stack itself.
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Worth watching whether other operators start talking about live experiences the same way - not as a nostalgia play, but as the actual differentiation strategy in an AI-saturated market.

What I'm Watching

• Larry Berg named MLS commissioner (formally introduced today, takes over Jan. 1) - a career private equity leader (30 years at Apollo, LAFC managing owner, stakes in AS Roma and Swansea City), not a league lifer. Worth watching whether MLS's next era gets built more like a portfolio than a front office.
• UFC 6 topped Junes best selling games list - first time the EA Sports title has ever led the monthly charts. This is a property that looked like a fringe, niche market not long ago. Now it's outselling other sports video games. Says something about how far "legitimacy" in sports has shifted, and how fast.
• Universities are leaving money on the table with collectables - a D1.ticker op-ed argues most schools don't have a deliberate strategy for memorabilia and collectables revenue. Feels like another piece of the college athletics pattern I keep seeing: the money is already there, it just hasn't been productized yet. Worth watching whether this becomes a real revenue line.

What I'm Hearing

Sat in on a Salesforce webinar recently with the San Francisco Giants a few weeks back that's stuck with me. Joe Shapiro walked through how the Giants built their first AI Agent - a scoreboard agent surfacing player stats at Oracle Park - from ideation to live deployment on opening night against the New York Yankees. Six weeks, start to finish. What stood out wasn't the tech, it was the build philosophy: scoped narrow on purpose (data pulled only from MLB.com, Baseball Reference and FanGraphs), rolled out internally first through the entertainment team's existing workflow, with change management built on understanding how the entertainment team already worked before introducing any prompting at all.

That's the part worth sitting with. Most of the AI-in-sports conversation right now is about scale - enterprise deployment, ROI measurement, McKinsey pegging $30-$50B in value up for grabs across the industry. The Giants' approach was the opposite: go narrow, go trusted, go fast, and let adoption pull the next agent into existence rather than pushing a roadmap onto a team that isn't ready. Feels like a pattern worth watching - the orgs that get AI adoption right may not be the ones with the biggest vision, but the ones who make the first deployment boring, scoped and trustworthy enough that the second one gets asked for instead of resisted.

Insight of The Week

McKinsey estimates $30-$50B in value is out there across sports organizations through AI-enabled workflows - with near-term targets landing around 3%-8% revenue improvement and 8%-12% operational efficiency gains.

Numbers like that get thrown around a lot, so here's one worth carrying with you: that value isn't sitting in some future AI breakthrough. It's sitting in workflows that already exist - ticketing, CRM, customer service, venue ops 0 just not yet touched by it. The gap between where sports orgs are and where that value sits isn't a technology gap. It's an execution gap.

Looking Ahead

• ​SBJ Live Session: "Beyond Game Day: How Agentic AI Turns Fan Data Into Year-Round Revenue" (Aug 12) - same territory as the San Francisco Giants AI conversation above, from a different angle. Worth watching if agentic AI in fan engagement is on your watch list too.
• ​Salesforce Dreamforce 2026, San Francisco (Sep 15-17) - Sports Leadership Forum and Sports Roundtable on the agenda.
• ​SBJ Drive Conference, Indianapolis (Sep 22-24)
• ​Leaders Week London 2026 (Oct 7-8)

If you're attending any of these, reply and let me know. I'd love to connect.

Before you go...

Season 2 of the Beyond The Whistle podcast drops soon. If there's a topic from this newsletter issue you want me to dig into on an episode, hit reply and tell me - I read every one.

And if you haven't yet, follow the podcast now so Season 2 lands in your feed the moment it's live: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube​

Odell