Call Us Sportstradmus

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Good Thursday Morning. I hope everyone had a great holiday season, and welcome to 2024! I traversed the country seeing various family with the future Mrs. Sports Business Playbook and that Michigan CFP game may have taken years off of my life, but we are so back! I am fired up for what’s to come with SBP this year.

📰 This Week’s Topic: We have another SBP first this week — we went on a podcast! I joined Andy Marston of Sports Pundit and Kelsey Smith of the MBA Sports Business Alliance to talk through our six crystal ball predictions for sports business in 2024.

Hey team,

I spent a lot of time over the holidays thinking about how I can take the newsletter to the next level, and one of the main areas is further collaboration with thought leaders in the space.

To that end, I hopped on a podcast in late December with two good friends who have their fingers on the pulse of sports business — Andy Marston, who writes the excellent Sports Pundit newsletter, and Kelsey Smith, cyclist extraordinaire and current president of the MBA Sports Business Alliance, an organization near and dear to my heart.

We had a blast talking through our six key predictions that we see taking place this year:

1. Alex: Women’s volleyball explodes

2. Andy: Consumer brands go deeper into the creator economy with female athletes

3. Kelsey: Caitlin Clark signs the youngest ever signature shoe deal for a female athlete

4. Alex: Amazon buys the Diamond Sports RSN business

5. Andy: In-person, out-of-stadium niche sports experiences and activations will continue to grow

6. Kelsey: Netflix doubles down on its live content strategy with additional versions of “the Match.” Kelsey’s spicy take: cycling will be included as one of the events

The link to the full podcast with our analysis is here. Let me know your thoughts on these predictions and if you personally have any prognostications for the year!

Until next time, sports fans!

-Alex