Can the N.F.L.’s Rules for Team Ownership Survive its Skyrocketing Valuations?

Rihanna returns from a nearly four-year hiatus from live performances. The halftime show will be a high-stakes comeback for the pop star, who has been busy building three companies that helped make her the youngest self-made billionaire, according to Forbes. Her company Savage X Fenty has sold out of special edition T-shirts reading, “Rihanna Concert Interrupted by a Football Game, Weird but Whatever.”

Two Black quarterbacks face off in the Super Bowl for the first time. Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes, the starting quarterbacks of the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, have both called the milestone “historic.”

The pregame

For most of America, the Super Bowl starts on Sunday evening. But for the deal makers who use the event as a backdrop for doing business, the real game starts days before kickoff.

It’s not uncommon to attend exclusive dinners and parties during the week, and then jet out of town before the opening kickoff. “Once the game starts, it’s just a game,” said George Foster, a professor at Stanford Business School who directs the school’s sports management initiative. “It’s much more effective to get extended time fairly focused on the business relationship on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.”

Michael Rubin, the founder of the sports merchandising company Fanatics, hosted a business lunch on Friday along with the sports agent Casey Wasserman. He said about 10 of the 100 guests, who included three state governors and about half of the N.F.L.’s team owners, flew to Phoenix just for that event. “That gives you a sense of how important it was,” he said. “People fly in and out just for an event.”

Deal makers take advantage of having big players in one place. “There’s C.E.O.-to-C.E.O. contact, which is unique in sports,” said George Pyne, the founder of Bruin Capital, a sports investment company, who has hosted a party with the agent Sandy Montag before each of the past 15 Super Bowls. “The N.B.A. Finals, you never know where and when it is, so you can’t go to that. Same with the N.H.L. Same with the World Series. There’s no other event that galvanizes sports business leaders in a way that the Super Bowl does.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/business/dealbook/can-the-nfls-rules-for-team-ownership-survive-its-skyrocketing-valuations.html