Y! Sports Biz: Stakes in the game

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Y! Sports Biz: Stakes in the game

Fri, Oct 9, 2026 ·

10 min read

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👋 Happy Friday! Programming note: We'll be off Monday for the holiday. See you back here on Wednesday.

In this edition:The overwhelming stakes in the game, the NFL wants prediction markets clarity, collectors gas up Shaq Diesel, the biggest TV draws in CFB, a concession crisis in America's pastime, and more.

Time to show you the money...

💸Stake in the game, from bets to investments

Commiserating fans used to joke about wanting to short their teams' performance, profiting financially from their on-field struggles. Now, that banter is a reality that takes countless forms.

Full toolbox:If a fan has a view on their team's performance, short- or long-term, pessimistic or optimistic, there have never been more ways to express it financially. The spectrum ranges from outright bet to investment.

Bet for or against a team in an individual game, place a futures bet on it, or wager on its win total.
Trade a prediction market contract on the outcome of a team's game or season.
Buy or sell a futures contract based on an index that tracks the team's season-long performance.
Buy or sell an ETF that seeks to provide performance corresponding to the results of the futures contracts in No. 3.
Buy or sell shares of the team as a business (if publicly traded, as with the Braves, Knicks, and Rangers).

Wait, ETFs?This summer, we wrote about how FutureSports uses league statistics to create indices that track NHL teams' on-ice performance, something they've also done with MLB teams. And what often follows indices? ETFs.

Multiple ETF providers have filed to create ETFs based on the futures contracts linked to those FutureSports indices.
An ETF is a familiar vehicle for investors, reducing the barriers to investing in, say, a Red Wings or Bruins index. In true 2026 fashion, ETF providers have also filed to create leveraged ETF products, seeking to produce 2X the index's return on a given day.

Blurred lines:The lines between betting and investing are getting fuzzy. Prediction markets brought sports contracts onto brokerage platforms. Now, ETFs tracking team performance will sit in brokerage accounts looking much like your S&P 500 index fund of choice. Those blurred lines could be problematic, particularly for younger investors.

According to Betterment , 26% of Gen-Z retail investors treat sports betting as a deliberate part of their long-term financial strategy.
In the last year, 52% of Gen-Z investors have redirected money intended for investing toward sports betting.

Know the difference:Speculation has become entertainment sometimes confused with investment. The risk profiles of speculative instruments vary, though, from a binary outcome on one game to less-binary movements in index value. But whether bets or ETFs, financial allocations to vehicles that reflect on-field performance don't participate in economic growth as an investment in a team (as a business) might.

Don't bet the house:Options to financially express a thesis on a team's performance are rapidly proliferating, and many increasingly resemble traditional investment products. Fans and investors should recognize the differences and allocate accordingly.

⚡Lightning Round

🏈 NFL nudges Supreme Court on prediction markets:The NFL filed an amicus brief on Thursday urging the Supreme Court to review whether prediction markets should be regulated at the state or federal level. The league believes recent rulings subjecting prediction markets to state regulation " got it right. "

⚾️ MLB proposes cutting season length:MLB has proposed returning to a 154-game regular season beginning in 2029, while also making the Division Series best-of-seven. Under the proposal, beginning in 2027, higher seeds in the Wild Card and Division Series would pick their opponents. However, the changes are unlikely without the introduction of a salary cap.

🎓 Adidas poaches Ole Miss:Just weeks after Nike signed Miami away from Adidas, Adidas struck back, inking Ole Miss to a seven-year agreement beginning in 2027. As with Miami, the deal is reportedly worth more than $20 million per year.

⚽️ Friedkin puts Everton up for sale:The Friedkin Group is exploring a sale of its controlling interest in Everton just two years after buying the club. The group also owns AS Roma, and the Friedkin family is currently working with the NHL toward a Texas-based expansion franchise.

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

📍 Expansion is expanding, for better or worse

Expansion is rampant across American sports leagues. The NBA is running processes for Las Vegas and Seattle, MLB is reportedly eyeing two additions once labor dust settles, the NHL appears Texas-bound, the WNBA has three teams on the way, and commissioner Jessica Berman said Thursday that the NWSL is targeting expansion to at least 20.

Worth the squeeze?The pros and cons of expansion vary based on a league's maturity, geographic footprint, and economics. Is a new market and a handsome expansion fee worth cutting an additional piece of the revenue pie and diluting the scarcity of a league's existing teams?

Shlomo Sprung, Yahoo Sports:

More likely than not, we're going to see nearly a dozen new franchises across the NBA, NHL, MLB, WNBA and NWSL because leagues and their owners believe the pros outweigh the cons.

"Leagues aren't just selling franchises," Jon Schwartz, a former NFL, Big Ten and NASCAR executive who's now partner and head of sports at Prosek Partners, told Yahoo Sports, "they're planting flags in new markets, creating year-round content and unlocking new fans, sponsors and capital allocators. At a time when major sports franchises remain scarce and demand for these assets continues to grow, expansion can create significant new value."

The money is enormous. The appetite is enormous. And for owners, the logic is increasingly difficult to resist. But every new franchise also makes the existing ones a little less scarce — and in professional sports, scarcity may be the most valuable asset of all.

Keep reading: Expansion is the rage in pro sports. But is bigger really better?

📈 Collectors gas up Shaq Diesel

Bounties and patch cards dominated the collecting discourse over the summer, but one retired star's cards rose more sharply than the rest during the third quarter.

Shaq Diesel:An index of Shaquille O'Neal cards tracked by card pricing tool CardLadder rose 132% in Q3, outperforming the broader market and every recognizable superstar you can think of.

Over the same period, CardLadder's Basketball index gained 33%, while its Modern card index, which tracks O'Neal's contemporaries across sports, gained 52%.
Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have enjoyed more collecting limelight through the card market's booms. However, even they failed to tower over the Big Aristotle in Q3, with their indices gaining 35% and 63%, respectively.

Overdue recognition:Shaq is among the most recognizable athletes on Earth. Beyond his on-court dominance, his presence across pop culture was and remains pervasive. However, the Hobby has historically had an anti-big-man bias, and O'Neal rose to prominence in the Junk Wax Era of overproduction. It appears, though, that Gen-X and Millennial collectors have sidelined those concerns.

Trickle down:The Q3 surge follows four of the highest-priced Shaq card sales in history in the spring and early summer. Entering this year, an O'Neal card had never sold for more than $200,000.

An April private sale of his 1997-98 Essentials Credentials Now card bypassed the $200k, $300k, and $400k barriers altogether, reaching $550,000. Two months later, his Green Precious Metal Gems card, from a coveted 90s set, sold at auction for $378,200.
These high-priced sales can drive momentum at the lower levels of the market. For instance, his PSA 10 1992 Topps rookie card entered the quarter just above $200 and exited it at approximately $340, with much of August spent around $400.

Bottom line:Collectible prices often reflect cultural relevance as much as athletic achievement. Few have married the two quite like Shaq, and collectors have woken up to ride Superman's cape-tails.

📺 CFB's biggest TV draws

After five weeks of college football, the No. 1 Texas Longhorns are also the country's most-watched team, according to Nielsen.

SEC rules:Seven of the top 10 are SEC schools, as the conference continues to win the ratings battle against the top-heavy Big 10, which is represented by the remaining three slots.

Who, us?!Even the biggest Badger fans must be bemused by Wisconsin's appearance at No. 3. The Badgers haven't appeared on the networks included in the analysis since Week 1 against Notre Dame. They're probably not long for the list, meaning it could get worse for the Big 10.

Shake-ups incoming:A high AP or Coaches Poll ranking doesn't guarantee watchability in the season's early stages.

Top-five teams Georgia, Notre Dame, and Miami are on the outside looking in for now, but the schedule will intensify in the coming weeks. The Bulldogs head to Tuscaloosa to face the Tide on Saturday night on ABC, while Notre Dame has the same slot next weekend against No. 8 BYU.

Moving target:Each week's rankings are a mere snapshot in time, not necessarily reflecting long-term fan behaviors. Some trends, though, are real, like interest in Arch and the Longhorns, Lane Kiffin's Tigers, and the Buckeyes.

🌲 Guess the logo

Question:Can you guess which player this newly revealed signature logo belongs to? We've included only a portion of the logo here to avoid giving it away!

Hint:NBA

Answer at the bottom.

🥜 The peanut gallery goes hungry

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don't care if I ev—wait, they don't have peanuts?!

An American tragedy:Peanuts were unavailable at Yankee Stadium in the final weeks of the regular season and at the beginning of the postseason.

Food and hospitality company Legends Global told Front Office Sports that the ballpark icon's disappearance resulted from a temporary disruption at nut conglomerate Bazzini.
Bazzini has provided peanuts to Yankee Stadium since 1923 , meaning Bronx Bombers fans have been littering the ground with Bazzini peanut shells since Babe Ruth was littering the bleachers with dingers.

Is nothing sacred?The scary part of the late-summer disruption is perhaps that so few noticed they were gone. What next? Are we going to stop root-root-rooting for the home team, too? Start caring if we ever get back?

National nightmare ends:Peanuts returned to Yankee Stadium for the remainder of the postseason, which turned out to be one game. Hope you grabbed a bag and let the world know that baseball tradition lives on.

Epilogue: Yankee Stadium apparently ran out of hot dog buns on Wednesday night. First they came for the peanuts…

Guess the Logo answer:Cooper Flagg. The tree motif represents Maine, Flagg's home state. What do we think: thumbs up or thumbs down?

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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