Soon, soccer fans around the globe will have access to thousands of games every month in a dozen languages — for free.

FIFA is launching an ad-supported streaming service, FIFA+, which will broadcast 40,000 games this year.

• While top-flight European leagues will be included in FIFA+’s coverage, existing rights deals in those leagues will focus the service on underserved areas such as Angola, Denmark, Mexico, and Poland.
• The service will broadcast 11,000 women’s games this year.
• FIFA+ will initially be available in English, French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, and expand to Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, Bahasa, and Korean by June.

The service will also include 2,000 hours of archival content, plus documentaries and docuseries.

Global Ambitions

While FIFA+ won’t broadcast the upcoming FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the service seeks to build on and feed off the excitement around the global soccer tournament. 

“We’ll be strategically extending — so we will be potentially going into gaming, social community, and potentially subscription depending on where this goes and where the industry disruption heads,” said FIFA+ lead Charlotte Burr.

The service aims to reach 200 million unique users by the end of this year. It will initially launch only as a digital service, but FIFA is in talks with broadcast partners.

The House Oversight Committee alleged the Washington Commanders committed a “troubling, long-running, and potentially unlawful pattern of financial conduct” in a letter sent to the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday. 

The 20-page letter detailed how for years the Commanders underreported ticket revenue to the NFL and alleged that owner Dan Snyder had knowledge of some of the schemes first reported by Front Office Sports on April 2. 

Jason Friedman, a former Commanders’ ticket sales executive who worked for the franchise for 24 years, provided much of the information to the committee used in the letter, including spreadsheets and emails. The attorneys general for Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell were sent copies of the letter signed by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), the chair of the committee. 

Snyder Implicated in Scheme

The allegations of financial improprieties date back to right after Snyder purchased the franchise for $800 million in 1999. 

• The Commanders “created artificial barriers to discourage customers from requesting” refundable deposits due to them. Friedman provided documents that showed the Commanders still held about $5 million in unreturned deposits from around 2,000 accounts as of July 2016. 
• The team “repeatedly concealed ticket sales revenue that should have been shared with the NFL.”
• The methods used to conceal revenue from the NFL was known internally as “the juice.”

“This new information on potential financial misconduct suggests that the rot under Dan Snyder’s leadership is much deeper than imagined,” Maloney said in a statement.

Camden Yards Sports Complex, which contains the stadiums for the Baltimore Orioles and Baltimore Ravens — announced that the Maryland State legislature has passed an initiative committing $1.2 billion to its stadiums.

The Orioles play at Oriole Park at Camden Yards and the Ravens’ home is M&T Bank Stadium.

The entirety of the dollar amount will be funded through the public in what is reportedly the second-largest public commitment to an MLB team. The funding trails only Yankee Stadium’s construction in 2009.

The money will be split equally between the Orioles and Ravens.

“These public funds are just a portion of the more than 10 billion dollars in economic tourism impact generated by the Orioles during the past three decades at Camden Yards,” Orioles’ chairman and CEO John Angelos said.

• Camden Yards cost around $110 million to build and is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
• The venue has produced close to 2,500 live professional events, attracting roughly 75 million visitors to the area.

Baseball Stays In Baltimore

There was reportedly talk last year that the Orioles could leave the site, but the Maryland Stadium Authority believes that the funding will assist in keeping the teams beyond their current leases — the Orioles in 2023 and the Ravens in 2028.

The Orioles were valued at $1.375 billion by Forbes in March, with the Ravens landing a $3.4 billion valuation in August.