Symptom of Empire Decline

Several historians have attempted to categorize the symptoms of a declining empire. The most compelling one is “the superiority of amusement;” where elites attempt to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion and distraction.

The term “Bread and Circuses” was coined during the fall of the Roman Empire; and I am struck by parallels between Gladiators in the Coliseum and the growing popularity and bloodiness of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship).

Further Reading:

“UFC: The Downfall of American Sport” by Joe O’Donnell

A Poetic Display of Ageing

We cannot win the battle against time. Watching our childhood gods become mere mortals is heartbreaking - a tangible reminder of our own inevitable demise. Yet many of our favorite players adapt to physical deterioration and produce some of the most memorable athletic displays during their swan songs:

• Michael Jordan developing a fade away jumper to compensate for a lower vertical jump (and taller wing defenders)

• Derek Jeter compensating for slower bat speed by applying probabilities and making an educated guess on where the pitch will land

The idea of ingenuity overcoming raw physicality is the story of humans’ rise to the top of the food chain. We love to see this play out in sports, where young apex predators come up short against the experienced masters of a craft.

Further Reading:

“The Disappointment of Sports Memoirs” by David Foster Wallace

The Last Shared National Reality

The apogee of a shared national reality came in the middle of the 20th century, amid the dominance of television and the absence of the internet. A handful of channels reached tens of millions of people, sharing the same stories, more or less. With the rise of web, social media and streaming services, there are now very few pieces of media that reach all of us in its original form.

Sports is a red herring - the last bastion of monolithic information consumption. There is no slant to the story of live sport, the narrative plays out in front of everyone simultaneously. Raw athletic spectacle is one of the most objective forms of entertainment left. In a world where trust in institutions is at an all-time low, sports provides a tonic.

You can put a sporting event on in a crowded living room at a family holiday, and you are unlikely to get differing or heated opinions about what is coming out of the TV…unless its about taking a knee during the national anthem.

Further Listening:

“The Logic of Cults is Taking Over” by Derek Thompson

Overtime flattened sports viewership, focusing on high school sports for high school viewers. Outside of the McDonald’s All American Game, ESPN and others were not covering the youngest athletes and their social media presence was lagging other entertainment categories.

Hats off to early investor, Jeff Jordan of A16z, for recognizing that sports media companies needed to supplement — and ultimately migrate — viewership from television sets to online venues where their fans of the future were increasingly spending their time.

The company currently boasts 26.5 million followers on TikTok and more than 10 million on Instagram, making it a serious sports media brand on social, alongside big players like ESPN (44 million followers on TikTok). The company has more than 70 million followers across seven platforms.

Here is A16z’s original thesis behind their 2018 investment.

Strava capitalized on a growing comfort with location-sharing technology. Apps like Apple’s Find My Friends became pseudo social networks, with Gen Z and Millennials monitoring their friends’ whereabouts just as previous generations looked over their peers’ Foursquare check-ins.

While other social networks have added location-based features, Strava was the first to bridge the gap between private run-time tracking and digital community building. The company now boasts 125MM users, mostly runners and cyclists.

Why is this included in Media? I present to you Strava Jockeys. Entrepreneurial runners in Indonesia have built lucrative businesses selling their jogging hobbies to older, busier professionals looking for social clout on the exercise-tracking app. In essence, you pay someone else to run for you to make you seem athletic.

Social networks attract wannabee influencers, and influencers are very much tied into the broader media landscape.

The company is rumored to do about $70MM in Annual Recurring Revenue and are profitable.

Here is a recent long read by The Information

Born in 1998 as “Global Sports Incorporated” (GSI), the company capitalized on an early recognition of e-commerce’s potential and followed an Amazon-esque rise to global relevance. It was acquired by eBay for $2.4 billion dollars in 2011.

Wildly enough, eBay did not want the sports e-commerce business, which included exclusive apparel manufacturing partnerships with all North American sports leagues along with hundreds of teams and colleges.

Recognizing that the true moat to the business lay in the basic economics of comparative advantage (leagues were looking for ancillary revenue streams and had little interest or expertise in building out their own apparel manufacturing business), Founder Michael Rubin bought back the Fanatics for $500 million as a part of the eBay deal.

The company has since expanded into betting and collectibles, punctuated by the questionable acquisition of Topps Trading Cards for $500MM at the height of the NFT craze (remember NBA Top Shot?!). Despite a somewhat reactive expansion strategy, the company was last valued at over $30 billion USD, netting investors a 60x paper return (before dilution). Not bad for a Villanova drop out.

Here is a long read from Fast Company from 2022.

Every Team, A Media Platform

While leagues like the NBA continue to sign record broadcast deals, the reality for most sports organizations is that revenues from these rights will decline. As such, organizations need to get more creative about how they monetize their brand via owned media channels and bespoke partnerships.

Enter companies like Scoreplay, Founded by Xavier Green and Victorien Tixier and backed by Seven Seven Six (investor Alexis Ohanian was the Co-Founder of Reddit and is married to Serena Williams). The company provides creator software for sports organizations to deliver real-time highlights, video clips, and other multimedia content directly to fans' mobile devices during live events. By leveraging these features, ScorePlay aims to create a more immersive and engaging experience for sports fans, while also providing data and marketing opportunities for sports organizations.

Data analytics companies like Genius Sports have dabbled in this realm, but perhaps a more nimble upstart with less tech debt can steal share or capture a different part of the market.

Across Diverse Channels; Athletes are the Through-Line

While the sports landscape is anchored in team sports, future media will lean further into the individual athlete. The live game will still be the foundation of sports programming, but audience demand for access to athletes beyond the game has grown over time.

By threading narratives through different media styles and platforms, the final whistle of the championship game is no longer the end of the story, only a chapter in the multiverse of sports.

Moneyball for the Masses

Fandom is reinforced by sports participation. Participation is contingent on improvement. It is hard to keep playing a sport you suck at.

“Performance optimization” is what you get when the explosion of wearable devices and biometric tracking meets the Moneyball generation - a data-literate fan base primed with fantasy sports and betting apps. The hardware is far more affordable, the ability to synthesize performance data has become easier. We all want the technology that the pros have and we are better at interpreting its output.

Last year, Breakaway Data, an analytics startup backed by Shane Battier, kitted out an NBA Summer League facility with 8 cameras, each shooting 240 frames per second. The cameras tracked the shooters' movements in 24 joint angles, creating thousands upon thousands of data points which were compiled in a five-page report for each player. The reports were a multicolored collection of graphs, charts and bullet-point insights that focus on three aspects of shooting: the set point (lower body), shot sequencing (path of arms and hands) and release point (elbow and wrist).

There are definitely some psychopaths that would replicate this entire operation. For the rest of us, Breakaway has released a mobile app which embeds sport-specific metrics with broadly popular wearables like Apple Watch and Oura ring.

Any type of technology that brings a fan’s personal athletic performance closer to the professionals they admire is a good starting point. The challenge is in the execution. While Breakaway’s app sounds awesome, the app only has 19 reviews, the last one coming in 2023.