Ffinally, it is a sector more ridiculously hyped than AI. Recently speaking with Yahoo Sports about the launch of Project B, a global women's basketball league startup, co-founder Grady Burnett stated that “women's basketball is now growing as fast as artificial intelligence.” Are you coming again? There is no doubt that women's basketball is doing well and we should all welcome this year's WNBA season was the most viewed in history. But the suggestion that the sport is growing at roughly the same rate as artificial intelligence, which has gone from the technological fringes to the heart of the US economy since 2022, is a plausibility test: Some reports suggest that spending on artificial intelligence have to half of US GDP growth in the first half of this year. I may be missing the real story, and the Federal Reserve is actively monitoring attendance figures for the Washington Mystics vs. Golden State Valkyries games for signs of potential overheating in the US economy. But this seems unlikely.
Statements like Burnett's are commonplace in the hyperventilating world of sports investing, in which new leagues bent on global domination are opening seemingly every week and speeches delivered at investment conferences by slick men with shiny teeth and immaculate sneakers become more and more bland and complacent by the hour. Burnett's league, which he co-founded with former Skype co-founder Jeff Prentice, was briefly associated with Maverick Carter and LeBron James over the summer, but the pair now seem be deleted Judging by the picture, the league is emerging from “stealth mode,” to use the wormy tech jargon, as the pure, uncut essence of the bored calculations of rich guys in Silicon Valley. In a crowded field, Project B may be the most insanely over-caffeinated and technologically confusing proposal for a new sports league.
The league's recent publicity tour was a masterful demonstration of Silicon Valley's unparalleled gift for reimagining the concept of professional athletes competing in the arena—what you or I might call “pro sports”—as some unique, bold, disruptive feat. Project B, according to Burnett, will be “a Formula 1-style track held on a global stage, physically where the fans are, and accessible to everyone digitally”; league, in the shine of one journalist covering its launch “seeks to use technology strategy in the sports environment with the goal of developing a globally distributed and globally distributed set of sports that distributes time-tested assets, i.e. games and players, in a modern, technological and media context.” In other words, Project B will be played in front of fans and available to watch on television, just like any other reasonably popular professional sport on the planet. Get inspired by those dreamy thoughts, baby.
The league will be based in Singapore but will play games in six cities spread around the world; In the coming years, the cry of exhausted fathers trying to corral their children in time for the start of Project B will be heard on every continent: “Come on kids, let's get busy with a time-tested asset and see some of our favorite time-tested assets in action!” Burnett, who made his money as an executive at Facebook and Google, used every tech cliché imaginable in his bid to promote the league: He talked about the “supply and demand mismatch” in women's basketball; his name dropped on TikTok, Web3 (a bit outdated, but I guess dads need somewhere to entertain themselves) and Drive to Survive, the series that popularized Formula 1 in the US (as much a must-have reference point for the modern sports investor as “Singapore” – for an aspiring autocrat); he boasted that “I have a tech lens” (maybe it's time to get a new set of glasses) and “focus on the eyeballs” (stop staring at Grady, you're making everyone uncomfortable); he's excited about working with investors who can “bail in” and lead a “platform shift” (which platform he's talking about and what direction it's heading remains unclear).
In the context of his league's planned “game” content, he even suggested that “we have the opportunity to discover culture and interaction through the eyes of basketball and sports, much like Anthony Bourdain did with food.” Coming soon to your screens: a five-part Netflix series about Kelsey Plum eating shawarma. If you've been impressed by Brittney Greiner's performance on the court, just think about what she'll show when she becomes… handed over baguette and released onto the terraces of Parisian cafes.
There's talk of branding, and then there's this: a stream of stupid technical gobbledygook whose only tangible effect is to suggest that the coming “leagues” will be airless little exercises in profit maximization, bearing only a passing resemblance to what we commonly call sports. For years, sport was the realm of the proudly inarticulate, with players content to do the talking on the field and silent coaches grousing at press conferences with minimal concessions to syntax.
There is now as much talk in sport about ecosystems, added value, unlocking core capabilities and “strategic brand benefits, audience engagement and retention” (I just made that up, but it rings true) as there is about deals, transfers, formations and selection. The linguistic oppression of sports—not just in the United States, but also in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, where the sporting landscape is rapidly changing thanks to American-led investment and associated cultural preferences—stems directly from its financialization.
“You'll see an expansion of the definition of sports to be more focused on fans and engaged consumers, which will broaden it from sports teams or sports businesses,” Greg Bettinelli, a partner at The Chernin Group, which has invested in Barstool and youth venture Unrivaled Sports. said at a recent sports investing conference. Okay, Greg, that sounds terrible. Project B takes its place in a women's basketball game already crowded with new entrants, such as the three-on-three team competition Unrivaled and Athletes Unlimited, which crowns an individual winner after a month-long competition in which players score points based on their own performances and the results of each game in which they compete. The dramatic increase in the number of competitions like these is not the result of some natural increase in popular hunger for strange sporting innovations; it is entirely driven by the financialization of professional sports and the mass of investors who come into sports hungry for places and people to invest their money in.
Naturally, the major leagues in the U.S. and Europe continue to attract the largest amounts of money, but there is also significant growth outside of the “majors” in volleyball, professional bull riding, mountain biking, pickleball and more. Like the second-rate Warren Buffetts, the tech bros and private equity cutthroats are seeking profit on the fringes, in lesser-known leagues and sports whose current status masks what they hope is a huge reservoir of potential gains.
“I see league prices going up by leaps and bounds,” David Eisen, investor in the North American Professional Padel League, one of many recent attempts in the racquet sports world to kill tennis (what's wrong with tennis?) and reinvent squash for the Uber Black brigade. said Athletic. What about the exponential growth in participation, access, popularity, cultural influence? Well, that can happen too, but it's secondary to the actual business of sports investing, which – I should add – is very transparent; none of this is denied or hidden – to make money for its owners and investors.
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Are these investments only intended to create networking opportunities for the investors themselves? This is also possible; When you hear these investors speak, you often get the impression that the audience they are interested in cultivating has nothing in common with traditional fans, that what they are really looking for is a future in which enjoying and playing sports becomes the privilege of those at a higher altitude (their own altitude). This explains their smug style of speech, their preference to communicate only in chartyak and technical squeaks. According to Marcos Del Pilarone of the co-founders of the competition, Liga Pro Padel, “is a networked superconductor for sports, like-minded people and masters of the universe with the same money.” To which the only honest answer can be: ugh, dude.
Sports funding isn't just a bad deal for those lacking live game attendance or astronomical streaming subscriptions, or those who resent the idea of being “targeted” by the various scams associated with Big Tech involvement. It's an insult 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 big green juice jaws that in the 2010s had squillions straining gig workers and beefing up rage bait.
The brothers are thinking big—about the size of their future bank accounts, but also about the wonderful horizons that will open up once the sport's grip on the sticky web of capital and technology is safe. NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum last week proposed an update on the world's largest basketball league's plans to expand into Europe, outlining a vision that “in the long term” you will have “world class infrastructure” in European cities and “supersonic travel will become a reality” allowing Europe to become the NBA's national conference. In the future, everything will be polished and polished exactly according to the wishes of the owner-investors. A sports brain-computer interface that would stream live sporting events directly into our frontal lobes without the need for in-person presence or watching in front of a screen may be just a decade or so away.
But in the meantime, the work of our collective lobotomy continues, one investment piece at a time. “I think you can make a fortune investing in sports,” said former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, who launched a dedicated sports investment fund last year. said he recently expressed a thesis shared by virtually all investors looking to disrupt the established old worlds of basketball, football, trekking and canoeing. “You just don't have a lot of competition right now. You probably have a trillion dollars of opportunity and probably ten billion dollars of capital going against it.”
Instead, you have over a thousand years of history of the English language, which may have been the first victim of the relentless monetary colonization of modern sport.
