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Good Thursday Morning. Here’s the rundown of this week’s Sports Business Playbook:

• 📰 This Week’s Topic: The return of SlamBall and why I’m bullish on the new league’s chances for success

• 🍸️ Impress Your Friends at Cocktail Party: Want to show off your sports knowledge in a public setting but don’t have time to read the deep dive? Hit the “Impress Your Friends at Cocktail Party” section at the bottom for a CliffsNotes of this week’s topic

• 🤯 “Whoa of the Week”: F1 valuations

• 💪 Weekly Reminders that Sports are Awesome: Basketball philanthropy and some sights and sounds from the MLB’s London Series

Hey team,

For any readers who have been in my general vicinity the past week, there’s been one topic I’ve been talking about incessantly.

No, it is not that I got engaged this past weekend (which is true; shoutout to the future Mrs. Sports Business Playbook!).

It’s that a new version of SlamBall comes back next month, and I am screaming from the rooftops that this thing is going to be a hit.

Let’s talk about what SlamBall is and why it is the perfect sport for the current moment.

Slam What?

For those unfamiliar with SlamBall, the sport is a combination of basketball, football, and hockey. Oh, and there are trampolines.

The setup is like a basketball court, but there are hockey-style boards that line the playing area and four trampolines inside the three point line on each side. Players are trying to score either two or three points like regular basketball (except a dunk is worth three points), but they’re also vaulting off of trampolines and being met at the rim by the opposing team players who are also jumping off of said trampolines to block them.

The game was created in the late 90’s by part athlete/part mad scientist Mason Gordon, who wanted to create the perfect sport that combined "the fluidity of basketball, the aggressiveness and physicality of football…and also this idea that video games kind of unleash your imagination in the sport."

Through a partnership with noted TV and movie producer Mike Tollin, SlamBall was able to secure a TV contract with Spike TV (now Paramount Network) in 2002. The sport had solid initial ratings, with the first season averaging 400-500,000 viewers and 2.3 million people tuning into the second season premiere. Here’s what attracted people.

SlamBall’s fast paced action — games are about 20-30 minutes — featured everything we as sports fans, including an 11-year old Alex Abrams at the time, love: thunderous dunks, big hits, and ample amounts of trash talk.

It also served as the perfect foil to the more buttoned up major league sports, and it captivated an audience that had a growing interest in extreme sports/stunts on the heels of shows like Jackass taking off around the same time period.

Unfortunately, contract disputes led to the league losing its initial media rights deal, and SlamBall was never able to regain its footing due to a lack of reach. There were multiple attempts to bring it back in 2008, 2012, and 2016 — they even went overseas to China with it — but they could never recapture the magic of that first run.

Guess Who’s Back

After several years of hibernation, it was announced in March that another iteration of SlamBall is coming back.

Gordon and Tollin got the band back together and raised $11 million from an A-list group of investors, including media mogul Gary Vaynerchuk, Fanatics founder Michael Rubin, and several prominent venture capital firms.

The season will start in July in Las Vegas, the hottest sports city in America as you all know, and run for six weeks, with the playoffs concluding at the end of August.

It’s completely fair to be skeptical of a wacky alternative sport that’s already failed a couple of times, but let me explain why the timing has never been better for SlamBall to come back.

Fifth Time’s the Charm

Media Rights Stability

SlamBall announced last week that it had secured a two-year agreement with ESPN, which means it will earn a rights fee and gain unparalleled access through ESPN’s distribution.

As it has been noted in prior editions, sports is the last frontier for live TV consumption, so if SlamBall can gain traction, there will always be suitors who want to pay them for their content.

Plus, there is not a lot of competition in July and early August because basketball and hockey have ended but football has not fully started, which means SlamBall has an opportunity to capture mindshare and build a following with viewers that are looking for something interesting. Along these lines, Gordon and Tollin have noted that they want SlamBall to be to the NBA what UFC is to boxing.

Lastly, a strong media presence means ancillary revenue opportunities with sponsors. Knowing that the games will be aired on ESPN changes the calculus for sponsorship deals with SlamBall because the brands will now be getting better exposure by tapping into the largest sports provider in the country — ESPN is in ~75 million households between its linear cable network and ESPN+ streaming service.

Social Media

Social media had not been developed yet during SlamBall’s first iteration, and the main platforms used now were in their infancy during the last earnest attempts to revive the sport.

Today, sports is constantly consumed on social media, and it’s also an amplifier for key messages that can bring about change. In SlamBall’s case, the hashtag #bringbackSlamBall has been viewed over 200 million times, and it was one of the driving forces for convincing Gordon and Tollin that it was time to give it another try.

Plus, sports fans are continuing to evolve into more of a highlight driven culture, particularly the younger generations. According to a recent Deloitte study, more than 90% of GenZ fans use social media to watch sports content, and over 50% of that same group uses social media as a second screen while watching sports on TV.

Accounts like House of Highlights, Overtime, and HoopsNation have tapped into this market trend and captured millions of followers in this coveted target demo by constantly posting game clips/highlights, athlete interviews, and additional shoulder content around the game and culture. This enables fans to catch things they miss and/or be constantly plugged in on what’s happening in multiple areas at once.

As you saw in the clip in the prior section, SlamBall’s action-packed games are a treasure trove of highlights, and it’s not hard to envision a massive dunk or hit doing major engagement numbers in today’s social media environment.

That engagement not only brings relevance, but it also brings revenue. Brands are always looking for opportunities to get in front of active users, so a positive social media presence could lead to lucrative sponsorship opportunities for SlamBall.

Mindset Shift with Sports

First mindset shift: investors.

As noted in last week’s article, a new model has been developing where investors to make venture capital-style bets on fledgling sports leagues. SlamBall is no different. Tollin noted that “we couldn’t come back until the market conditions were optimal for alternative sports and we had the investor group we wanted.” They appear to have found that group.

In addition to the famous people listed above, SlamBall’s cap table also includes the following hitters:

• IA Sports Ventures and Eberg Capital — co-owners of the Miami Marlins

• David Blitzer of Harris Blitzer Sports — owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Devils, Cleveland Guardians, and several other sports organizations

• Sharp Alpha — one of the preeminent sports betting and online gaming VCs

These types of investors have high business acumen, deep pockets, and huge networks in sports — all things a young enterprise like SlamBall needs.

Second mindset shift: infrastructure.

As the sports industry has grown the last 20+ years, so too has the business infrastructure around it. When SlamBall first started, they were most likely operating like a scrappy startup with no serious knowledge of how to create a sustainable sports enterprise.

Today, there are countless agencies and service providers that SlamBall can lean on to scale up quickly and follow a “playbook” to create sustainable business practices from the beginning.

One of its other investors, Legends, is a global premium experiences company that was spun out of the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees a decade ago. Now, the company is a multi-billion enterprise that has created a specific group, Legends Growth Enterprises, to invest in and help develop new sports leagues. They will be helping SlamBall with their retail, sponsorship, and other revenue-related strategies.

Third mindset shift: content strategy. 

As we have seen most recently with the success of Netflix’s F1 show, Drive to Survive, and FX’s Welcome to Wrexham, which chronicles Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s journey owning a 5th division Welsh soccer team, compelling narratives can captivate fans and catalyze a sport or team’s growth. All sports properties are turning their attention to find that next series or content that can drive similar engagement.

SlamBall’s co-founder, Mike Tollin, isn’t a bad guy to have on staff for this. He has won three Emmy’s and been a part of iconic sports projects like Coach Carter, Radio, and Varsity Blues. Most recently, he served as an executive producer for the Emmy-winning The Last Dance, the iconic documentary centered on Michael Jordan’s career at the Chicago Bulls.

And lo and behold, guess who’s leading the production on a SlamBall docuseries that will follow this year’s action? Mr. Tollin himself.

The Man in the Tramp-arena

In conclusion, there’s a lot of risk with this endeavor, and SlamBall’s track record is not super promising.

But, hope springs eternal (proud of myself for making it to the last section before dropping the first trampoline pun). The market conditions have never been more right for SlamBall. If it is ever going to work, it’s now.

Lastly, you have to give Mason Gordon and Mike Tollin credit for their perseverance and determination to bring this idea to life and then continue to look for opportunities to revive it.

Here’s hoping they can use the positive tailwinds as a springboard to success (I’ll see myself out now).

Impress Your Friends at a Cocktail Party

Want to show off your sports knowledge in a public setting but don’t have time to read the deep dive? This section is the CliffsNotes of this week’s topic

• Opener: SlamBall is back, baby! First aired in 2002 and 2003 and had a decent following, but was canceled due to TV disputes and never regained its footing

• Shot: People have tried to bring it back multiple times over the years, but the conditions were never right. Now, the two original co-founders have raised an $11 million Series A and are bringing the sport back in July.

• Chaser: I think it will work this time for three reasons. Reason 1. They have signed a media rights deal with ESPN, which gives them the stability they were missing in past iterations

• Chaser: Reason 2. Social media was not a thing during the original run. SlamBall’s fast paced action and memorable moments is perfect for today’s highlight-driven culture

• Chaser: Reason 3. The sports ecosystem has matured. SlamBall has a strong investor base, access to service providers who can give them a playbook to scale effectively, and a team that can deliver a content strategy similar to Netflix’s Drive to Survive.

“Whoa” of the Week

Insane, mind-blowing things constantly happen in the sports business world. Here was my favorite of the past week.

1. New F1 valuations came out this week — what a time to be involved in the sport. Also, a reminder that a couple of these teams were bought for $1 (not a joke) in the past few decades.

Weekly Reminder that Sports are Awesome

This newsletter is, of course, mostly centered on the business side of sports and the things that happen off the field. That being said, it’s important to remember why we fell in love with sports in the first place, though.

This section is meant to highlight the amazing things that happened in sports this week that serve as that reminder.

1. Kevin Durant and his business partner, Rich Kleiman doing good in the community.

2. We need more baseball in the UK and we needed it yesterday. First, the electric commentary

3. Second, the innovation was unbelievable. That’s a real camera shot; not a video game.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what feedback you have.

Also, if you enjoyed this breakdown, please consider sharing it with your friends and network by clicking the social media icons at the top of the newsletter.

Until next time, sports fans!

-Alex