March 5, 2024

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A historic vote at Dartmouth today could alter the future of the NCAA. … American stadium concepts could be on the way for Italian soccer. … NFL teams’ popularity on social media paid off big time this past season. … And we check in on some crucial tennis coaching for one Hollywood star.

— David Rumsey [[link removed]]

Dartmouth Men’s Basketball Set for Historic Union Vote [[link removed]]

Justin Lafleur - Dartmouth Athletics

On Tuesday night, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team will face off against Harvard. But for players, the game won’t be the most monumental activity of the day: a few hours earlier, they’ll vote on whether to certify a team union. This is the first time in NCAA history that the outcome of a team union vote will be announced to the public.

The vote is the next step in a lengthy process that players have embarked upon to be classified as employees, and to create a union, through the National Labor Relations Board. They first filed a union petition [[link removed]] with the local NLRB office in September and were declared employees [[link removed]] by an opinion handed down in February.

If players vote to unionize, they’re effectively taking one more step toward killing the NCAA’s business model of amateurism. A Dartmouth players’ union would allow athletes to collectively bargain with the school for wages and other employee benefits entitled to employees under U.S. labor law (including workers’ compensation, which the NCAA created the term “student-athlete” to avoid). Other athletes on campus, as well as in the Ivy League, could follow suit. Dartmouth players have said that they hope to create an Ivy League Players’ Union to facilitate other campus organizing efforts.

Technically, the ruling would only apply to private school athletes in Division I, as the NLRB’s jurisdiction does not extend to the public sector. But the NCAA would likely be forced to allow all athletes to be employees in order to prevent major disparities across college sports. (A separate ongoing NLRB case in California involving [[link removed]] USC football and basketball players could allow the NLRB to declare D-I football and basketball players as public school employees, too.)

Ultimately, the NCAA and its schools would have to rethink how they finance college sports—and concede that they owe players a cut of the billions they make each year.

An Ongoing Battle

Dartmouth tried to get the election canceled, or at least have the ballots impounded, in a last-second motion last week. However, as of publication, the election is proceeding as planned.

The school is working on a formal appeal of the ruling, which will be reviewed by the NLRB’s national board. An appeals process could continue all the way up to the Supreme Court—a likely outcome given that the NCAA, conference, and schools are looking to prevent an employment model at all costs.

A Little History

Though Tuesday will provide the first recorded outcome of an NCAA D-I team union vote, it’s not the first election to take place. In 2014, Northwestern football players went through a similar process. They were able to vote, but their ballots were impounded. The unionization petition was ultimately struck down on a technicality, so the NLRB never released the vote results.

Follow Amanda Christovich [[link removed]] and Front Office Sports [[link removed]] on X (formerly Twitter) for live coverage of the election and other updates.

Born in the USA? RedBird to Bring American Concepts to Italian Soccer [[link removed]]

AC Milan

An American style of doing business is increasingly infiltrating Italian pro soccer.

Gerry Cardinale, head of RedBird Capital Partners and owner of Serie A’s AC Milan said he is advancing plans to build a new, 70,000-seat stadium for the club, with the design of the facility featuring many amenities common to U.S. facilities, as well as an adjacent mixed-use development increasingly popular among other American teams. That, by itself, is not surprising as the club has been seeking for months to leave [[link removed]] Giuseppe Meazza Stadium at San Siro, the 97-year-old facility it shares with local rival Inter Milan, for a new venue—even though Milan mayor Giuseppe Sala continues to press for a renovation to the historic San Siro.

But Cardinale has much bigger aspirations and wants to expand the stadium development model to the rest of Italy.

“I’m going to create a company that’s going to build this stadium [for AC Milan], and then, frankly, I want to take that company and have it go build stadiums for all the other teams in Serie A,” Cardinale said recently at the Financial Times Business of Football Summit in London. “Because on one hand, I wear my AC Milan hat and we want to win the [championship]. On the other hand, I want to help Serie A narrow this gap [to the Premier League].”

‘A Big Gap’

The Italian financial gap also is not new, with Serie A continuing to lag [[link removed]] well behind not only the Premier League in total revenue but also Spain’s LaLiga and Germany’s Bundesliga. But further pressures continue to grow across the Serie A, particularly as ownership money from well-resourced countries such as Saudi Arabia continues to transform global soccer.

Despite growing investment in Italian soccer by U.S. companies such as RedBird, Serie A in 2022 posted [[link removed]] its worst collective financial loss in 15 years. Many owners of Italian clubs have previously sought to elevate their situations through enhanced facilities, only to find resistance in numerous areas, particularly regulatory and political ones.

“There’s a big gap between Serie A and the other leagues,” said former AC Milan star Zlatan Ibrahimović at the summit. “It’s all about the budget, the economics. Italy needs something more; they need something new.”

Editors’ note: RedBird IMI, of which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is an investor in Front Office Sports.

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FRONT OFFICE SPORTS TODAY How Zendaya Became a Tennis Star

Dan MacMedan-USA TODAY

Brad Gilbert is Coco Gauff’s coach, an ESPN commentator, and co-author of Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis—Lessons From a Master. Now he can add one more skill to his résumé: acting teacher. Gilbert trained Zendaya (above) for her upcoming role in the tennis-romance feature film, Challengers, out next month. He’s on the latest episode of Front Office Sports Today to tell us about how the film production was a family affair, to break down the current crop of IRL top-ranked players, and to weigh in on the infusion of Saudi Arabian cash in the game.

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

It Pays to Be Social

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

The NFL’s popularity remains unparalleled in TV viewership [[link removed]'s%20best%20figure%20since%202015.], and it had one of its biggest years on social media. This was exemplified by Taylor Swift’s appearances at Chiefs games, the Lions’ resurgence, and Lamar Jackson’s MVP season. During the 2023 season Zoomph tracked [[link removed]] teams’ total number of posts on social media platforms (X, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube), impressions, and engagements, and then it ranked them based on overall value. The report notes that the NFL’s overall social value is worth $1.1 billion. Here are the top five teams:

Eagles: $52,606,394 Cowboys: $40,735,244 49ers: $39,892,620 Chiefs: $38,041,773 Steelers: $32,310,361 TIME CAPSULE March 5, 1973: A Trade Unlike Any Other

NorthJersey.com-USA TODAY NETWORK

On this day 51 years ago: Two Yankees players executed a trade without equal before or since in MLB history. Pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich (above) arrived at spring training and announced they swapped families, with Peterson moving in with Kekich’s wife and children and Kekich doing the same with Peterson’s family. The saga—quickly becoming prominent tabloid fodder—was one of the first major stories to drop under the leadership of new Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who assumed control of the franchise just two months before. Though each newly constructed couple insisted there was nothing lurid about the arrangement and that it was a “love story,” it was very far from the buttoned-up image that dominated Yankees lore. Then MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn said he was “appalled” by the situation but was powerless to intervene.

Fritz Peterson and Susanne Kekich are still married, but Mike Kekich and Marilyn Peterson split up a few years after the trade. Hollywood stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon spent several years in the 2010s attempting to develop a major movie project around the Peterson-Kekich trade but were unable to get the effort off the ground, in part due to resistance from Mike Kekich.

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The Facilities Arms Race

Throughout the country, college sports are on a historic run. Massive media rights and NIL deals are getting signed, attendance records are being broken, and superstars like Caitlin Clark are elevating women’s sports to new heights.

At the foundation of it all are schools’ athletic facilities.

Among weight rooms, locker rooms, nutrition centers, medicine clinics, and the courts and stadiums themselves—universities are spending millions on state-of-the-art athletic centers.

During our Future of Sports: College Athletics [[link removed]] event on March 13, we’ll connect with coaches and athletic staff from TCU, Clemson, and Memphis, as well as the president of Sorinex Exercise Equipment, to discuss the impact this phenomenon has on everything from recruiting and player development to the fan experience, donations, and school revenue.

Reserve your spot [[link removed]] now.

Conversation Starters Join Front Office Sports and the School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management (STHM) at Temple University tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET for The Future of Fan Interaction [[link removed]]—a thought-provoking discussion about the transformative impact virtual reality and the metaverse will have on how we watch and interact with sports.* For the past 25 years, Invesco QQQ [[link removed]] has given access to leading innovators in one ETF. Be a part of the next 25 years of innovation, with Invesco QQQ. Let’s rethink possibility. Invesco Distributors, Inc.*† After 13 years, all with the Eagles, Jason Kelce has officially retired [[link removed]], wrapping up a career that includes six All-Pro selections, seven Pro Bowl appearances, a Super Bowl win, a top sports podcast, his own youth charity, a documentary, a line of apparel, two Christmas albums, and $82 million in career earnings. Releasing Russell Wilson will saddle [[link removed]] the Broncos with an NFL-record $85 million in dead cap, surpassing the sum of the previous two record hits in league history. Editors’ Picks Tuned In: How Chris Mortensen Paid It Forward at ESPN [[link removed]]by Michael McCarthy [[link removed]]It all started with some advice from the late Will McDonough. The Caitlin Clark Economy: Much More Than an Army of Traveling Young Girls [[link removed]]by Amanda Christovich [[link removed]]The economy surrounding No. 22 goes far beyond her biggest fans. Sheer Madness: What You Need to Know About MLB’s New Uniform Saga [[link removed]]by Eric Fisher [[link removed]]MLB’s reworked uniforms have become a major source of spring training controversy. DISCLAIMER

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