Will Cain Country - Joe Pompliano: American Pro Sports League Power Rankings and Gambling's Impact On Sports

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

On this edition of The Will Cain Show’s Friday sports episode, Will sits down with Sports and Business writer at the ‘Huddle Up’ Substack & Host of ‘The Joe Pomp Show,’ Joe Pompliano to rank the top American sports leagues from one to five, how unavoidable gambling is becoming to the sports viewing experience, and where all the leagues are headed in an uncertain future.   Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail]   Subscribe to The Will Cain Show on YouTube here: Watch The Will Cain Show!   Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ranking the top American sports leagues from one to five. And how avoidable is our future as sports and society in gambling on your phone and at every sports arena? It's the Will Kane Show, normally streaming live every Monday through Thursday, at 12 o'clock eastern time at foxnews.com on the Fox News YouTube channel and the Fox News Facebook page. Always available by subscribing at Apple or on Spotify, as is this episode of Canaan Sports. Absolutely fascinating conversation that I did not expect that went on for one hour. Joe Pomfleiano is a sports and business writer.

I follow him on X. He has a substack, The Huddle Up, and a podcast, The Joe Pomp Show. we ended up after talking about the top five sports leagues ranking them how they got there what they need to become a national sports talking about how unavoidable this future is of gambling and honestly what it means for society as we've seen a model in europe cover all kinds of topics here lebron tom brady hockey and of course the NFL but i found it absolutely fascinating we talk about the future of sports and society when it's gets to gambling. Here's Joe Pompiliano. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do.

Take the quiz every day at thequiz.com. Then come back here to see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz. Fox News Audio presents unsolved with James Patterson. Every crime tells the story. But some stories are left unfinished. Somebody knows. Real cases, real people.

Listen and follow now at Fox True Crime. dot com i'm janestine join me every sunday as i focus on stories of hope and people who are truly rays of sunshine in their community and across the world listen and follow now at foxnews podcast dot combe joe pompliano is a sports and business writer at the huddle up substack he's well the host of the joe pomp show which you can check out wherever you get your audio entertainment he joins us now what's up joe i'm goodwill how are you I'm pretty good this morning. You know, I've been following you for quite some time.

You do an interesting thing there at the intersection of sports and business. We're in that slow period after the NFL before March Madness and before anyone really cares about the NBA. But it kind of makes it the perfect time as hockey, to some extent, baseball, certainly the NBA, vie for the public's attention, to step back, survey the lands, and ask you this question, Joe. If I asked you to rank the top five sports leagues in America,

in order of relevance and importance and as a business model, how would you do it from five through one? Give us the overview, and then we'll dive into each one. Okay, so you want to start at the bottom. All right, so I think Major League Soccer is five, NHL is four, MLB is, three, NBA is two, NFL is one. And my caveat to this would be that if you really wanted to, you could put college football in between one and two, right? Like one, one B to the NFL at

1A. But I think college football is probably more prominent in a bigger business than the NBA at this point. Let's dive in. Let's start with college football. I was curious what you would do with college football. I think it is probably number two, but it is a far, and I'm a huge college football fan. But it is a far smaller enterprise than the NFL. When you look at ratings, it's hard to know where revenue as a whole is in college football. But are we confident at this point that college football as a national interest? And I'm from Texas and my point of focus is the South. And it would almost certainly be true in the South. But I did live in New York for 15 years, so I've seen another way of viewing sports. Are we confident that college football is above the NBA

in major league baseball on a national level i think so and i think what we've seen is a lot of the sports leagues primarily at the major league level have become uh there's been this like line of division where you're either a national league or a regional league right and i think that's baseball's problem really is baseball at this point is very regionalized right like they get a ton of attendance a lot of people go to the games they play a ton of games each year so a big part of their business is ticket sales which is sort of the same thing for major league soccer nch l to a degree although they get certain good TV ratings in specific markets. But I think college football, the biggest problem right now is that it's regional to a degree and then it becomes national when the matchups make sense,

right? So when, you know, a Texas plays a Georgia or something like that, that'll get national viewers into it. But otherwise it becomes regional because the matchups don't always make sense, right? You know this. A lot of the teams, they kind of had their schedule with easy games at the beginning, these games where they're actually paying the other schools to come and play them. Whereas if you had a model that was more similar to the NFL where everyone was on more of an even playing field, perhaps those ratings would become more national than they are local for some of these other games. Now, I actually think college football, while it is still very far off from the NFL, it's probably the NFL's biggest competitor.

And it doesn't really make a lot of sense because they're the same sport, right? Like you would think college football feeds into the NFL and makes it more popular. And maybe it does. But if you were to build a world where you took the SEC in the Big Ten, maybe even, just the top teams added in a Notre Dame and a couple of other schools from other conferences, and you created a super conference of some sorts, which a lot of people have been talking about and trying to do. Maybe that brings you more national TV viewership than some of the local games today that aren't as competitive when a Texas plays UT San Antonio, right,

where it's not as interesting to the national audience. All right, let's talk a minute for about the NBA. Yeah. The NBA is such a hard conversation to have because it has become a straw man for the cultural battles of America. I actually feel like I'm a person who is pretty uniquely qualified to talk about it, acknowledging its cultural problems, but still suggesting, I love the NBA. I still watch the Dallas Mavericks.

I woke up this morning to make sure that they beat the Charlotte Hornets. But I do acknowledge the problems with the NBA. Their NBA All-Star Game, you posted this the other day, the NBA All-Star Games ratings have absolutely cratered. I think you posted in 1993, 22 million people watched the All-Star game, and then this year in 2025, was it five million watched the All-Star game?

Yeah, less than five, yeah. Less than five million. Which, okay, it's the All-Star game. But we've seen something similar happen, Joe, in the NBA finals. We just saw the NBA post its highest regular season ratings this week of the season. And that was Luca Donchich's, this is hard for me to say,

Los Angeles Lakers taking on the Dallas Mavericks. But those are numbers, Joe, was two and a half million. To be honest, I beat that most days on the Will Kane show on Fox. Yeah, I think the NBA has a few very specific problems. And I'll caveat this with, like, I'm an NBA fan too. I still think the NBA is a great business. They do over $10 billion in revenue. The players make a ton of money.

sponsorships, all of that stuff. Like, the business is big. The idea that the NBA is going to go away anytime soon just isn't true, right? Like, it's a big business. But I think one of the core problems over the last few years is that the league has catered more to the players than the fans, right? If you think about in the NBA, you can make a trade request and be on a new team within a week.

In the NFL, that obviously doesn't happen because of some of the contract situations. The players make a ton of money. There's absolutely no incentive that you can give them in the All-Star game to make them play hard, right? Because this year, I think there was a $1.8 million prize pool for the players, right? So everyone, regardless of if you didn't win a single game in that little tournament they had or you won the championship, you were making $50,000, $100,000, $150,000. That doesn't matter to someone who's making $50 to $60 million a year. You could increase that to $10 million, and it's not going to matter either, right? So that's why I think the NHL's model for the four nations

was so great because most of the players actually aren't born in the United States where the NBA, 75% of the players are still American-born players. You'd have to take out some of those American-born players if you wanted to make a world versus the USA All-Star game. It just wouldn't work. So the NBA is in sort of this weird situation. I also think part of the problem, and we can get into this with MLB, I know you guys have talked about it, is that TV has changed, right?

Like if you think about the NBA, a lot of their games are still on cable. Many people before Christmas were talking about the NBA's decline in ratings. It was down 15 or 20 percent year every year and everyone was saying the NBA was dying. Adam Silver was actually going on a lot of shows and talking about ideas of how to regenerate viewership and get more viewers to come into the games, reducing the length of quarters and other things like that. But what you saw happen was that ESPN simply decided to broadcast or simulcast those games on ABC as well, right?

And you know as someone who's in the TV business how much of a difference that actually makes. So the NFL has done this fantastically, where they have CVS, they have Fox, they obviously have ESPN with Monday Night Football, but a lot of those games are now simulcast on ABC as well and they do the doubleheaders. So I think the NBA has fallen a little bit behind and maybe with some of their new deals that helps. But we're seeing this shift to streaming.

And I think at the end of the day, this is part of the reason why Major League Baseball got out of business with ESPN. Now, this wasn't Major League Baseball's idea or option, right? ESPN essentially told them we're not going to pay what we're paying. But at the end of the day, you have to look at other options because ESPN Sunday Night Baseball, that's a show that should be averaging, you know,

mid-seven figures every single Sunday night. at least it was back in the day, and now it's averaging one and a half million viewers last year. So this isn't good viewership numbers. I do think sports are still the last thing that's keeping live TV viewership alive. I mean, 90 to 95 out of the top programs each year are on live television from sports. But that's all football, right? It's all either the NFL or college football. Maybe there's an NBA finals game mixed in if the series goes seven games. But even if you look at baseball, I mean, you had the best matchup you could possibly imagine between the Dodgers and the Yankees last year. And that number didn't do nearly as well as I think some people anticipated,

primarily because it wasn't a great series. But baseball, to our earlier point, is much more regionalized now than it was back in the day. Okay, this is the conversation I think we have to have at some point at a deeper level. And I put it off there for a moment, but the idea of national versus regional attention. So having hosted a daily national sports radio show for it ended up being almost three years, you learn a couple of things about when you're trying to appeal to a national audience that while I listen to sports radio today, and everyone knows I live in Dallas, I listen to local sports talk radio. I don't put it over on any nationally syndicated program, and no matter how good they are. And some of them are really good. Colin Coward is really

good at what he does. But I'm not going to listen to him very often because if I'm going to be listening to sports talk, I want to listen to things that I am passionate about. Same thing with what I read. I have subscriptions to several different Texas Longhorns recruiting websites. I pay for The Athletic, which I think is a really good sports publication. But what the athletics algorithm does is it tailors its content to the things it knows that I like. And I also signify to it. I follow these five teams. So when I go to The Athletic every day, my homepage is populated with stories about teams that I care about and I like. For the record, it's going to throw Maverick stories at me,

Cowboys, Longhorns, Manchester City, Rangers, and Star's stories straight at me. So I'm not inundated with anything that you would be sold is a national story. Now, they'll hit my algo, but they'll be about 20% maybe of the content that is fed to me on the athletic. So what you learn when you're doing a national radio show is there's only a few topics that actually works.

And it really comes down to like these handful of things. When I was doing it, you could talk LeBron. LeBron James garnered a national audience. But that was it when it came to the NBA. There was an ongoing debate at that time whether or not Kevin Durant had arrived at the level that a national audience would listen to content about Kevin Durant. Then it was the NFL. But you learn very quickly.

That doesn't mean you can talk, Jags, it just doesn't work nationally so what you learn is you can talk about quarterbacks quarterbacks work nationally who ranks where this guy versus that guy and somebody in in Nebraska will be in on a dac prescott versus carson wince debate that was a debate in 2018 19 that's what works so what what i think the takeaway is is just very few things that bring us together as a national audience. We are, in sports, a regional audience. And I don't think that's just about Major League Baseball, although they're a big one.

We knew you could not talk baseball. We tried Yankees, and it works a little tiny bit, but even the Yankees or Dodgers don't work. Baseball is regional, but my argument would be, if we're being honest, almost all sports are regional except for a fraction of the NFL attention. span. Do you think that the media has anything, like, so you just, you talked about what you're able to debate because it garners a national audience, but it feels like there's this ongoing debate. I mean, LeBron literally talked about it last night, I think it was, where he said,

why would you want to be the face of the NBA when all the guys covering the NBA talk crap about the NBA and say how bad of a product it is? Do you feed into that that there's anything there relative to the guys that are covering the leagues where they're either promoting it or trashing it? I don't know. I think to some extent that's that's, to be honest, an overly coddled athlete that's used to adoration that doesn't understand that the price of fame and stardom is not just all positivity. I mean, ask Donald Trump. You know, I mean, anyone who becomes valuable in the face of something is going to be a divisive figure. We could have psychiatrists in to discuss with us why, but like people love to hate. They love.

and hate. They did that with LeBron. They did it with Tom Brady. They do it with Donald Trump. It's the price. And don't pretend for a moment. It's been some life of persecution for LeBron James. LeBron James has benefited greatly from this fact of psychology. He has made, I don't know, is he a billionaire? If he's not a billionaire, he's on the verge of billionaire status, you know. So point to me the guy who's ever held that seat who, you know, had 100% adoration. And by the the answer to that might be Michael Jordan. I mean, he's the closest. And I don't think we, you or I or anyone listening can fully appreciate the uniqueness of Michael Jordan.

Yeah, I would agree that it's probably Michael Jordan. And that's sort of the price you have to pay, right? If you think about not only that, but it's also what makes these guys so valuable, right? Like a Caitlin Clark is a great example of this. Caitlin Clark has essentially done everything you would want an athlete to do over the last number of years, right? She's been absolute box office. She's brought the entire sport in leagues that she's played in up with her. She's made everyone a ton of money, whether you're with her or against her.

Everyone in the league has made a ton of money. The broadcasters, the league, this team owners, et cetera. Yet, she is universally hated by a percentage of the country just for being good at basketball, right? Which is sort of this weird story because, you know, people like to use her in the culture war that exists in America today. But at the end of the day, I don't really think she's done anything to warrant that, right? Like she doesn't ever talk about politics publicly. She doesn't necessarily go in and pick one side of the other. She plays basketball.

She usually says the right things. And people like to just pick a side. And to your point, either love her or you hate her. But at the end of the day, that's probably good for her and the leagues. I mean, I don't think we have to dive into it. But the Caitlin Clark conversation is inescapably tied to race. It just is. and that's just in my estimation like a doctor looking at a patient and going what's the diagnosis

the diagnosis of the divisiveness of katelyn clark is about race now but i want to think about this michael jordan thing for a moment because i think it tells us something about the sports leagues if i were to come up with somebody else as i said that to you and you were talking i don't think katelyn clark is the first place that i go in my mind it's actually wain gretzky he although that reveals a little bit of ignorance for me in that he didn't have a 100% approval rating because people in Canada got so mad when he came to America, when he signed with the Los Angeles Kings. But I think that the other problem for the NBA, that's the umbrella under which we're having this conversation right now, is that we lived in this moment of time where there were basically

three and then four broadcast channels, right? And because of that, it forced us into national conversations that we wouldn't naturally have with our regional interest in sports. So if you could see the Lakers and Celtics only on a national broadcast on NBC, it made it national by scarcity, by a lack of options, right? And like you said, I agree that the NFL getting tied to the broadcast networks was real key in its, in its past and current success. But when our entertainment options fractured up and the NBA got pushed to cable, I think that was a more accurate reflection. It allowed our natural instincts to get more obvious, which is, hey, you know what, I only care so much about the Lakers and Celtics. I care about the Mavericks. And you, Joe,

wherever you live, let's pretend for a moment it's Orlando. You care about the magic. You know, I just think that's how most people consume sports. And the fact that the NBA final, don't rate takes us back to that. The finals will be on broadcast. But we just only care so much about whatever teams end up in the NBA finals because we don't follow it as a national sport. LeBron was a somewhat extension of Jordan. That's why I told you he worked as a national conversation.

But there's just, it really honestly shows a unique moment in time and the unique characters that were Jordan Gretzky and then LeBron. So when you were talking there, I was thinking of two other people, and I'm curious if you agree, but the only other two that I could think of off the top of my head were Tiger Woods, who is sort of, I think universally loved by pretty much everyone,

even though he's done, you know, has a sort of checkered pass, but he was just such a different figure than anyone else we've seen in the golf world, and I think universally celebrated because of that. I think Tigers' corollary, if we're drawing these at analogies, is Caitlin Clark.

those two have a lot of crossover taking a sport that was capped out at a certain attention span level to a new audience to new heights and race was part of each of their story so different than jordan those two are pioneers maybe they can be compared to magic and and bird in that those two guys are responsible for taking the NBA to a national audience that jordan then um capitalized on that's what Tiger did for golf. And that's what many hope Caitlin Clark does for the WNBA. Yeah. And I think to the WMBA's point,

what they have to be careful about is if you look at golf today, I think they got way too comfortable in thinking that it was the product versus Tiger that was giving them so much popularity, right? And what I mean by that is if you think about golf, the TV product really isn't that great because not, there's so many tournaments, half the guys don't even play in half the tournaments. If they show up, your favorite player may not play well,

maybe he doesn't even make the cut. If he does make the cut, you're committing four days to it, right? Four long days of TV covers that you have to watch the tournament. And then when you watch the tournament, 60% of the broadcast is interviews or commercials. You're rarely ever seeing actual action and golf shots. So it's just not a great TV product. And we've seen that with Tiger kind of taking a step back over the years, the numbers have fallen since his master's win in 2019 to what he's done over the past two decades.

So when we talk about the WMBA, the WMBA needs to be careful. around not thinking that it's specifically them and leaning more into Caitlin Clark and her popularity. And I think Nike made a huge mistake over the last two years by not promoting her even more than they did. All the other players seem to realize that if they associate themselves with Caitlin Clark from a race perspective, that it's beneficial to them, right? Angel Reese, sure, she's a fine player. I don't really care to get into the argument of whether she's good or not. But undoubtedly, I think everyone can admit that she benefited from what she did in the national championship game against Caitlin Clark. That made her immensely more popular than she was

beforehand. And that's part of the reason why she's still doing it today saying, no, I'm the reason the WMBA is popular. She knows what she's doing. Asia Wilson, she's a phenomenal player. But why did she keep a secret that she was not getting a signature shoot with Nike for a year and a half and then tweet out cryptic messages when Caitlin Clark got one saying that she was denied and all this other things when she knew the whole time that she was getting a signature shoot? She did it because she wanted to attach herself to Caitlin Clark and knew that that would make her more popular and her shoes sell more.

So I think that other WMBA players have realized that Caitlin Clark is the meal ticket at this point and now it's up to the WMBA to realize, okay, let's ride this for as long as we can. Maybe our product benefits as well. I don't know if that will work for Asia Wilson or Angel Reese, but if your theory is correct, what someone should have done in golf,

it was impossible because nobody was on his level. was, would have been to become the rival to Tiger Woods. That would have elevated them individually. And it might have helped golf if his, if he was capable of taking the mantle on, you know, after Tiger imploded his first implosion, you know, then they could have been sort of someone who rode the wake of Tiger Woods and then inherits the mantle.

I'll, you know, one of the most interesting storylines in golf for me over the last you know 10 years besides and this is unique to me and I think this is tied to the regionalism of sports is I followed Jordan's beats rise and now I follow Scotty Sheffler's rise because they're Texas guys you know um but but the storyline that was most interesting me from a national perspective was the rivalry between bryson de chanboe and brooks keppka that was interesting to me you know so I think you're you're right I don't know how calculated Wilson and Reese are but if somebody could have done that with Tiger, it might have been good for the sport and certainly good for that person to be his

rival. Yeah, and that's what sells at every sports league, right? Like, if you think about why ESPN back in the day, certainly, but even still some today, the joke is, right, they just compare who the goat is, LeBron or Michael Jordan. It's because these rivalries sell, especially theoretical rivalries that you can't solve, right? If you think about the WMBA and Reese and Caitlin Clark, they rarely ever actually play each other, right? They don't play the same position. They're never actually guarding each other. It's something that can't really be solved. And that's why it's sort of the perfect debate because it has the race aspect, it has the competition and the rivalry, but it also can't be solved. If it was, okay, what team is better, you can go solve

that, right? In the NFL, NBA, whatever, it happens all the time where these two teams meet, they play, one side wins. But the idea of why it's so powerful is because these arguments can never be solved, right? One person might say, Michael Jordan was a different animal back in the day. The other person might say the NBA has gotten so much more skilled and better. There's no right a wrong answer and it can't be solved. And those stories are what takes a regional sport into the national conversation.

And I think you're exactly right. And this isn't unique to casual soccer observers. Every soccer observer will know and have had and has a take on Messi versus Ronaldo. That rivalry is huge for that global sport.

It just is. Okay, you also mentioned that you had a second name that you thought of while I was talking. Michael Phelps. And the reason I think Michael Phelps is because I think he has an added benefit from doing it from an Olympic perspective, right? Americans love their country, mostly, and want to see their Olympians do well. So I don't know if that's the same thing because sort of doing it under the American flag

is I would consider cheating to a degree relative to Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. But I can't really think that many people that hate Michael Phelps, right? When he was winning all those gold medals at the Olympics, Everyone universally celebrated that. And now he's become this sort of, it's a niche sport to a degree, whereas a lot of the other sports are more popular. But he was one of the other names where I was thinking of myself, like, most people, if you ask about Michael Phelps, yeah, he's great. They love him. He worked really hard.

He won a bunch of a meddles. He's American. Whereas the other leagues have a difficult time doing that because there's fans of other teams versus other countries. So I think the diagnosis that I'm pushing towards here with you, Joe, is that if you think about the future of sports, and then we're going to re-retroactively apply it back to the leagues for a moment, I have said this for quite some time. I think the next great disruption in sports media is at the local sports level. And I think, you know, we've seen elements of that with like rivals who does a good job.

And by the way, all their competitors, 24-7. at the college sports level. But I think that by nature, the average sports fan is a regional sports fan. And I think that applies to every sport, including the NFL. Okay? So if that's where attention and passion are located,

that's where the disruption in media will exist. And by the way, it's still dominated by an ancient medium, which is local radio, and to some extent blogs, right? Local radio and blogs are, where regional and local sports exist. But if you're going to try to play in the realm of national audience,

you need to find a storyline in the most successful historical storyline is either a transcendent star whom you cannot bank on finding, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Caitlin Clark, LeBron James, or a rivalry, a storyline. And this is the story of boxing. like that's why boxing mattered we can talk about the merits of the sport and that all has to be part of it that's like a necessary but not sufficient component to the sport you got to be somewhat entertaining people have to be in on the concept right of the sport but to go to the level of becoming national you got to find that rivalry and um I actually think it's a problem for UFC I think UFC is great and it's risen and it's done great but the turnover and its champions is a problem we have to get to know you we've got to invest in you and then we've got to find a rival to you

to have this story developed and the best stories so far in UFC have probably been Connor McGregor and Rhonda Rousey. That's the biggest names you would say and I don't care if there's a huge UFC fan that disagrees with me because we're talking about actually getting

casuals in on your sport so I think that's the recipe. Now the question is is that possible or necessary for sports like Major League Baseball, NHL, or MLS, who want to rise up from 3, 4, 5.

Well, I think that's why the Dodgers signed Otani to all that money, right? Because they knew that they were basically buying Japan. And now they just did that with another pitcher from Japan and other people as well. They're saying, okay, we can take a team that is regional, but now make it more global, which is going to bring us way more money than we're going to pay him.

And we saw that in the first year. Someone told me that they did over $100 million in additional revenue just from signing Otani. that obviously some of the contract is deferred, but they're paying them $2 million a year. So that's a home run, probably one of the greatest signings ever, even at that high dollar figure. But the other thing I was thinking about, too, and it's an interesting way to look at it, is I almost feel like some of the problem with the national viewership for some of these leagues is due to

a lot of the games looking the same, right? Like if you think about sports leagues over time, they're sort of an ebb and a flow to this and it changes, but a lot of them have reached sort of max efficiency, right? If you think about the NBA, the number one problem everyone complains about is the three-point shooting. You know how many teams are going to, how many threes everyone's going to shoot a game. All the games, whether you're watching your local team or the Lakers versus Celtics, they all sort of look the same at this point. Some teams getting either blown out and the other teams making a bunch of threes. They all look very similar.

The same thing can be said for baseball. We went from a world where if you hit 300, you were a great player. Now, you need to hit 40, 50 home runs a year to be considered a great player. They're optimizing launch angles. They know that you have to hit more home runs. You've got to get guys on base and score more runs that way. The same thing can be said about the NFL with the diminishing value of the running back relative to the passing game. So I think the other problem is that a lot of the games look the same.

And if you're not seeing that diversity relative to your local team, maybe it's less interesting to watch. I love this theory. I don't know how much of it is true, but I'm inclined to believe one of my producers, Tenfo, Patrick's a big believer. in the problem of refinement theory that everything, not just sports, reaches a peak refinement. You points out, and you may have seen this, Joe,

like we're down to basically three colors of cars at this point. We've refined car design and car taste down to gray, white, and black. And if we rewind the clock to the 1970s, you would have seen more green cars, more yellow cars, you know. But we keep refining it until architecture and interior design

and everything kind of looks the same, no matter where you go. And sports is no different, where analytics has pushed us into the three-point game. And I started smiling when you wanted this theory because I just got this text yesterday from one of my kids, you know, prior youth soccer coaches. My boys were both very into soccer. And it's a YouTube video that I haven't watched yet, but it says the title of it is, from Ronaldinho to robots, how football killed creativity, talking about soccer. And soccer is actually at the forefront of this. you could argue even before basketball, it understood the nature of spacing, it understood therefore how you do that. And honestly, what we have to grapple with is the game gets better.

Like the team that figures these things out is a great team, you know, and intellectually and analytically, you're right. You should play this way in order to maximize your opportunity to win. And the guy that does it is a genius. But as everybody else figures it out, we all start to look the same. And it all, every game unfolds the same way. And, And I think everybody's noticing that with the NBA in particular, with three-point, what are we looking at? How many three-point attempts per game? It's like, I mean, the Celtics are shooting 40 a game sometimes, you know, it's gotten to the point where they won't ever, they literally won't shoot a mid-range shot, which is, you know, people will complain about it and I agree to a degree, but it's what the analytics are telling them are going to help them win. I mean, they literally won the NBA championship last year.

So it's hard to argue about whether that's efficient or not. But I think the other thing, too, is that the league commissioners and the owners are incentivized for this stuff to happen, right? If you think about the leagues themselves, baseball games used to take over three hours. Then they implemented the pitch clock. They did a bunch of things with shifts and pitching changes and stuff like that. They drastically reduce them. Adam Silver just mentioned it the other day that he wants to bring quarters down from 12 minute quarters to 10 minute quarters. Why does he want to do that?

Because he wants to get the broadcast window at two hours or under. And the idea is that every broadcast is going to be the same now because it fits the television. window to attract the most viewers. Now, my argument would be that the NBA could probably just start their games on time and maybe get to the two-hour window. But my point is that the leagues and the commissioners are incentivized for this same thing to happen because the networks are telling them this is what people want from an attention basis. So people will argue about these things at the end of the day, but you know this better than anyone. These networks and these media companies, they're looking at the data. They know exactly like when Bronny James had his first

preseason game. I saw a bunch of tweets on Twitter or X saying, why is he on the front page of ESPN? No one cares about Ronnie James. He scored two points in the preseason game. Why are they debating this? And they're debating it because people are telling them on their website that that's what they want to see. You talked about the algorithm on the athletic. It's the same thing on all these other websites. That's what you want to see. And I think people are kidding themselves if they think they're smarter than those algorithms um there was another angle to this that i wanted to go what was it you said something totally love never this never happens to me i know i want to go somewhere with curiosity i don't know i don't know it'll come to me in a second um

do you think oh i know what it is okay the other thing is which of these games we also treat all these sports exactly the same as though um even the way you and i are analyzing it i i think it was derrick thompson at the atlantic who wrote this who's sort of a political culture guy sometimes does sports he said football joe though is uniquely a game made for television especially in the current age so i was having a conversation with this fox executive and it was about honestly it was about the kevin costner series on fox nation on yellowstone the parks and he's doing one of you know he was telling me it's four 30 minute episodes i said oh that's interesting and he's and somehow came up like well you could do a two-hour documentary he goes nobody watches two-hour documentaries

nobody will click on it nobody will sign up for two hours but they will sign up for 30 minutes and that 30 minutes easily binges into two hours you know if you're if you continue on that's how we that's how we we bite-sized things now in culture and i was then i shared with him this thing thompson wrote he was like well the NFL is perfect made football is perfectly made for for bite-sized drama over a two two and a half hour window three-hour window every third down certainly every fourth down is a mini drama you're signing up you're on the edge of your seat let's call it every 15 20 minutes in the NFL in the NBA there's really only two minutes of drama and it's the final two minutes of the game the rest of the entirety of the product you're watching for oh that's cool you know that's that's was a cool shot that was a cool play that was athletic from this guy but that doesn't have the same currency as those many dramas that are drug out over the length of a football game now you could argue baseball does lend itself to those many dramas and it hasn't capitalized on it and hockey is

different in soccer would be more like hockey where it's like it what feels like nothing happening and all of a sudden an explosion of things happening that are unpredictable totally unpredictable oh my god i didn't see that coming so i don't know i do think the NFL is perfectly built for the way we consume content yeah and i think the NFL i love this theory by the way because i i totally agree i think the NFL though the secret there is that it builds up to that right you know when that drama is going to happen when third down comes up whereas in soccer or even basketball or even baseball you don't know when a home run's going to be hit right so it's hard to convince someone to commit themselves to a three hour game or two an half hour game and say okay during this game

there's going to be three surprise moments. Like, sure, maybe that's fun. But in football, you know exactly when it's going to be happening because, okay, second down, they don't get it. Now it's third down. We know this is going to be awesome and it's going to be important. So I think that's a big piece of it. My other piece to add onto this is that I think it's going to become even more important

and a big reason why the NFL is going to be more successful in the future because of betting, right? So when you think about sports betting, you know, everyone has their own kind of take on whether sports betting is a good thing or a bad thing. But let's just pretend it's neutral. and people can go do whatever they want. And if you like sports betting, great, go bet on the NFL. I think what we're going to see is the sports betting companies are going to find a way, technologically wise, eventually, to bet in between plays on every single play.

Right. So you're going to see, okay, this next play is going to be a runner or a pass. And it's a little bit difficult right now. Draft Kings is trying this with a company that they acquired called Simple Bet, where it's in-game betting, right? So it's a little bit difficult now because you, YouTube TV is delayed by, I don't know, 30 seconds or something like that, but if you can get those latency issues down and all of a sudden you're able to bet on every mini drama that goes into a play, that becomes much more interesting to the leagues because what do we know? We know that people bet on games.

They're more likely to watch that game. Betting is obviously becoming more important. You know, when states like Texas eventually legalize at California, other places like that, you're now accessing a much larger percentage of the population. Again, whether that's good or bad, I'm sort of indifferent, but it becomes much more important to a league like the NFL. whereas a league like baseball, maybe it's not as important. All right, I want to set aside the moral side of gambling as well for a minute. Dave Ramsey, for example, I just saw Dave Ramsey in the past maybe 24 hours was talking about how bad it is on people and where we are in terms of a society with gambling addiction.

I'm not setting aside because I don't think it's important. There's just so many angles to this conversation. I saw last night, Joe, that he, did you see this stat that, So ESPN bought PIN, right? That's what they did. And renamed it ESPN Bet. And the conversion rate of ESPN.com users into ESPN bet is less than 0.1%. So it's not working, right?

Like the idea of content leading to betting isn't working, which makes me wonder, like, what's the future of sports betting? is it external casinos like draft kings but then how does that how does that benefit the league the league set up their own platforms their own gambling revenue sources in which case you're like that's right for corruption like right now there's a story unfolding with jontay porter i'm sure you know you know it in the NBA he's under investigation and so we're some other guys now i think terry roger is under investigation for point shaving um But I don't know what that ESPN story tells us about how sports and gambling integrate. So morally speaking, I think that, and I'll get to why this is important, morally speaking, I think personally, sports betting is probably one of the single most destructive things that we've implemented and will implement throughout our society, right? I just think it's a terrible idea. I think you should have the ability to do it if you want, but go in person. don't make it easily accessible to where people can use it within seconds on their phone.

I think it's quite frankly atrocious. And I also think that the problem is that they've now integrated it into all the leagues, right? Because the leagues know the broadcast fees are not going to go up over time. They need to make more money from a sponsorship perspective. Now you can't watch a game. You can't go to a game without seeing a sports betting ad. Some of these arenas and stadiums even have sports books inside of them now, which, okay, whatever. But my point is that the sports books, like every other business, over time, will find ways to

optimize their profit margins. And what we've seen over time is that this significantly impacts winning betters, right? So if you look at all of the top sports books, Draft Kings and Fanduel specifically, what have they done? They've aggressively pushed people towards same game parlays over the last two to three years because they know that their hold or the margins on those products are often four to five to six times higher than a straight bet, right? So every personality that you see that has a sports podcast or a sports show, they're promoting a sports betting. and company, and they're not promoting you to go bet on a single game. They're promoting same game parlays because these companies know that you're going to bet on three, four, five games

at a time, and it tilts the odds in their favor. Fandwell and Draft Kings talk about this all the time in their earnings call, how these products specifically are going to change everything for them. But that's not where it stops. What they want you to do is they want you to get into it with sports betting. Then they want to push you to eye gaming, where it's casino games and stuff like that on your phone, where they have even better odds than they do in sports gambling. The revenue streams are a little bit more predictable. So what they do is they've now created this infrastructure where they can entice a sports fan simply through a commercial offering you $2 to $300 to $300 by signing up for their app. Then you get in, you go

bet on a couple games, you then move up to same game parlays, then you move to eye gaming. And what we've seen is people are losing tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases without being able to stop their addiction. And I think this is a serious problem because what we've seen is a lot of the states, specifically if you look at New York, their tax rate is so high that the incentive for them is to let people gamble as much as they want because they need and want that money. Whereas other states maybe aren't making as much money, but my point is other states are eventually going to adopt this because that tax revenue is so important. So a state like Texas, yeah, they put it off for long enough, but I know you've talked about

this. Why did the Adelson and the Dumont family buy that team? It wasn't to own an NBA team. They don't care about the NBA team. Obviously, they don't care about the NBA team trading a player like Luca that the fans cared so much about. They want it for gambling purposes. And the same thing can be said for a number of other sports teams throughout the country. Virtually everything that you see in the sports world today involves or has some aspect of sports gambling to it, which I think is part of my frustration to the industry as a whole because I love sports, right? I grew up playing sports. I grew up watching sports. Sports are important to me.

So to see sports getting integrated with ads where now you can go on the NBA app and they have in-game betting integrations, right? So during on the screen, you can see odds for that game. and you can, with a click of a button, get taken to Draft Kings and then place that bet. I don't think that's a good thing. I don't think that's a net positive for these sports leagues at the end of the day. But you have to look at what the incentives are. And for basically every single organization, both the teams and the leagues, but also the owners, the states, the operators, it's to get sports betting more active and in more people's hands, which I don't think is a good thing.

What an awesome answer. What a fascinating thing you just laid out for us. I have two follow-ups. No, it was really good, Joe. I don't know how interested you are in talking about politics, and I'm not going to go too far into it, but this point was made to me that Texas, like, will Texas legalize gambling?

Okay, I agree with you. That's why the Adelson-Dumont group bought the Mavericks, but will it happen? Will it actually happen? And I've been operating under the presumption that it will, kind of like you've assinuated at some point. But it's not for sure, and it's not tomorrow. And one of the things I was told about why that is the case,

is that Texas is a well-managed state. So states that have done a good job of managing their budgets and their finances don't need gambling. Then they can afford, quite honestly, to be moral. Okay, and that doesn't mean they're not moral. They definitely, I know a lot of these Texas politicians don't believe it would be good for society to legalize gambling. And they made the Northeast as well. we gave right new york and texas those are polar opposites right from a management perspective and there's a reason has legalized it and one hasn't and and there's a reason for that is what i'm getting at and

and there may be a bunch of new york politicians that acknowledge how bad this is for society and are morally opposed there may be um maybe there's fewer because it's a different cultural and political landscape but the real motivating factor for new york is we got to get this money because they have horrible budget management they are in debt they can't can't tax enough and people are fleeing the state, eroding their tax base. So coming to places like Texas. So they're more incentivized to go, we'll legalize gambling, because they need the money. Texas doesn't need the money yet, yet to your point, which by the way would also make you think California will do it because they're a poorly managed state that needs the money. So you have to

think they legalize gambling very soon. Yeah, and they have a massive population with a big sports culture specifically in L.A., right? They would make a ton of money. My guess is they will eventually implemented as well. But it brings up an interesting point because New York isn't stopping here, right? Like, it's going to get, I think it's going to get significantly worse. And I'll give you a good example. I don't know if you've seen this, but what Steve Cohen is doing around the Mets stadium. So City Field is where the Mets play right out there on Long Island. And Steve Cohen wants to take essentially the parking lot around the stadium. It's 50 acres of asphalt parking. He wants to totally demolish it. And he wants to build a, what they're calling a mixed use development, right? So it's going to

have all the things that make politicians and locals happy with restaurants and shops and park space and they're going to build parking garage people can still park at the games he's even going to pay to redo the subway stop right there so obviously the mta is going to be happy about that as well but of course included in this his partner on the deal that's going to privately fund it which otherwise wouldn't happen unless they were going to make a ton of money is hard rock international and hard rock is going to build a hotel and casino with a sports book right next to city field Now we're talking about New York residents having like one to maybe two places within an hour, hour and a half where they can go bet on things to having a casino with a sports book literally 15 minutes away from New York City. It's right next to the airport.

It's going to become a major tourist attraction. But why is New York doing that? They're doing it because they know that Steve Cohen will pay hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars for one of three licenses that they're going to offer in downtown New York. they're also going to implement a massive tax rate around 50% probably of what they've done on the sports book. And it's going to make the state of New York and the city of New York City billions of dollars over the next decade and hundreds of billions of dollars when you look further into future. And who is that coming at the expense of? It's coming at the expense of people who are already paying taxes in that state, right? They're basically just giving money over to the state

at a higher rate sometimes more than they would in taxes, which again, is up to anyone, you know, you can make your own decisions about whether you want to go do that. I believe you should have free choice to go gamble if you want to. I just don't think it's a positive that it's been integrated into the sports experience as much as it has over the last few years. Okay, last thing, and this is a follow-up on that great answer you gave. How necessary is it for the sports model? So, and I think he said all this on it.

So I had Brad Alberts, the president of Dallas stars on, who I think a lot of. And we were talking about the television model, you know, because the stars are at the front end of doing something that nobody else has done, which is they've created their own over-the-top streaming app, the Victory app, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And they did it out of necessity because necessity is the mother of invention. They lost the Ballet's regional sports networks. And you could argue they're also the pioneer in that everyone else is going to have to head down this path as they lose their rights.

Or find their own recipe. Maybe it's local broadcast channels. But the bottom line, he said, look, it's also easier for us because TV wasn't a huge part of hockey's revenue stream. It's not like the NFL losing TV. That would be a big problem for the NFL, right? So it hurts. He said it hurts, but it's not the same piece of the pie.

But his point was, we are going to have to be open to finding new revenue streams that support the model of sports business, to pay the player's salaries, that make the owners happy, that keep the consumer happy, the fan. The fan has got to want to see a good team with good players. And the question is, how are we going to do that, you know? And I think that he did say, you know. That's my point, right?

Is sports betting is one of those avenues streams, right? Because, well, that's what he said. That's what I was going to say. I was going to say he brought up gambling as the answer or as at least one of the answers. And as you and I see her talk about it, I'm just kind of thinking, well, first of all, is that going to come all through sponsorships? That's what I asked you a minute ago. Like, are all the teams going to become casinos or how are they going to do that?

You're just going to make sponsorship money from all these kids? Are they going to be owner-operators of casinos like the Adelson's or Steve Cohen? Or is there another model? Like, it doesn't have anything to do with gambling. Yeah, so I think there's a few different answers to this. And I'll start with the problem, and I'll give you what some of the teams are doing. So the problem is that eventually media rights are going to stall or go down. I mean, you've seen ESPN.

ESPN got rid of MLB. They're not renewing Formula One. They're getting rid of some other packages as well. They're still making a lot of money off the cable affiliate fees, but those are obviously declining. I think the MBA, they just signed this 11-year, $76 billion deal. And it was significantly more than a lot of people thought Adam Silver could get for that package. And I think the reason why is because he sort of perfectly timed it, right? If you think about ESPN, they're in 60-something million homes today.

That used to be 100 million. Maybe that settles around 45 or 50 million, but it's still going down at a pretty aggressive rate. So Adam Silver was able to time it up basically, and I think the NFL will probably do this when they can opt out of their deals in 2029 as well, where you have this inflection point where cable companies are having to bid on these rights because they need them for their business. So in a lot of ways, they're willing to overspend because it's so important. And then you have the streaming companies that have technology assets or like an Amazon who make their money off commerce and other things like that or AWS and can afford to pay for deals that don't necessarily make sense. in the short term because they know they'll pay off in the long run. So I think the late 2020s are going to be really important for that. But when we get into the 2030s, I think all bets are off, right?

And this is what I think the president of the stars was talking about of like, where does that income get replaced? I think sports betting is a significant part of that. Sponsorships is probably the first avenue where that will go. And then to your point, maybe we eventually see some of these teams and leagues get more involved on the operating side because they know that they can make more money relative to just sponsorships. But I think real estate is another big piece of this as well.

You're a baseball fan. I don't know if you've ever been to an Atlanta Braves game, but they have the battery right outside of their stadium, right? The battery makes them $50 to $60 million in additional revenue every single year. So for people who are listening to this, they don't know what the battery is, it's just a mixed use development, right? There's hotels, there's restaurants, there's gyms, there's, you can basically go there. It's open 365 days a year.

You can go there before games, get a drink with your buddies, whatever. But they own it, right? And then they lease out those spaces to other businesses. It generates them $50 to $60 million. It's now their second or third biggest revenue stream outside of media rights and ticket sales, which is incredibly important because that money sits outside of revenue sharing agreements with other teams. So they don't have to share that money with any other major league baseball teams where they would have to with media rights, ticket sales, merchandise, basically everything else that runs through the team has to be shared with the other teams.

Which is why I think Steve Cohen and a bunch of other teams have done this as well. if you look at Patriot Place in Foxborough or the Deer District of Milwaukee, what Steve Cohen wants to do, ballpark village in St. Louis. Basically, every professional sports team is now trying to look more like a real estate company because they know that revenue, they can keep themselves. And it's a way to generate additional revenue from the fans versus what you could do with media rights. You know, you're only going to sell so many concessions. You're only going to sell so much parking. You can only increase tickets or season tickets at a decent clip every single year. So you have to look outside the box.

I think the two that I would look out for are sports betting and real estate. Really interesting. Yeah, I know that's what the Rangers have done as well with Texas Live, which is a concert venue. It's something similar to what you're talking about. So the idea is you're figuring out new ways to monetize foot traffic in that case. So the whole thing is attention, right? It always has been. How do you monetize attention?

And can your sport attract? This is where we began our conversation. Can your sport attract as much attention as possible? And then how do you monetize that attention? I do agree with you. I am highly concerned about the corrosive effects of gambling. And when you start talking about the incentives like that you talked about, like to cover up, you know, budget holes in the red at state levels and using it as a tool to do that,

you're down a bad path, you know? Before you know, at New York, you know, you're legalizing marijuana. you're legalizing gambling like what does your society look like in 10 15 years i i agree like let people make a lot of their own bad decisions but how much do you incentivize it how much do you lean into it all that well you have to do is be not just bad for sports but society right like all you have to do is look at history europe legalized gambling and it became so pervasive over there that soccer teams you're a soccer fan in the premier league they literally banned front of shirt sponsors from gambling companies because it got so bad. People were killing themselves, right?

Like there was just so many issues that they're now pulling back aggressively. If you look at Australia or other places like that, the same thing can be said. And the U.S. and America is now looking at this and saying, essentially ignoring all of the problems that have happened in other countries that were 10 or 20 years ahead of us by legalization standards and going full force with it anyways because of those problems that we talked about. Now, I do think that it's a benefit that you can choose where you want to live and it's done on a state-by-state basis rather than a national level where you can live in Texas, right? And you can say, okay, I want to live in a state where this isn't as big of a deal. And my kids can grow up in an area where they can go play sports.

They can go to games. And this doesn't have to be infiltrated in every aspect of their sports life. Whereas at a national level in some of these countries, it's done. I think that's a benefit for the U.S. But I do caution people to just go look at what's happened in some of these other countries over the last two decades, where it started and where it's gone, how big a problems have happened because of it. And I would estimate that we're headed down a very similar path. What a fascinating conversation, Joe. I really, really enjoyed this. Joe Pompeiano, he's the sports and business writer. You can check his substack out at The Huddle Up and EOS podcast as well, the Joe Pomp show. I really, really enjoyed this, Joe. Thanks for so much time.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was fun. There you go. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Joe Pompleano. Check them out again at the Huddle Up on Substack or the Joe Pomp Show wherever you get your audio entertainment. I'll see you again next time. with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcast and Amazon Prime members you can listen to this show ad free on the Amazon Music app.

Following Fox's initial donation to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, our generous viewers have answered the call to action across all Fox platforms and have helped raise $6.5 million. Visit Go.com. forward slash TX flood relief to support relief and rebuilding efforts.