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Axios’ Sara Fischer breaks down the implication of the potential sale of Warner Bros. Discovery: “One, we don’t think of Warner Bros. Discovery as a major sports player, but they are. Their March Madness rights coupled with CBS’ would give Paramount a March Madness behemoth. Two, Warner Bros. Discovery has a massive digital sports arm in Bleacher Report. Combine that with CBS Sports and that’s a pretty formidable competitor against ESPN. Three, Warner Bros. Discovery owns Eurosport, which has the [European] Olympic rights. That, combined with Comcast, which has domestic Olympic rights…is a huge, huge deal. So, this is not a deal or merger conversation that you can have without considering sports. Now, do I think that the sports rights are what regulators are going to look at to potentially block a deal? No. In the Disney-Fox situation, sports actually was the big sticking point. Regulators forced Fox to divest its regional sports networks to approve that deal. In this case, that would not be, but sports fans still need to pay attention because it will change the way that they possibly get access to their favorite sports.” (link)

Real Madrid plans to sell up to 10% of a newly formed commercial entity in an effort to generate €500M to €1B in fresh investment, putting the value of the club at €10B. The move follows Los Blancos’ earlier deal in which they sold 20% of future Santiago Bernabeu profits to Sixth Street and Legends for $417M. Real Madrid President Florentino Perez: "Our club must have an organisational structure that protects us as an institution and also protects all of us as owners of Real Madrid. To this end, I confirm that we will bring to this Assembly a proposal for the club's corporate reorganisation that secures our future, protects us from the threats we face, and, above all, guarantees that the members are true owners of our club and its financial assets.” Goal.com’s Nukul Jashoria notes expenses on the revamped Bernabeu have reached €1.347B, up from the original €575M plan. (link, link)

The Buffalo Bills have raised $245M by selling personal seat licenses at the new Highmark Stadium, and there are “still plenty of PSLs left to sell,” according to the Buffalo News’ Michael Petro, who notes the team initially expected to raise $225M. The Bills sold about 89% of the PSLs it planned to offer in the new stadium as of the end of September, and the team “expects to bring in millions of dollars more” by selling those approximately 6K remaining PSLs. That number, Petro continues, has “likely kept climbing over the past month and a half” as the Bills get deeper into selling PSLs to fans who have been on the waitlist. Overall, the Bills plan to sell 54,628 PSLs in the 60,108-seat stadium. (link)

Collegiate Sports Connect has reviewed secondary market ticket data for college football games on November 21-22. HERE are the "get-in" prices -- the cheapest available ticket to get into the stadium -- for each game this weekend.

Two west coast games top the charts for most expensive ticket in Week 13, with "Big Game" leading at a $145 get-in price, followed by USC-Oregon at $120. 

The median ticket price for SEC games is highest at $51 with three conferences -- the ACC, Mountain West and Big 12 -- bunched together.

CLICK HERE to see the get-in price for every week 13 game >> 

SBJ’s Ethan Joyce goes deeper into Jump, the end-to-end fan-experience and ticketing platform co-founded by Minnesota Timberwolves owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez. Wolves CMO Mike Grahl says the early phase is about experimentation and automation: “A lot of what we’re testing and learning is what data do we know, what do we understand about a user and how can we either gather that information and send communication or better yet automate that communication based on all the inputs that we have.” Jump’s 2025 momentum includes its first pro client (NWSL’s NC Courage), a $25M raise, new partners (Denver Summit FC) and an MLB/Tickets.com integration for Las Vegas deposits. Jump CEO Jordy Leiser underscores the company's long-term thesis: “There is no world 10 years from now, five years from now even, where there are just middlemen businesses that sit between a professional sports team worth $10B and their customer. It’s just not going to happen. That’s why the NFL’s already thinking about it. And that’s what we do at Jump: We literally deliver on that promise.” More. (link)

SBJ’s Chris Smith spotlights a new fan-facing tech feature at Intuit Dome, where AT&T has launched “Connectopia,” an interactive AI activation that lets fans design imaginative cityscapes in real time using the arena’s extensive fiber and 5G backbone. The installation sits on the upper concourse and generates visuals based on touchscreen prompts (e.g., jungles, pilots, basketball courts), with selected fan creations featured on the Halo Board during Clippers games and voted on via in-seat buttons. Clippers CTO George Hanna says the activation is “the art of the possible,” aligning with the venue’s push toward cutting-edge tech while paving the way for deeper integrations with the Halo Board in future seasons. AT&T reports significant year-two usage gains at Intuit Dome — 40% higher total data volume and 73% higher upload traffic — with VP Adam Schieber calling the building one of the densest fiber/5G environments in its national network and a test bed for similar deployments elsewhere. (link)

JohnWallStreet posits the narrative of streaming platforms delivering younger sports audiences is highly misleading. Fox Sports President of Insights and Analytics Michael Mulvihill has called the idea that streaming is the primary pathway to young fans “the most stubborn myth in sports media” while Crakes Media Principal Patrick Crakes adds that many 18-34s remain in the pay-TV bundle: “How else could sports viewership be growing amongst all demos when 90% of the games that matter still reside inside the pay TV bundle?” Crakes explains that outside of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football — which uniquely benefits from local broadcast simulcasts — moving exclusive inventory to streamers reliably reduces reach, which in turn lowers median age simply because younger viewers decline less steeply than older ones. He argues discoverability remains a structural disadvantage for digital platforms: “Going on a safari for content is not something older people typically want to do.” More from JWS. (link)

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board uses Walmart CEO Doug McMillon’s tenure to argue that top corporate executives often are worth their compensation. McMillon, who retires next year after more than 40 years at the company, took over in 2014 as online competitors eroded Walmart’s traditional dominance. He pushed Walmart to build a competitive e-commerce platform, integrate AI across operations to increase productivity, and navigate the Trump-era tariff shocks with minimal disruption. Walmart’s annual revenue subsequently increased from $486B to $681B under his leadership, and the company’s share price is up roughly 310%. Wages and benefits have also risen for Walmart’s 2.1M employees. The editorial board frames McMillon’s tenure as a reminder that “one of the hardest tasks in business is to inherit a giant business and continue to grow,” contrasting Walmart’s success with the decline of GE, Sears and Kmart. The board also argues that Walmart’s profitability has enabled hundreds of thousands of households to build wealth, even as big business has become a political target, concluding that younger anti-corporate voices “are living off the prosperity created by wealth creators like Walmart’s CEO.” More. (link)

Snack food company Kind is overhauling its marketing playbook with generative AI as it fights for Gen Z attention and battles growing private-label competition, according to Digiday’s Kimeko McCoy. Kind CMO Osher Hoberman says this year has been “an inflection point,” with AI slashing creative testing cycles from 3-4 months (and ~$10M in spend) to a matter of days. Kind is now deploying AI-generated creative assets for individualized contextual targeting (e.g., post-workout vs. on-the-go breakfast messaging) and building “synthetic audiences” trained on past campaign data and syndicated research to accelerate insights. Hoberman says the personalization “was more effective in brand and sales lift than previous campaigns” and improved media efficiency and channel-mix decisions. (link)

New NielsenIQ data shows CMOs are facing sharper pressure to prioritize short-term ROI over long-term brand building. Marketing Dive’s Peter Adams explains that support from CEOs/CFOs for long-term investment has dropped to 69% (-11 pts YoY), while 84% of CMOs now rank ROI as the primary budget metric. Confidence in brand purpose has fallen from 83% to 71%, as political climate and backlash concerns make purpose-led campaigns riskier. Meanwhile, just 55% of CMOs allocate a majority of spend to long-term brand building, and fragmentation remains a major barrier – according to NIQ, 54% struggle to integrate data across sources (up from 31%); one-third rely on 5-to-15 tools to measure ROI; and just 37% have a single centralized data source. Generative AI is widely adopted but still maturing — 70% use it for content generation, 64% for personalization, and 55% for media planning — with NIQ noting CMOs will need to quantify AI’s impact and upskill teams. (link)

The percentage of women serving as CFOs declined globally last year, reversing several years of steady progress. MSCI data shows women held 19.8% of CFO roles among U.S. companies in the MSCI World Index in 2023, dropping to 19% by October 2024. The decline was sharper in emerging markets, falling from 21.3% to 19.4%, a reversal after years in which EM companies had outpaced developed markets in female CFO appointments. CFO Brew’s Jesse Klein notes female CFOs are also turning over far faster than men with an average tenure of two years on average vs. 4.5 years. A separate Crist Kolder report shows stagnation at the largest U.S. companies: namely, women held 17.5% of CFO roles in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 as of July 2025, down from 18.5% in 2023. (link)