Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet.
Name-dropped today: Azzi Fudd, Rory McIlroy, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Greg and Carrie Walton Penner, TPG, Dick Vitale, Candace Buckner, Toto Wolff and more. Let’s go:
Driving the Conversation
A watershed week for women’s sports
There are a couple of threads over just the past few days related to the economics of women’s sports. They demonstrate a half-decade of increasing attention and investment has yielded a dramatic tipping point:
👶 WNBA Draft rookie windfall. No. 1 pick Azzi Fudd will make $500K with the Dallas Wings next season, which is up *blinks* $432,000 over previous WNBA rookie deals for top picks. Last year, the first 12 picks combined to make over $907K; this year, the top two picks alone will combine to make more than that. The ninth pick this year will by herself make as much as the ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th picks last year combined. Long time coming.
(Coincidentally, if unsurprisingly, the Wings announced a huge sponsorship deal with Geico on Monday. If you watched either NCAA Tournament, you know Fudd has an endorsement deal with Geico and was the star of a Geico TV ad in heavy rotation. That is what you call a virtuous cycle.)
🌎 The WNBA formally approved three expansion franchises. Those are Cleveland (launching in 2028), Detroit (2029) and Philadelphia (2030). Each ownership group paid a $250 million expansion fee. For comparison, Portland paid an expansion fee of $125M two years ago, and the Golden State Valkyries ownership group paid $50M in 2023. By the way, Detroit’s valuation is already reported to be $325 million, based on additional investments into the team.
💸 Women’s sports revenue across the major global sports is projected to be $3.04 billion in 2026, per a new report from Deloitte. That’s a 340 percent increase since 2022. “Beyond traditional revenue streams,” the authors write, “there is an expansion of assets, including the launch of new leagues and competitions that are quickly generating significant income.”
🤝 Ally hits “50/50” goal a year early. Speaking of spending in women’s sports since earlier this decade, in 2021, the financial services company decided to go big into women’s sports — you have probably seen it in the form of branding across league and team sponsorships, on women’s sports broadcasts and at women’s sports off-field events. The company’s goal was to have 50 percent of its sports-marketing spend be related to women’s sports within five years; it hit the goal in four.
If you went back and asked even the most forward-looking observers in 2021 if they thought the WNBA’s No. 1 draft pick would be making $500K her rookie year or that women’s sports revenue would climb past $3 billion or WNBA franchises would be commanding $250 million expansion fees, they would probably say …
Well, yes. We tried to tell you.
Get Caught Up
Big talkers from the sports business industry:
Amazon’s ugly NBA TV glitch: If you were watching the thrilling ending to the Hornets-Heat Play-In game last night — Amazon Prime Video’s first NBA postseason broadcast — you saw the tense final minute of overtime interrupted by “Technical Difficulties,” an inauspicious situation.
Rory McIlroy wins the Masters: $4.5 million payout. Joins the short list of back-to-back champs. Had skipped tournaments to focus entirely on Augusta National. Got to enjoy it with his family. (Fascinating additional detail in Grab Bag below!)
Related: U.S. senator rolls out “For the Fans Act”: Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin has a two-part idea:
1) If your local team is playing a nationally televised game behind a streamer or cable paywall, you should get to watch for free. (The NFL does this with “Thursday Night Football,” but Baldwin wants to extend it to MLB, NBA, NHL, NWSL and WNBA.)
2) If you have a season-long out-of-market package like NBA League Pass or MLB.TV, and a game is cherry-picked to go from local broadcaster to exclusively on a streaming platform with additional costs, you should get that game for free.
It has about as much chance of becoming a law as other sports-related legislative ideas (slim to none), but it reflects a growing populist sentiment — and resentment, or at least frustration — around the costs and obstacles against watching your team on TV.
World Cup price-gouging, continued: Yeoman’s work from my colleague Adam Crafton on the ongoing ways various groups are trying to wring as much money from fans as possible. The latest: New Jersey’s transit system is planning to charge $100 for a round-trip ticket from NYC to games at MetLife Stadium. Tickets are normally $12.90.
Oh, and a similar effort continues in Boston, with the host committee launching a bus service that will cost $95 to take fans from Boston to Gillette Stadium.
Colorado Rockies get a new investor: Deep-pocketed ownership (and Penner Sports Group, which owns the Broncos, qualifies) should have Rockies fans excited that the wider team ownership consortium is going to be willing and able to spend on competitiveness. And with a 40 percent stake, Greg Penner and Carrie Walton Penner have a vested interest in making the Rockies more successful.
Private equity’s latest push into college sports: TPG bought college marketing rights behemoth Learfield, so I pinged my colleague Matt Baker, who specializes in covering college sports money, for a quick take on this story (first reported by SBJ). I loved his response:
💬 “It’s a reminder that PE is continuing to take a bigger role in college sports, one attorney told me, but that’s about it. Schools need to prepare accordingly because the sharks they’re swimming with are stronger.”
The WTA Tour Finals is leaving Saudi Arabia: Matt Futterman and Ava Wallace have new reporting on why, and what’s next for the flagship event of women’s tennis.
Wishing the best to Dick Vitale: The legendary college hoops broadcaster announced he is battling melanoma in his lung and liver cavity, his fifth bout with cancer. Dickie V has made it his life’s work to raise money and awareness for cancer research, particularly pediatric cancer.
Other current obsessions: Playoff hockey in Buffalo … The White Sox “Pope Hat” giveaway on Aug. 11 … Grace and Michael, the viral Indiana Pacers couple … Argentina playing World Cup warm-ups in U.S. college football stadiums … fans who still love paper tickets … welcome to my new teammate, national columnist Candace Buckner … Joe Buck calling a baseball game on TV tonight (Mets-Dodgers, 10 p.m. ET, ESPN) …
What I’m Wondering
How pro athletes handle Tax Day
April 15 is here, and I hope your tax prep went smoothly. How do pro athletes navigate filing their taxes? Stephen Nesbitt has an amazing dive into how it works in MLB:
💬 For Major League Baseball players, tax season is a complicated beast, and minor details can have major consequences. (Spencer) Torkelson’s parents are both certified tax professionals, running the family business, Torkelson & Associates, in Petaluma, Calif. Few players have that luxury. Instead, many find themselves mystified the first time their club mails them a teetering stack of W-2s in the offseason or they overhear older teammates talking about S Corps, LLCs and K-1s.
Grab Bag
Data Point: 135 bpm
That was Rory’s heart rate on the 18th tee, which dropped to 117 bpm on his first putt, then 105 bpm on his tap-in, then spiked to 150 bpm when he started to celebrate. All of this is from the Whoop device he wears on his wrist (he was an early investor, too). Clever marketing by the company to promote the data.
Name to Know: ‘Uniqlo Field’
Uniqlo’s sponsorship of Dodger Stadium came up a few weeks ago, and Sam Blum looked into the reactions, which — as expected — were a mixture of pragmatism and sentimentality:
“It’s a deal that, when looked at in the context of other naming rights deals, seemed to be too good for the Dodgers to pass up. But it’s also one that some fans have expressed may subtract from what makes Dodger Stadium, in its old and beautiful way, so celebrated.”
Peak of the Week: F1 maestro
I find Mercedes F1 impresario Toto Wolff to be fascinating as both a leader of a billion-dollar sports organization and a main character in F1. This profile of his management style from Rustin Dodd was excellent.
On the other end of managerial excellence, you have… the Toronto Maple Leafs.
MoneyPoll
Just curious: Do you do your own taxes or use a preparer? (No judgment! Whatever works for you!) Would love to hear your response — you have to be an email subscriber to vote, so if you aren’t an email subscriber yet, go through the super-simple process and get signed up!
Last week’s poll results: 45 percent of you “definitely” or “maybe” planned to tune in for Amazon’s Masters coverage.
Beat Dan in Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle No. 569
Dan’s time: 00:45
Try the game here!
Worth Your Time
Great business-adjacent reads for your downtime or commute:
Group chats, Slack channels and buzzing iPhones. Why MLB players now communicate just like us. (Have not read a more relatable story in 2026. Now, excuse me while I check my 75 Slack channels at The Athletic. 😅)
Two more:
The great MLB froyo scandal. (How can you not click after that tease?)
The NWSL has built an audience that can fill NFL stadiums. As Asli Pelit asks: Is it time to think bigger about the championship venue?
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