1) Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?
The plaintive cry of Janis Joplin has echoed its way down the decades and – harnessed by WTA Ventures CEO Marina Storti and a commercial team supported by Wasserman and IMG – finally been answered. Mercedes-Benz will replace Hologic as the Premier Partner of the WTA. From 1st January, the competition will be known as the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz, and with up to $50 million-a-year due in rights payments across the next ten years, it’s the biggest deal in the history of women’s sport.
2) What have the creators done now?
Three bits of evidence this week to add to the dossier marked ‘The Creators have inherited the earth’:
a) The AFL is dialling down its in-house production capability, and dialling up its investment in creators.
b) Football content creator Angry Ginge won ITV’s I’m a Celebrity 2025, galvanising 13 million votes in this weekend’s final – the highest number in a decade.
c) Livemode – the company behind Brazilian streaming sensation CazeTV – have bought World Cup rights in Portugal.
Forget about digital strategy; if you’re a rights holder without a ‘creator strategy’, you’re not ready for 2026.
3) Does Piers Morgan know what he’s doing?
You’d have to say the answer is an unequivocal yes. The firebrand journalist has partnered with WME and the Raine Group to try to raise $30 million to beef out his ‘Uncensored’ brand into a podcast portfolio company, emulating Gary Lineker in building out a team of media personalities and creators to head up subject specific shows. Any guesses on which controversialists he might want to lean on to front the inevitable sports podcast?
4) What (or who) is Fifa Creep?
If ‘rage-baiting’ is the Oxford University Press word of the year for 2025, I’d like to think that ‘Fifa-creeping’ has got a chance next year. Here are a couple of options for definitions:
a) The slow expansion of commercially convenient rule-tweaks in the formatting of football games
b) The slow expansion of obligations in the global football calendar
After quietly expanding the length of the half-time break to accommodate a ‘Super Bowl-style’ show at the Club World Cup final in the summer, Fifa has announced that three-minute ‘hydration breaks’ will take place in each half of every game during next summer’s World Cup – regardless of the weather conditions. It’s easy to be cynical and interpret this as the Commercial Inventory Wolf dressed up in the Player Welfare Sheep’s clothing. Richard Gillis has run the numbers on his abacus this week and worked out that as a result of the already expanded World Cup tournament and these new drinks breaks, Fifa has just generated 312 minutes of new broadcast ad inventory. In an era in which rights fee growth is stalling, a potentially very valuable precedent has been set.
5) Why is Netflix intending to pay $82 billion for WBD assets that were worth $30 billion only a few months ago?
I like this conspiracy theory from Michael Smith.
6) Any new leagues to keep an eye on?
Chiron Sports Group is launching a new fencing league; while Elysian Park Ventures and the former CMOs of TikTok and the NBA – Nick Tran and Tammy Henault – have invested into a $7 million seed round for the new International Dance League.
