Sports Business Conversations

Over the years, we’ve had a lot of conversations with sports business entrepreneurs. One thing they all share is a certain degree of risk tolerance. But even the most daring of them pale in comparison when it comes to this episode’s guest. At 17 years old, Davyeon Ross left his home in Trinidad and Tobago and headed to Kansas to get his college degree and play basketball. Now Kansas winters aren’t...

It wasn’t too long ago that we had Peter Murray on this show to talk about his transition from running the Professional Fighters League to serving as the CEO of the Pro Bowlers Association. And if you think that’s an interesting career segue, let me introduce you to this episode’s guest, Patrick Lindsey . You see, not that long ago, Patrick was running the PGA Tour stop in Las Vegas, the Shriner’s...

If you’re looking to buy a used stadium urinal, boy, have I got a deal for you. Well, in truth, I don’t have a deal for you. But Brandon Steiner , the founder of Steiner Sports and CollectibleXchange sure does. That’s because Steiner is in the process of dismantling HighMark Stadium, the former home of the Buffalo Bills, and in doing so, is offering a catalog of items from that venue for sale. As...

Sports business is built on big transactions. In this new feature of the Sports Business Conversations podcast, we’ll take a close look at how some of these transactions came to be. It’s called “The Room Where It Happened”, and in it, we’ll deconstruct a recent sports transaction with the person who helped put all the pieces together. This time, Eryn McMahan of Longhorn Sports Properties and Learf...

Hey this is Dave Almy of ADC Partners, and welcome the 100th episode of the sports business conversations podcast. And look, I realize that in the grand scheme of things, making it to 100 podcast episodes isn’t exactly up there with stupendous human achievements like landing on the moon, writing Hamlet, or inventing bourbon (and thank YOU, Elijah Craig). But it’s something worth celebrating a litt...

We're going to go out on a limb and say that if you’re listening to this podcast, you have a connection to high school sports. You’re probably not playing them at the moment, but we bet you did at some point. Maybe you have kids who play them now. Doesn’t matter. Whatever your connection or association, you know what a big deal high school sports are to students, families and communities. And that...

If you’re like me, when someone mentions “bowling”, you get a flood of memories. For me, those memories include things like past birthday parties for my kids, the casual/only slightly ironic Friday night out with friends, and the ill-fated league I joined with my college classmate my junior year. Hey, the beer was cheap and we made cool shirts. For Peter Murray , the new CEO of the Professional Bo...

We don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a little soccer tournament coming to North America this summer. It’s apparently kind of a big deal. In reality, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is the biggest version of the global event ever attempted. The most host nations. The most teams in competition. The most number of games. A global economic impact estimated at over $80 billion. As CEO of New York/New Jer...

Here’s your unexpected piece of sports business trivia for the day. According to Arctos , which is a major player in sports private equity, professional sports franchise values have compounded at a rate 13.0% per year for the last sixty years. So it turns out that this whole sports ownership thing can actually be pretty lucrative. Which is why it’s currently boom times for teams looking for invest...

Safe to say that the most common expression used to describe the current state of Name-Image-Likeness and college sports is “it’s the Wild West.” Which, in reality, may actually do a disservice to the wild west. There’s no way that period could be as nuts as this one… Clearly NIL has completely upended college sports. In doing so, it’s produced a fabulously dynamic environment for new businesses t...

It used to be that sports sponsorships were a "nice to have". They were a way to use up the last part of a marketing budget after all the ad buys were completed. Find out what the CEO’s favorite sport is, buy some signage, get some tickets and call it a day. Not any more. Sports are one of the last places that capture our extremely fragmented attention, so sponsorships have become far more importa...

The question on every stadium owner’s mind is what to with the thing when no games are scheduled. Think about it. An NFL team has about 8 regular season games, and 3 pre-season games. Other than that, a few concerts? Monster trucks? There’s a lot of days on at calendar where nothing’s happening. That’s why a mixed use stadium district that pulls people in year round is at the top of every franchis...

It’s February 2026, and the Winter Olympic games in Italy are in full swing. And if you think the competition on the slopes and on the ice is fierce, it’s got nothing on the sponsors and advertisers trying to get your attention while you’re looking up the latest medal counts. Unless you’re really close to the Games, you might not realize that athletes are highly restricted in what they can do or s...

How does sports gambling impact fandom? Which sports are growing the fastest? What’s happening with youth sports participation? What’s behind the explosive growth of women’s sports? That's a lot of questions! Fortunately, we managed to get Neil Schwartz , the president of SBRNet , to sit still for 30 minutes to provide the answers to these and other burning sports business questions. Neil has been...

Imagine driving your car about 65 miles an hour down a freeway. Not that hard to imagine, right? Nothing very special about it. Chance are you might do it every day. OK, now imagine that you’re sitting on the roof of that car while it’s speeding down an uneven road at 65 miles per hour while someone throws water in your face. That, my friend, is SailGP , which has about as much in common with trad...

It’s safe to say that there’s no part of sports business that’s as dynamic as college sports. That’s the polite way of saying it, anyway. There’s a bunch of other expressions that can be applied, and often are. But think about it: conference realignment, NIL, the transfer portal, the House v NCAA decision, private equity investments… And this has all been in the last 5 years! Sitting in the eye of...

There’s a moment in every sports fan’s life where they entertain the idea of buying their team. Most times it’s just a fleeting idea. “Well, if I owned the team, I’d…” And that’s pretty much it. It’s just a fantasy. But if you’re Spencer Gore , it’s an idea that sticks. The lifetime soccer fan and founder of the European Medical Journal had spent years watching his local club, Chelmsford City FC s...

If you’re paying attention to the business of college sports today, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by all the so called experts telling you they have the answers to what’s going to happen next. In this attention economy, loud and outrageous voices often win the day. It’s exhausting. When you talk to Kevin White , though, it’s an opportunity to break through all that noise and hear from someone wh...

If you use the phrase “sports tech”, people tend to think of things like artificial intelligence, data analysis, and apps that are meant to improve the sports experience. They’re typically heavily focused on software, subscriptions, and more often than not, have a pretty intense learning curve. This is especially true for the 100s of start ups out there using technology to help athletes achieve pe...

Here are some things you might not ordinarily think of when the topic of sports business comes up. Information warehousing. Analytics. Data centers. Cybersecurity. Typically speaking, these are NOT the topics that most fans concern themselves with when heading to a game. They just want their tickets to scan quickly, their payments to work seamlessly at concession stands, and their smack talking po...

When we first spoke with Peter Frintzilas , the CEO of youth sports tech pioneer TeamSnap , the company was in the process of integrating the recently acquired Mojo Sports. As with any tech integration, it wasn't easy. "It’s not going to flip a switch and all of a sudden everything works together," Frintzilas commented at the time. Turns out it took about 1.5 years to flip that switch: TeamSnap ON...

We’re starting with a bit of a history lesson. In the dark ages of TV, people had about five channels to choose from, had to negotiate with family members over who got to control the remote, and had to make sure they were in front of the screen exactly when their favorite show started. And if that sounds like it sucked, that’s because it did. I speak from experience as someone who rarely (if ever)...

If you were in charge of the world’s most innovative sports experiences and hospitality company, and you were responsible for major global sports events, how would you spend your time at those events? Walking the sidelines like a boss? Maybe catching the action from the comfort of your luxury suite? Well, if you’re Paul Caine , the President of On Location , you spend it wiping down tables, making...

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this new racquet sport that’s growing like crazy. Let’s see if you can guess what it is. It’s easy to learn, super fun to play, and begins with a “P”. Yup, you guessed it. It’s padel . Now, if you live outside North America, you probably guessed right and were unsurprised at the answer. Padel after all has been exploding all over Europe, Latin America, South Amer...

I’m sure you’ll be excited to know that my guest is John Stewart (no, not that Jon Stewart, and yes, he gets that a lot), the co-founder and CEO of Fastbreak.ai . And in many ways, this John Stewart has had as much of an impact as the other one. In 2019, John sold his logistics optimization start up to Salesforce. Looking for a new challenge, he harnessed his expertise and growing AI capabilities...