Bulls of the year
It was a huge year for the business of sport, with Caitlin Clark and the WNBA leading the charge in a game-changing year for women’s basketball. She’s not alone but she is clearly the poster child for the new economic reality for women’s team sports. Clark is making everyone around her wealthier.
Explosive growth in media rights fees and overall revenues reaching the stage where several North American pro sports teams posted more than 30 per cent increases in franchise valuation, year-over-year. The television juggernaut that is the National Football League — which we’ve dubbed the new social network — closes out 2024 with an average franchise value of US$5.7 billion according to Forbes magazine. When your weakest links are still worth $4 billion and have grown by about 70 per cent since the pandemic, there’s no one to feel sorry for. That’s especially true when recent streaming deals will only drive more NFL revenue and audience in the years to come. Amazon Prime paid $100 million for the Black Friday stream last month while Netflix offered up $150 million for the NFL Christmas Day doubleheader that averaged 24 million, peaked at 27 million for a Beyonce half-time show and rallied more than 65 million unique viewers for at least part of the two games played on Wednesday of this week.
Also having bullish years in 2024: Alternate telecasts, stadium design, podcasts and collectibles. More to come on those fronts in 2025.
Bears of the year
It was already an historically bad year for the Chicago White Sox, the Major League Baseball franchise that set an all-time mark for futility despite having the advantages of operating in the third largest market in the U.S. Yet leave it to the Chicago Bears of the NFL to give them a run for the money as one of the biggest losers in the business of sport this year. The Bears (6-3 losers to the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday Night Football this week) have now lost a record 10 straight games after starting the season at 4-2.
Outside of deep playoff runs by the New York Yankees, New York Mets and New York Red Bulls, the Big Apple has been largely rotten in 2024. The biggest media market in North America has not one but two also-rans in the NFL (the 2-13 Giants in the NFC and the 4-11 Jets in the AFC), not to mention the New York Rangers, who are an absolute mess at the Christmas break despite being the second-richest franchise in the NHL according to both Forbes and Sportico.
Meanwhile, the Oakland Athletics are no more after one of the messiest and protracted break ups in North American team sport. After more than two decades of on-again, off-again talks about a new stadium in Oakland finally collapsed, the Athletics will play in Sacramento for three seasons while they work with Las Vegas stakeholders to fund and construct a new ballpark at the site of the Tropicana Hotel. Once one of the most storied blue collar sport markets in North America, Oakland is now a shell of its former self, with the Golden State Warriors of the NBA now playing at the Chase Center in San Francisco, the Oakland Raiders in Las Vegas and the old California Seals long ago morphed into the Cleveland Barons, merged with the Minnesota North Stars and ultimately relocated to Dallas in 1993.
Tom Mayenknecht is the host of The Sport Market on Sportsnet 650 on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Vancouver-based sport business commentator and principal in Emblematica Brand Builders provides a behind-the-scenes look at the sport business stories that matter most to fans. Follow Mayenknecht at: x.com/TheSportMarket.