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Finally, a sector more ludicrously hyped than AI. Speaking to Yahoo Sports recently about the launch of Project B, a startup global women’s basketball league, co-founder Grady Burnett declared that “women’s basketball is growing right now as fast as AI”. Come again? There’s no question that women’s basketball is growing nicely, a development that we should all cheer: this year’s WNBA season was the most watched ever. But it is testing credulity to suggest that the sport is growing at anything like the same speed as AI, which since 2022 has gone from the technological margins to the very center of the US economy: by some reports, AI spending accounted for half of the growth in US GDP in the first half of this year. Perhaps I’m missing the real story here and the Federal Reserve is actively keeping tabs on attendance figures at Washington Mystics v Golden State Valkyries games for signs of potential overheating in the US economy. But it seems unlikely.
Claims like Burnett’s are par for the course in the hyperventilating world of sports investment, in which new leagues intent on world domination are launched seemingly every week and the pitches, delivered at investment conferences by slick men with gleaming teeth and spotless sneakers, grow more and more clammily self-satisfied by the hour. Burnett’s league, which he co-founded with former Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice, was briefly associated with Maverick Carter and LeBron James over the summer but that pair now seems to have been removed from the picture, and the league is emerging from “stealth mode”, to use a wormy bit of tech jargon, as the pure, uncut essence of bored Silicon Valley rich guy calculation. In a crowded field, Project B may be the most insanely overcaffeinated, tech bro-addled pitch for a new sports league yet.
A recent publicity tour to promote the league has offered a masterful demonstration of Silicon Valley’s matchless gift for repackaging the concept of professional athletes performing in an arena – what you or I might call “professional sport” – as some uniquely daring feat of disruption. Project B, Burnett has said, will be a “Formula 1-style circuit played on a global stage, physically in a location where the fans exist, and digitally available to everybody”; the league, in the gloss of one journalist covering its launch “aims to employ tech strategy to a sports framework, with the goal of developing a globally-played, globally-distributed array of sports that allocates time-tested assets – i.e. games and players – in a modern, technology- and media-enhanced context.” In other words, Project B will be played in front of fans and available to watch on TV, like every other decently popular professional sport on the planet. Get a load of that blue-sky thinking, baby.
The league will be based in Singapore but stage games in six cities scattered around the globe; in years to come, the cry will be heard across the continents from harassed dads trying to corral their children in time for Project B tip-off: “Come on kids, let’s get along to the time-tested asset and watch some of our favorite time-tested assets in action!” Burnett, who made his money as a top executive at Facebook and Google, has unrolled every tech cliché imaginable in his blitz of promotion for the league: he’s talked about the “supply-demand mismatch” in women’s basketball; he’s name dropped TikTok, Web3 (a bit passé but I suppose dads need to get their fun somewhere), and Drive to Survive, the series that popularized Formula 1 in the US (as mandatory a benchmark for the modern sports investor as “Singapore” is for the aspiring autocrat); he’s boasted that “I come from a tech lens” (might be time to get a new set of spectacles) and has a “focus on eyeballs” (stop staring Grady, you’re making everyone uncomfortable); he’s rhapsodized about working with investors who can “lean in” and drive a “platform shift” (which platform he’s referring to and in which direction it is shifting remain unclear).
He’s even suggested, in the context of his league’s projected content “play”, that “we have an opportunity to discover culture and interaction through the eyes of basketball and the eyes of sports, similar to what Anthony Bourdain did with food”. Coming to your screen soon: a five-part Netflix series about Kelsey Plum eating a shawarma. If you’ve been impressed by Brittney Griner’s performances on the court, just think of what she’ll produce once she’s handed a baguette and unleashed on the cafe terraces of Paris.
There’s talking up the brand and then there’s this: a stream of smooth-brained tech bro gibberish whose only tangible effect is to suggest that the “leagues” to come will be airless little exercises in profit maximization, bearing only a superficial resemblance to what we commonly know as sport. For years, sports were the realm of the proudly inarticulate, players content to do their talking on the field and taciturn coaches who grunted through press conferences with minimal concession to syntax.
Now the talk in sports is as much about ecosystems, value-adds, core unlocks and “strategic strengths across brand, engagement and audience retention” (I just made this up but it sounds believable) as it is about trades, transfers, formations, and selections. The linguistic molestation of sport – not only in the US but in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, whose sporting landscapes are rapidly being reshaped by American-led investment and the cultural preferences that come with it – has proceeded directly from its financialization.
“You’re going to see an expansion of the definition of sports to be more focused around fandom and engaged consumers that broadens it versus just sports teams or sports adjacency businesses,” Greg Bettinelli, a partner at The Chernin Group, which has invested in Barstool and youth venture Unrivaled Sports, said at a recent sports investment conference. OK Greg, that sounds awful. Project B takes its place in a women’s basketball landscape already crowded with new entrants like the three-on-three team competition Unrivaled and Athletes Unlimited, which crowns an individual winner after a month-long competition in which players accumulate points based on their own performances and the outcome of each game in which they compete. The explosion in competitions like these is not the product of some native rise in popular hunger for weird sporting innovations; it’s driven entirely by the financialization of professional sports, and by the swarm of investors who are entering sport ravenous for places and people to inject their money into.
Naturally, the big leagues in the US and Europe still attract the largest sums but there’s also considerable growth away from the “bigs”, in volleyball, professional bull riding, mountain biking, pickleball, and elsewhere. Like second rate Warren Buffetts, the tech bros and private equity goons are sniffing for value on the fringes, in lesser known leagues and sports whose diminished present status conceals, they hope, a vast reserve of potential gains.
“I see the league growing by leaps and bounds in valuations,” David Eisen, an investor in the North American Pro Padel League, one of many recent attempts in the world of racquet sports to take down tennis (what’s wrong with tennis?) and reinvent squash for the Uber Black brigade, told The Athletic. What about growing by leaps and bounds in participation, access, popularity, cultural influence? Well, that might happen too but it’s secondary to the real business of sports investment, which is – very transparently, I should add; none of this is denied or hidden – to make money for its owners and investors.
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Are these investments just designed to create networking opportunities for the investors themselves? That’s also possible; to hear these investors speak, it often feels as if the audience they’re interested in cultivating has nothing to do with traditional fans, that what they really seek is a future in which enjoying and attending sport are the privilege of those at a higher altitude (their own altitude). This explains their smug style of speech, their preference for communicating only in chartspeak and tech squeaks. According to Marcos Del Pilar, one of the competition’s co-founders, the Pro Padel League “is a networking superconductor for athletic, like-minded, like-moneyed masters of the universe.” To which the only honest response can be: yuck, dude.
The financialization of sport is not just a bad deal for anyone priced out of live game attendance or astronomical streaming subscriptions, or anyone icky at the thought of being “targeted” by various Big Tech-derived engagement cons. It’s an offense to anyone who wants to read words in English without feeling like their brain is a ball in the latest padel match between a pair of green-juiced bigjaws who made squillions stiffing gig workers and boosting rage bait in the 2010s.
The bros are thinking big – about the size of their own future bank accounts, but also about the beautiful horizons that will open up once sport’s capture in the sticky web spun by capital and tech becomes secure. NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum last week offered an update on plans for the world’s biggest basketball league to expand to Europe, sketching out a vision in which “long-term down the road” you have “world-class infrastructure” in European cities and “supersonic travel becomes a reality”, enabling Europe to become a conference of the domestic NBA. In the future everything will be beamed and smoothed exactly to the owner-investors’ specifications. A brain-computer sporting interface, feeding live sport directly into our frontal lobes without the messy need for in-person attendance or spectatorship before a screen, may only be a decade or so away.
But in the meantime, the work of our collective lobotomization proceeds one investment soundbite at a time. “I think you can make a fortune of money investing in sports,” former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, who launched a dedicated sports investment fund last year, said recently, expressing a thesis shared by virtually every investor intent on disrupting the staid old worlds of basketball, football, trekking, and canoe. “You just don’t have much competition right now. You’ve got probably a trillion dollars’ worth of opportunities, and probably ten billion dollars of capital that’s going against it.”
Against that you also have more than a thousand years of the English language, which may be the first casualty of money’s relentless colonization of modern sport.
