Y! Sports Biz: Losing Local Flavor?

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Y! Sports Biz: Losing Local Flavor?

Mon, Jul 6, 2026 ·

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👋 Welcome back!Before the USMNT gets down to business against Belgium tonight, let's get down to Sports Biz. Tell your friends and colleagues to subscribe !

In today's edition:Dents in the NBA's financial armor, Joey Jaws' dollars per dog, the business of the Tour de France, Kroenke's empire origins, sports stock winners and losers, and more.

Time to show you the money...

🏀 Think globally, act locally

The NBA just completed the first season of a national media rights deal that pays an average of $6.9 billion annually, drawing the envy of even the NFL . Why, then, is the salary cap for next season, a derivative of basketball-related income, up only 6.7%, well below the 10% cap allowed under the CBA?

What happened?The NBA confirmed the final salary cap for the 2026-27 season last week. At $164.961 million, it comes in just below the eyebrow-raising spring projection of $165 million, which represents only 6.7% growth on the prior year. Under the CBA, annual increases of up to 10% are permitted, and after the initiation of the new media rights deal, many expected that limit to be tested repeatedly. But the 10% increase was a one-and-done phenomenon in 2025-26.

Why does it matter?Under the CBA, players receive 51% of basketball-related income (BRI), informing the setting of the salary cap. The lower-than-expected cap reflects an overall business that is not flourishing to the degree that the massive uplift in national media money might suggest. For reference, the cap increased 34.5% when the prior media deal took effect in 2016-17, before the 10% smoothing mechanism was instituted.

The culprit.While the NBA's national media standing is secure for a decade to come, the tamer cap increase reflects the tumultuous local media landscape.

The general decline of the cable bundle is a structural headwind that has weighed on regional sports networks — and thus local media rights — throughout sports.
This year's collapse of Main Street Sports Group impacted 13 NBA franchises, leaving them without a local broadcast partner for the season ahead.
While many of the impacted franchises are still solidifying solutions, the impact on other sports has been significant. For instance, the St. Louis Cardinals reportedly expected a two-thirds reduction in local media revenue in the switch from Main Street to the league's media arm.

Restructure and reinforce.The concern is apparent in the NBA's personnel decisions. Last week, Sports Business Journal reported that the NBA was eliminating dozens of jobs and restructuring to focus on growth opportunities, including local media. It's expected that the league will pursue local rights centralization to fortify their financial standing.

Looking ahead:The 2027-28 salary cap is projected to rise by only 5.5%, indicating that the league's growth outlook remains cautious. That level of growth is no small feat for an 80-year-old business, but for all the well-deserved celebration of a landmark national media deal, the league can't operate at full strength without viable solutions for its rabid local fans.

Don't be deflated:Though the cap is growing slower than expected, the players should be okay. From 2000 through 2024, the minimum salary for an NBA rookie grew 265%, dramatically outpacing the 110% growth in median personal income in the U.S.

📸Money on the Field

Coney Island, New York —Joey Chestnut won his 18th Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, consuming 66 dogs to retain the Mustard Belt by a healthy margin (perhaps the only healthy thing about the event).

Dog eat dog: For his triumph, Chestnut pockets $10,000 in prize money , or $151 per dog. The prize money was instituted in 2007, the first year Chestnut won the competition. In his 18 victories , he has consumed 1,206.5 hot dogs, amassing $180,000 in winnings. His result this year narrowly outperformed his career DPD (dollars per dog) of $149.

Eugene, Oregon —Cameron Myers broke the tape in the Bowerman Mile at the Prefontaine Classic, setting an Australian record in 3:46.07.

Diamond hands: The Prefontaine Classic is part of the Wanda Diamond League, and the Bowerman Mile is a Diamond+ discipline, meaning that Myers earns $20,000 for the win (double the standard prize for a non-Diamond+ event). Which is the more painful way to earn five figures: running a 3:46 mile or eating 66 hot dogs in ten minutes?

Munich, Germany —YouTube golf star Brad Dalke, playing on a sponsor's exemption, finished tied for 30th at the DP World Tour's BMW International Open. Dalke was two shots off the lead on Friday before fading over the weekend.

No competition: Dalke takes home €20,963.23 (approximately $23,950) for his efforts, a far cry from the $1 million he split with two teammates for winning last year's Internet Invitational, a competition featuring YouTube golfers and other internet personalities. There's more than one way to earn a living playing golf in 2026.

🚴‍♂️ Biz Breakdown: Tour de France

The 113th edition of the Tour de France began on July 4, and while the public focus is on Tadej Pogačar's pursuit of a record-tying fifth title , our curiosity centers on the business of this historic and globally popular event, which is a true commercial oddity in the modern sporting world.

The ownership structure:The Tour is owned by the Amaury family, a French dynasty of sorts, via the Amaury Sports Organization. Unlike F1, for example, where the commercial rights of the circuit and underlying Grands Prix are owned by Liberty Media, cycling's three "Grand Tours" are split in ownership: ASO owns the Tour de France and Vuelta de España, while the Giro d'Italia is owned by RCS Sport.

The revenue drivers:Because of the unique nature of a competition that spans an entire country, the revenue composition of Grand Tour cycling differs from other popular sports.

Aside from limited hospitality, ticketing in cycling is essentially a non-factor, as crowds take to the local roads on a course extending over 2,000 miles. Since the peloton whizzes past in an instant, it's hard to capture value from a roadside audience.
Media rights are a critical component of Tour revenue, with the event broadcast in over 190 countries , and European markets are of greatest importance.
Sponsorships are even more crucial than in other sports, with partners frequently and prominently visible throughout the Tour. For instance, LCL, a French retail bank, sponsors the famous yellow jersey, with separate sponsors for green, white, and polka-dot jerseys.

Away game:The NFL isn't the only competition exporting games across the globe, though it is a bit odd that the Tour de France has so frequently left the nation's borders for the Grand Départ (opening stage) in recent years. This year's Tour began in Barcelona, which reportedly paid ASO $8-9 million for the honor.

Paltry prize:The Tour's winning team will pocket only €50,000 (approximately $57,000), though the prizes due to riders are more lucrative. The winner of the yellow jersey wins €500,000, and stage winners take home €11,000.

Broken spokes:Those prizes are the result of a system in which ASO has all the leverage. The Tour offers cycling's best exposure (representing 80% of a team's television exposure and sponsor visibility), and the sport's teams rely heavily on sponsorship revenue. Despite its global popularity, the sport of cycling exists in a perpetual state of financial peril, where teams accept nonexistent financial upside and chase glory at insurmountable cost.

Tune-up needed:There have been various attempts at economic reform in recent years.

Saudi-backed OneCycling, which was blocked by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), proposed bundling commercial and media rights of the big races, streamlining the calendar, and introducing revenue sharing.
A collection of team owners has explored and proposed a team-owned franchise structure, pursuing a similar bundling strategy.
The UCI itself has acknowledged the need for change, beginning a consultation focusing on improved revenue generation and greater sustainability for team outfits. The challenge for any of these efforts, though, is delivering a solution palatable to the Grand Tours.

Haves and have-nots:The need for economic reform comes amid an arms race, where well-heeled superteams have an immense financial advantage — and thus an immense sporting advantage — over those with shallower pockets. The support of a large title sponsor can be the difference between glory and insolvency. For instance, estimates peg UAE Emirates' budget at over $60 million annually, while the average team budget is under $40 million.

Final climb:Behind the images of the world's most elite aerobic specimens, their state-of-the-art bicycles, and world-class support staff is a sport reliant on generous ownership and willing sponsorship to make ends meet. Those teams, so expensive to operate, are worth almost nothing, particularly relative to the sums freely paid in other sports.

⚡Lightning Round

⛳ Versant buys Full Swing:As it continues to pursue diversification beyond the cable business, Golf Channel-parent Versant is acquiring golf simulator company Full Swing from Bruin Capital for $530 million. Bruin acquired the company in 2021 for a reported sum of $160 million. Full Swing's simulator technology powers indoor golf league TGL, whose media rights agreement with ESPN recently expired.

🇨🇦 Rogers completes MLSE acquisition:Rogers Communications has reached a $3.06 billion agreement to acquire the remaining 25% stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, owner of the Maple Leafs, Raptors, and Toronto FC. Rogers had previously bought 37.5% in July 2025 and now owns 100% of the organization, in addition to its ownership of the Toronto Blue Jays and the Rogers Centre.

🏀 Gasol invests in women's soccer:Pau Gasol, via Gasol16 Ventures, completed a €55 million investment in Liga F, the top women's soccer league in Spain. Through the investment, the fund acquires 35-49% of the league's commercial rights for 25 years. Four clubs have opted out of the investment, including Real Madrid .

🏨 No World Cup boom for leisure & hospitality:Last week's underwhelming jobs report painted a bleak picture for the World Cup's economic impact. Leisure and hospitality jobs, those most likely to benefit from tourism, fell by 61,000 in June. Who served the Tartan Army all those pints?

📺 Nielsen numbers on the move again:Just as the media industry wraps its arms around Nielsen's Big Data methodology, the company is preparing to roll out a new co-viewing measurement as soon as September, reports Eric Fisher of Front Office Sports. The change will increase the difficulty of making apples-to-apples comparisons in understanding sports viewership, which drives media-rights-buying and advertising decisions.

See what else is trending on the Yahoo Sports Business Hub .

📈 Winners & Losers at Halfway

The sports and sports-adjacent universe of publicly traded equities is a diverse set of businesses experiencing the present economic moment in very different ways. In this edition of Jock Stocks, we unpack the performance from the first half of 2026, revealing the year's winners and losers at the midway point.

🏟️ Winner: Sports Franchises

The institutional interest in sports team ownership has extended into the equity market, as three of the premier publicly traded teams are off to red-hot starts: Madison Square Garden Sports ( MSGS : +55.4%), Manchester United ( MANU : +44.0%), and the Atlanta Braves ( BATRA : +32.5%) have all substantially outperformed the broader market. The Knicks and United both enjoyed successful and commercially lucrative seasons, further bolstering their equity performance.

⛳ Winner: Golf

Two of the first half's biggest gainers were Callaway Golf ( CALY : +61.0%) and Acushnet Holdings ( GOLF : +48.5%). Callaway has solidified its balance sheet and pure-play business following the TopGolf sale, while Titleist has launched successful new products and capably defended and reinforced its premium brand status. On a macro level, rounds played in the U.S. were up over 5% in Q1, and golf remains well suited to a K-shaped economy, in which affluent consumers continue to spend.

🎰 Loser: Sports Gambling

From sportsbooks like DraftKings ( DKNG : -26.7%) and Flutter ( FLUT : -52.5%) to data companies like Genius ( GENI : -45.0%) and Sportradar ( SRAD : -37.0%), 2026 has been unkind to stocks with sports gambling exposure. The emergence and growth of the prediction markets industry, anchored by Kalshi and Polymarket, have weighed on shares, as have unfavorable outcomes and concerns about plateauing domestic growth.

📺 Loser: Media

Many sports-involved media companies have endured a turbulent start to 2026, though their increasingly expensive sports-rights portfolios are not principally to blame. Some of the negative price action is event-driven, as in the case of Paramount Skydance ( PSKY : -26.4%) and Fox ( FOX : -27.9%), while persistent structural headwinds, cord-cutting and streaming profitability among them, have weighed on the category broadly. Disney ( DIS : -15.4%) and Comcast ( CMCSA : -12.3%) have also fared poorly, as has the recently spun-off Versant ( VSNT : -20.0%).

📆 This Day in History: Kroenke's Colorado Conquest

Today, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment is the largest empire in sports, with premier sports properties valued at over $20 billion spanning the globe. But that empire grew from more modest beginnings.

On this day in 2000:Stan Kroenke completed the acquisition of the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and the Pepsi Center, buying a 93.5% stake in the assets at a combined valuation of $485 million.

Fast forward:The Avalanche ($1.8B) and Nuggets ($4.8B) are now worth a combined $6.6B, per the latest valuations from Sportico, having appreciated at an annual rate of over 10% for the last 26 years. That appreciation was achieved right in Denver; Kroenke promised to keep the teams there for 25 years after the acquisition (promise kept), and they'll stay there for another 25 years yet.

Just the start:While this wasn't Kroenke's first foray into sports ownership — he was a minority owner of the St. Louis Rams at the time — it was his first control acquisition in the space. From that foundation grew one of the most formidable portfolios in sports, one that has recently enjoyed tremendous on-field success after requiring patience from local fans.

Arsenal FC:2026 Premier League Champions, 2025 Women's Champions League Champions
Colorado Avalanche:2000, 2022 Stanley Cup Champions
Colorado Rapids:2010 MLS Cup Champions
Denver Nuggets:2023 NBA Champions
Los Angeles Rams:2021 Super Bowl Champions

Real estate tycoon:Real estate investment has become a critical component of financially successful sports ownership. But many organizations are only now figuring out what Kroenke, whose real estate expertise preceded his sporting success, has known for much longer.

Owning the land around an arena and using the arena as an anchor tenant is a powerful engine for year-round revenue generation.
While others rely on subsidies and leases of municipally owned venues, Kroenke owns Ball (formerly Pepsi) Arena, SoFi Stadium, and the Emirates, capturing the complete financial upside from those and adjacent properties.

Wild stat:Kroenke is America's largest private landowner , with 2.7 million acres of ranch and agricultural land, confirming that his capacity for diversification extends beyond the world of sports.

🏆 Over/Under: Jaylen Brown's Pricey Payday

The Celtics' seismic trade of Jaylen Brown to the 76ers generated criticism, tinfoil-hatting, and some sensible financial discourse.

Question:Central to the trade was Brown's elevated cost, both now and, potentially, in the future. Did Brown's pay for the 2025-26 campaign rank over or under the 10th highest in the NBA?

Answer at the bottom…

🎙️ Notable Quotables: Bold Prediction

Kara Nortman, co-founder of women's sports venture capital firm Monarch Collective, joined Yahoo Finance's Brian Sozzi last week to discuss the category's robust growth prospects, offering unique insight (and a few bold predictions) on the trajectory of women's sports.

On the parallels between women's sports and tech:Nortman likens the moment in women's sports to the early days of tech, when it was considered a backwater industry but, with focus and discipline, growth was an inevitability. However, she warns that — like in tech — the largest and most powerful properties will ultimately drive market size.

"We're a $3 billion market today. It could be — we wouldn't put this in a slide deck — it could be $20, $30, $40, $50 billion. But it's going to disproportionately aggregate to the places where people want to show up, put butts in seats, do it repeatedly, watch it, and engage with the storytelling…A lot of the stuff on the margin will be fun but won't drive that market size."

On Monarch's investment approach:Given that sports is not a monolithic asset class, Nortman's approach at Monarch is fundamentals-driven, focusing on those areas of the market where growth will disproportionately aggregate. A defensible team-driven business creates a floor for the investment, while media rights growth can unlock substantial returns.

"Can you build a P&L to break even or better with the revenue streams you control at the team level? And then we've exclusively invested in places where media revenue is up and to the right, so there's this asymmetric risk profile in what we do where the downside is protected by franchise value and the upside should look like where the NBA and NFL have gone over the last 20 or 30 years."

On the possibility that women's sports could overtake men's sports:Nortman articulated the thesis for a world in which women's sports could surpass men's sports in size, referencing the unique proposition that women's sports offer to a wider breadth of brands and the disproportionate level of female-driven consumer spending.

"I think that women's sports will, in my lifetime, maybe be bigger than men's sports, because we drive 80% of consumer spend, and you're seeing completely new categories of sponsors coming in. That's my crazy, provocative comment. I might just have to live to be 200."

Trivia Answer:Under!

Brown took home $53.1 million last season, ranking him in a tie for 8th in the league in cash payment. His 2026-27 pay is set to increase to $57.1 million.

Thanks for reading! Wanna talk shop? Follow me on X and Linkedin , or drop me a line: dylan.dittrich@yahooinc.com .

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