College Sports & NIL
Professional Sports
Entertainment & Media
Business & Deals
Litigation & Regulation
Legal and business analysis involving professional leagues, teams, athletes, labor relations, and competition.
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Sep 19, 2026
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10 min read
The old endorsement agreement rented a celebrity’s attention. The emerging model gives athletes, actors, musicians and creators a piece of the business their attention helps build. That changes the economics—but it also changes the risk, the law and what sophisticated talent should negotiate.
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9 min read
The important shift is not that more people are watching women’s sports. It is that capital can now see what it is buying: scarce franchises, contracted media inventory, repeatable ticket and sponsorship revenue, dedicated infrastructure, and increasingly mature labor and governance systems. The next fight will be over who captures the value those assets create.
Athletes are increasingly taking ownership alongside endorsement money. The deeper shift is that brands are learning to finance growth with athlete influence—and athletes are deciding that renting out their fame may be less valuable than owning part of what it builds.
Sep 18, 2026
A federal judge agreed that the former NFL tackle plausibly alleged a highly offensive disclosure of private facts. He still dismissed the case—with prejudice—because the intimate details were part of Haley Kalil’s own account of her marriage, health and divorce.
5 min read
Courts and regulators are still fighting over what sports-event contracts are. The NFL has drawn its own line—and even DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics cannot cross it with prediction-market products.
A one-page document created by Korn Ferry during a Raiders coaching search has become part of Brian Flores’s discrimination litigation. Nobody outside the case knows what it says. That is precisely why the fight over whether it stays sealed matters.
6 min read
The criminal case is largely resolved. The NFL investigation is not—and a fight over sealed surveillance footage is exposing the difference between a league’s power to discipline a player and its power to obtain evidence.
Sep 16, 2026
4 min read
The NBA commissioner’s intervention does not resolve Portland’s arena fight. But it matters because relocation is not Tom Dundon’s decision alone—and the league just publicly signaled where it stands.
Partners Group's investment in Sports Entertainment Group is not really a story about private equity discovering sports agents. It is a story about athlete representation becoming a scalable financial platform—and about what happens when institutional capital starts consolidating the businesses standing between talent and nearly every way talent gets paid.
8 min read
Diamond Baseball Holdings now owns 49 of Minor League Baseball’s 120 affiliated clubs—one team shy of MLB’s current ownership cap. But the real story is not the number of franchises it has collected. MLB’s 2021 overhaul turned a fragmented local business into something that could be operated at national scale, and DBH is becoming part owner, part commercial platform, and increasingly part real-estate company.
+3
Sep 15, 2026
The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS—and their players unions—want betting-related harassment to carry a new consequence: permanent exclusion from regulated sportsbooks.
Sep 14, 2026
UEFA is trying to use a little-known U.S. discovery statute to obtain investor emails, valuation work, deal documents, and testimony for a contemplated Swiss criminal complaint involving FIFA President Gianni Infantino. The first fight is not over guilt. It is over whether the foreign proceeding is real enough to justify American discovery before it even exists.
Ballmer says the Clippers will accept the NBA’s historic salary-cap penalties instead of challenging them. What disappears is the threatened league fight—not the five lost draft picks, the NBA’s continuing investigative authority, or the separate federal criminal probe.
Bankruptcy does not simply cancel a sponsorship, player deal, media-rights agreement, or licensing contract. It changes the rules for performance, payment, termination, assignment—and leverage.
Sep 12, 2026
The contract language that can turn a scandal, accusation, arrest, old social-media post, or reputational crisis into a right to suspend or terminate a deal.
What athletes are really signing when they hire an agent—and how commissions, exclusivity, termination, union rules, federal law and state regulation fit together
A salary cap is not just a number. It is an accounting system that decides which dollars count, when they count, which teams may spend above the line—and when an endorsement deal starts looking suspiciously like payroll.
Salary caps, drafts, free agency rules and other restraints would look very different under ordinary antitrust law. The nonstatutory labor exemption is what allows leagues and players to negotiate them as labor rules instead.
Calling an athlete an employee can mean union rights, minimum-wage obligations, payroll taxes, workers’ compensation—or some combination of them. The complicated part is that American law does not use one universal definition of “employee.”
LIV Golf’s proposed restructuring would give players 52.5% of the reorganized company. But the equity is not simply a perk—it is part of a deal that could replace old cash-heavy contracts with ownership, new commitments, and a very different allocation of risk.
Sep 9, 2026
12 min read
The NCAA says it has no mechanism to overturn Michigan's win. Its new replay directive would have prevented that win in the first place. That distinction exposes the real problem: not an absence of power, but an absence of a remedy.
Sep 7, 2026
17 min read
The fight over fifth-year eligibility has produced a question college sports never expected to answer: when, exactly, does testing the professional waters become crossing a line you cannot cross back?
3 min read
A new House bill would use federal student-aid leverage—and even criminal penalties for athletics officials—to preserve the line between college and professional sports.
Sep 6, 2026
A former NBA player’s ejection from a publicly owned arena could force a federal court to decide when private sports enforcement becomes government action.
