January 19, 2024

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With more and more eyeballs on women’s sports, pro hockey is taking off. … NCAA transfer issues reach the DOJ. … FanDuel’s dominance in the U.S. market is growing. … And we chat with former Masters champion Jordan Spieth about why this is a big year for the PGA Tour’s financial future.

— David Rumsey [[link removed]]

New Hockey League Latest to Capture Women’s Sports Boom [[link removed]]

David Kirouac-USA TODAY Sports

The Professional Women’s Hockey League is just 13 games into its debut season, but the upstart competition is already further boosting the growing interest in women’s sports, which saw a banner year on multiple fronts in 2023.

More than 65,000 fans have attended PWHL games, which are averaging crowds just over 5,000 on a nightly basis. The biggest success story [[link removed]] thus far is in Minnesota, which set an attendance record for women’s pro hockey when 13,316 fans attended the team’s home opener. Minnesota’s home games, which are played in the same arena as the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, are responsible for nearly 26,000 fans alone.

Showing Up Big

The strong turnout perhaps shouldn’t be surprising considering other recent attendance spikes for women’s sports:

The 2023 NWSL season attracted [[link removed]] a record 1.37 million fans. Nearly 2 million people attended the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The WNBA’s 1.58 million total attendance number was its highest in 13 years. In August, Nebraska women’s volleyball team set the all-time record [[link removed]] for a women’s sports event with 92,003 fans packed into the Cornhuskers’ football stadium. Iowa’s women’s basketball team, led by star senior Caitlin Clark, drew 55,646 fans to its football stadium for a preseason game in October.

The women’s sports attendance boom of 2023 doesn’t appear to be slowing down, and now you can add hockey to the list of sports capitalizing on the trend.

PODCAST

🎙️ They Said What?

“[Basketball] pulls some weight. Obviously, football drives the bus because it’s so much of the revenue. But conferences—particularly the Big 12—have approached it as … if we can build a really strong basketball conference, we’re gonna have something to sell.”

—Kevin Sweeney, writer at Sports Illustrated, on basketball still having a strong foothold in college athletics. To hear more about the ever-changing world of NCAA basketball, check out the latest episode of Front Office Sports Today.

🎧 Listen and subscribe on Apple [[link removed]], Google [[link removed]], and Spotify [[link removed]].

Department of Justice Joins Lawsuit Over NCAA Transfer Restrictions [[link removed]]

James Snook-USA TODAY Sports

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division announced that it had joined a lawsuit against the NCAA over transfer restrictions. The timing could not be more concerning for the NCAA, which spent Thursday morning advocating for antitrust protections in a hearing on Capitol Hill.

The lawsuit, first filed [[link removed]] in December in West Virginia federal court, was brought by seven attorneys general who accused the governing body of violating antitrust law by forcing athletes to sit out a year if they wanted to transfer more than once. The parties agreed to a preliminary injunction that would suspend this rule for the rest of the 2023-24 academic year, though a trial will determine its ultimate fate.

“NCAA Division I institutions compete with each other not just on the playing field or in the arena, but to recruit and retain college athletes,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division said. “College athletes should be able to freely choose the institutions that best meet their academic, personal, and professional development needs without anticompetitive restrictions that limit their mobility by sacrificing a year of athletic competition.”

The DOJ added itself as a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit in the amended complaint Thursday. This is the first time the DOJ has signed onto a state-led antitrust lawsuit, according to the Ohio attorney general’s office. However, it’s not the first time the DOJ under President Joe Biden has waded into college sports—Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued in favor of athletes in the Supreme Court case NCAA v. Alston in 2021.

The move “shows the DOJ’s continued eye on college sports as a walking antitrust violation,” Boise State sports law professor Sam Ehrlich tells Front Office Sports.

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FanDuel Strengthens U.S. Dominance Ahead of NYSE Debut [[link removed]]

Albert Cesare / USA TODAY NETWORK

The king of U.S. sports betting is only getting stronger.

Already holding the top market share [[link removed]] in the country, FanDuel burnished its position further in 2023’s fourth quarter, according to new data released by corporate parent Flutter Entertainment.

The Ireland-based Flutter said FanDuel raised its position to capture 43% of gross sports betting revenue in the October-December period, a stretch that included the heart of the NFL and college football seasons, MLB playoffs, and start of the current NBA and NHL seasons. The performance helped fuel a 25% rise in Flutter’s full-year 2023 revenue to $12.1 billion.

The news sent Flutter’s stock in London up by more than 15% on Thursday, reaching its highest level in nearly six months. The investor enthusiasm happened despite Flutter taking a $343 million hit to its fourth-quarter revenues due largely to customer wins on NFL bets placed on FanDuel during November. In particular, FanDuel said [[link removed]] it paid out $13.4 million in winnings on a four-leg parlay from a Nov. 30 game in which the Dallas Cowboys beat the Seattle Seahawks 41-35.

“There were some unusual outcomes there, but that was great for customers who had bet on that and really drives their interest, and so it augurs very well for the future,” said Flutter CFO Paul Edgecliffe-Johnson.

The disclosures also arrived as Flutter is preparing for the scheduled Jan. 29 start [[link removed]] of its American stock listing on the New York Stock Exchange, a move happening less than two weeks before Super Bowl LVIII—another major sports betting event set to further enhance FanDuel’s standing.

“This is a pivotal moment for the group as we make Flutter more accessible to U.S.-based investors and gain access to deeper capital markets,” said Flutter chief executive Peter Jackson.

FOS WITH ... Jordan Spieth: ‘Big Year’ For PGA Tour’s Financial Future

Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

Jordan Spieth started his 2024 PGA Tour season with a strong third-place finish worth $1.36 million in Maui at The Sentry, the first of eight signature events featuring $20 million purses. This is the second year in which the PGA Tour is elevating the financial status of its top tournaments, as the rival LIV Golf— which poached defending Masters champion Jon Rahm at the end of last year—continues to offer $25 million purses.

“I believe he saw two places that [sic] neither one was in a great situation right now, and he said, ‘May as well have the money,’ ” Spieth previously said [[link removed]] of Rahm.

Spieth, a three-time major championship winner, is now on a break before playing a trio of tournaments in February, beginning with the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the next signature event on the schedule, its purse funding and name courtesy of Spieth’s longtime sponsor. “It was pitched that you’ll pay a premium price, but you’ll get a premium product,” Spieth says of the PGA Tour’s signature event model, which aims to bring together the top-ranked players on a regular basis. We caught up with Spieth to talk about the business of golf before he hits the course again.

How would you compare the impact of winning a major championship versus a big-money signature event?

The Masters is probably in its own category—and the Open Championship, probably. As far as winning other big events, it sets you up for the year. Financially, the whole idea is that you’re delivering a premium product, and hopefully that’s what it shows, otherwise we’ll have to bounce back in a different direction. … You’re going to have a tournament that hopefully looks and feels better than any time you’ve had that tournament before, and that’s the idea to the sponsors. So to do that eight times during the season, that would improve our product, create better competition, and honestly, create better stories as we come into the weekend [of tournaments].

While AT&T is investing more this year, other sponsors like Wells Fargo and Farmers Insurance are exiting the PGA Tour. Does that worry you?

Certainly, if you lose sponsors that have been there a long time, that’s not obviously the end goal. The Pebble Beach Pro-Am has been the biggest charitable donor in the history of the PGA Tour, and now AT&T is stepping in to get it to a level that hasn’t been reached before. This is a big year because if we can actually deliver, like I’m saying, a premium product, then I think that that helps verify the investment that these companies are making. And if not, then we can figure out: What is the best path forward to hold on to these sponsors? Did we go too high? Do we need to sign something that everyone’s going to play? What exactly has to happen to make sure that our long-term sponsors stay committed to the PGA Tour? A lot of it’s going to be dictated by what comes out of these elevated events this season.

What would make for a successful run of signature events?

I imagine there’s a couple things that go into it: Do our sponsors feel like they got the value out of it at the event? And then, how are the ratings? Those ratings help the sponsors with their advertising dollars that are oftentimes more of what they’re thinking about in their investment than exactly what’s happening at the golf course. … If it’s not exactly what someone likes, then I think, as players, and our management, we should be open to having these conversations and just make sure that our product model going forward is going to be what everyone else wants.

📆 TIME CAPSULE Jan. 19, 2000: Err Jordan

Star News via USA TODAY NETWORK

On this day 24 years ago: Michael Jordan’s executive career begins in earnest. Less than two years after clinching his sixth NBA championship for the Chicago Bulls, Jordan is brought in as part-owner and president of basketball operations of the Washington Wizards. Hopes are high that arguably the greatest player in NBA history can lift the moribund Wizards, but the experiment ultimately fails. Washington posts the worst record in franchise history in Jordan’s first full season running the team. He later ends his retirement, returning as a player for the Wizards in 2001, believing “there is no better way of teaching young players than to be on the court with them as a fellow player.” Jordan’s on-court return is a box-office smash, routinely drawing sellout crowds both home and away, but still results in two more losing seasons before he retires for good in 2003. Expecting to head back to the Wizards’ front-office role, Jordan is instead fired by then-team owner Abe Pollin, who described [[link removed]] “an atmosphere on edge” with His Airness.

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Conversation Starters The Alabama message boards say it’s time to stop giving money to churches—and instead donate [[link removed]] to the Crimson Tide’s football NIL collective. The Bills host the Chiefs this Sunday, and Buffalo was already set to play on two fewer days’ rest than their opponent after their first-round matchup was delayed. Now, the teams could be facing more logistical issues [[link removed]] as more heavy snow hits Western New York. CJ McCollum has officially launched [[link removed]] the McCollum Scholars Program, which will provide $80,000 scholarships to 10 New Orleans high school students. Editor’s Picks Tuned In: Cowboys Agony Proves Ratings Gold For ESPN [[link removed]]by Michael McCarthy [[link removed]]Stephen A. Smith’s 'First Take' draws a massive 1.5M viewers. Show Them the Money: Record NWSL Media Deals Fueling Record Player Contracts [[link removed]]by Eric Fisher [[link removed]]Two record-setting deals have been signed in the last month. MSG CEO James Dolan Accused of Sexual Assault, Sex Trafficking [[link removed]]by A.J. Perez [[link removed]]A masseuse alleges Dolan “pressured” her into an “unwanted” sexual encounter about a decade ago. SURVEY

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