Several international league soccer seasons begin Friday, with the Premier League, La Liga, and Ligue 1 all starting play, followed a week later by the Italian Serie A and the German Bundesliga. 

But the 2023-24 campaign kicks off amid a very different economic landscape, even from the end of last season.

The most drastic change is perhaps the revamped Saudi Pro League, which also starts play Friday and has used its extensive oil wealth to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contracts for European stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Jordan Henderson, and Karim Benzema — in addition to making record-breaking, ultimately unsuccessful offers for Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe.

That ongoing ambition and financial largesse — and increased exposure thanks to a new slate of international media deals involving 130 territories — prompted Premier League CEO Richard Masters to acknowledge that the Saudi situation is requiring heightened monitoring.

“They have spent [$494 million] on 20-odd players, eight or nine of which have come from Premier League clubs. We are only at the start of something,” Masters said. “I have been asked if I’m concerned by that, and you know the answer — it’s something we have to keep an eye on.”

The sport’s rising financial pressures are also prompting widespread and unpopular ticket price increases, while giant clubs like Chelsea are scouting out potential investor capital.

Building Boom

The other major trend in international soccer lies in facility upgrades. 

Chelsea, Everton, Fulham, Liverpool, and Manchester City are among clubs with major stadium projects in progress, part of a broad industry push toward modernization and mixed-use development.

The growth of nontraditional golf venues continues to accelerate at a rapid pace — so much so that one major company projects it will soon welcome more golfers than standard courses.

In 2022, the National Golf Foundation said 41.1 million Americans aged 6 and up played golf, including 15.5 million who participated exclusively in off-course golf activities. 

Topgolf is on track to open 11 new venues by the end of 2023, expected to attract between 3 million and 4 million new visitors. 

“With this growth, Topgolf will soon have more consumers visiting it than exist in all of U.S. on-course golf,” Topgolf Callaway president and CEO Chip Brewer proclaimed on an earnings call this week, “including one-half of the total on-course golf population, as many now participate in both on- and off-course golf.”

Topgolf leads the way in an ever-expanding off-course business that includes other alternative driving-range-style options like Drive Shack and adult-friendly mini-golf venues like the Rory McIlroy-backed Puttery and London-based Swingers, which has expanded to the U.S.

Additionally, Toptracer Ranges — a product of Topgolf — are helping public golf courses attract new players with a tech-forward buildout that allows casual golfers to play games and virtual courses, while also giving more experienced players a peek inside key data like swing speed and ball trajectories.

In a larger sense, creative approaches are helping the golf industry keep up its initial pandemic momentum — a task with which so many sectors in the leisure and fitness space have struggled.

CBS Sports is upping the ante for its golf coverage this weekend in the network’s first crack at broadcasting the FedEx Cup Playoffs.

Since the FedEx Cup started in 2007, the playoffs have been broadcast by NBC Sports. Moving forward, CBS and NBC will rotate coverage years — an arrangement along the lines of the NFL’s heralded multipartner approach — giving the PGA Tour more media exposure for its season-concluding events.

“We’ve wanted the playoffs for a long time,” CBS Sports lead golf producer Sellers Shy told Front Office Sports. The PGA Tour is reportedly receiving $700 million annually from CBS, NBC, and ESPN under its current contract that began in 2022 and runs through 2030.

“We felt unfulfilled in previous years because it would just abruptly end,” Shy said of past seasons, which saw CBS conclude its golf coverage with relatively run-of-the-mill PGA Tour events like the Wyndham Championship. “We felt strongly that we wanted to finish it off at the Tour Championship.” 

The final round of last year’s season-ending event from Atlanta averaged 3.62 million viewers on NBC.

However, uncertainties remain as to what kind of impact the PGA Tour’s partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will have on the playoffs in coming years. “It’s still a little gray with the future,” Shy admitted. “But in the end, we’re going to have the playoffs more than just this year.”

The action is already underway in Memphis at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. CBS will have third- and final-round coverage on Saturday (3-6 p.m. ET) and Sunday (2-6 p.m. ET), and will also air next week’s BMW Championship in Chicago and then the Tour Championship in Atlanta.

Barcelona enters the 2023-24 soccer season with perhaps more questions than any other club around the world — especially financial ones.

The club is defending yet another La Liga title but has continued to struggle to secure much-needed revenue, an ongoing issue that contributed to Lionel Messi’s departure in 2021. Recently, Barcelona’s debt was well over $1 billion.

Now, ahead of its opening La Liga match on Sunday, Barcelona hasn’t registered several top signings due to a lack of sufficient funding.

Uncertainty has surrounded a unique deal to sell equity in the club’s Barca Studios. It’s an effort to bring in cash — as much as $65 million at a time — in large part to pay large player salaries. It’s currently unclear how many Barcelona players will have officially signed and will be ready to play this weekend.

Next weekend, Barcelona will play its home opener — but not at the storied Camp Nou, which is closed at least until late 2024 while undergoing renovations as part of a $1.6 billion development project. 

For the immediate future, Barcelona will play home matches at Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys. That venue, originally built in 1927 and renovated for the 1992 Olympics, has a capacity of 56,000 — about 40% less than the nearly 100,000 regularly packed into Camp Nou.

Barcelona has also been fielding lucrative transfer offers from clubs in Saudi Arabia to help bolster the club’s bottom line.