The upstart international basketball league advised by LeBron James’s longtime business partner Maverick Carter has scored significant backing. Its investors, according to the Financial Times, include the Singapore government, SC Holdings, Riyadh’s Public Investment Fund, UBS, Skype founder Geoff Prentice, former Facebook executive Grady Burnett. VC firm Quiet Capital and tech investor Byron Deeter are reportedly raising capital. Galaxy Entertainment, which is based in Hong Kong, is also reportedly a partner.

In January, Bloomberg reported that the league was seeking $5 billion in funding to launch an international league.

Sources familiar with the new league told Front Office Sports last month that James would not be involved, and that the league has no intention of competing directly with the NBA. The league instead is aiming to be an “F1 for basketball,” making two-week stops in eight global cities. Singapore was known as a host location, and the FT report listed Macau as another host.

FT also reports the league expects to be a “full-time” responsibility, unlike Unrivaled, which happens during the WNBA offseason and lasts for just a few months. However, like Unrivaled, players would receive equity in the league.

The NBA has only a short window between its Finals in June and the start of its season in October, making any new league a potential rival. Kevin Durant’s longtime business manager Rich Kleiman said Thursday that he could see his client “potentially” joining the new league.

Wealthy investors have poured money into competing leagues across sports in recent years, but men’s basketball has seen few attempts to compete with the NBA or the EuroLeague. Unrivaled, a new women’s league, recently started in South Florida, although WNBA players can play in both leagues because of how the women’s basketball calendar is set up.

The new league is reportedly planning to include six men’s and six women’s teams.

There were barely more than 16 weeks between the end and the start of the NBA season in 2024, meaning the new league would likely overlap with the NBA calendar.

Carter and James are childhood friends, and Carter is the CEO of SpringHill, a production company he runs with James. SpringHill announced a merger last year with British production company Fulwell 73, which produces the Grammys and Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Could there be a scenario where ESPN doesn’t have MLB rights? It’s technically possible as a mutual contract opt-out window in their existing rights agreement becomes active next month. The state of negotiations, however, will be a key litmus test on the fast-changing state of sports media. 

The Disney-owned network already reconstructed its MLB rights in 2021, signing a new, seven-year agreement running through 2028 that shaved the annual fee from $700 million to about $550 million, and focused the package more on premier events, such as the annual Home Run Derby, the wild-card round of the playoffs, Sunday Night Baseball, and the MLB Little League Classic.

Now, ESPN, according to multiple reports, has had issues with the value it gains from its MLB rights, particularly when contrasted with Apple’s $85 million annual fee for a Friday night package, Warner Bros. Discovery’s agreement worth $470 million annually and that includes a larger set of postseason rights and the mere $10 million per year for Sunday morning games on Roku. 

New Thinking

ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, meanwhile, has also shown a desire to acquire some local MLB rights, saying last summer, “We are very interested in continuing to identify partnerships on a team-specific basis.” That sentiment certainly intersects but doesn’t necessarily align fully with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s plan to reconstruct baseball’s media landscape to a more centralized model in 2028, when all its national media-rights deals are due to expire. 

All of that adds to a level of uncertainty that has scarcely existed since ESPN began broadcasting MLB games in 1990.

“We talk to ESPN all the time,” Manfred said following league meetings this week in Florida. “They’re one of our big partners. … We both have a [contract] out in March of this year. Obviously, ’25 is set. We’ll continue to talk to them, and each side will make a decision whether they want to do anything with that.”

The Athletic reported there is an element of force behind that sentiment, and that MLB is prepared to walk away from the deal if ESPN exercises the opt-out provision. Industry sources confirmed that feeling to Front Office Sports and that a formal opt-out would make it essentially impossible to construct a new deal. 

Will it get to that point, though? Beyond the very long-running nature of the MLB-ESPN rights relationship, the network has taken great pride in having rights deals with every major U.S. men’s pro sports league. Pitaro is also a big baseball fan personally. His charge, however, is to run a fiscally responsible operation, an effort showing greater strength this week in Disney’s quarterly earnings, while MLB content certainly would be a notable part of the direct-to-consumer service, currently called “Flagship,” debuting later this year.

The 2024 MLB season generated a five-year viewership high for Sunday Night Baseball, reaching 1.5 million viewers per game, up 6% from 2023, with double-digit percentage gains in several younger demographic groups. Wild-card viewership, meanwhile, rose 25% and set a new record for that round since the 2022 reformation of the league’s playoff format. All those metrics on ESPN are consistent with a resurgent league that enjoyed a broader spike in popularity last year.

New Orleans, of course, is colloquially known as “the Big Easy,” and a still-falling ticket resale market for Super Bowl LIX has made scoring tickets to Sunday’s game easier than ever.

Low-end, get-in prices for the Chiefs-Eagles matchup fell early Friday to about $2,600 per seat across multiple marketplaces. That figure is down by more than 20% from levels at the beginning of the week and is just over half what upper-deck tickets at the Caesar Superdome were selling for immediately after Kansas City and Philadelphia clinched their conference titles. 

A similar situation is apparent with On Location, the official hospitality provider of the NFL that controls a large swath of the Super Bowl ticket resale market. Its packages that include various fan experiences in addition to game tickets now begin at $3,750 per person. That’s down 21% from Monday, and also by nearly half compared to late January. 

The entry-level pricing also is now less than a third of what was seen in Las Vegas last year, with that market’s status then as a first-time Super Bowl host driving historic levels of fan interest. 

Overall, the game is tracking as the weakest Super Bowl on the secondary market in six years.

The prevailing factors in the downward pressure are much the same as earlier in the week and are gathering strength: an unprecedented lodging crunch has created four-figure nightly prices in many instances for even spartan accommodations and five-figure ones for luxury rooms, in turn cutting into many fans’ ability to spend on game tickets.

That situation, along with the unprecedented demand last year in Las Vegas, further showcases the heightening role of the host location in Super Bowl demand. Kansas City’s fifth trip to the Super Bowl in six seasons, meanwhile, has also furthered a sense of “Chiefs fatigue.”