Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. (Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here.)

Name-dropped today: M-I-N-A K-I-M-E-S, Zohran Mamdani, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Greg Sankey, Hull City, Naomi Osaka, Christian Pulisic, Victor Wembanyama, Dr. Robby and more. Let’s go:

Driving the Conversation

Mina Kimes spells out success

For my money, the smartest on-air talent in sports media is ESPN’s Mina Kimes. Yale alum, Emmy-winning NFL analyst, polymath podcaster, reigning “Celebrity Jeopardy” champion and — this week — first-time host of the Scripps National Spelling Bee (ION, 8 p.m. ET tonight for the tape-delayed semis and 8 p.m. ET tomorrow for the live final).

In another timeline, she’s managing partner at McKinsey or a billionaire hedge fund manager or C-suite at Disney, rather than a few reporting levels down from there.

Ahead of her Bee debut, Kimes talked with my colleague Jayna Bardahl in a fascinating, wide-ranging interview that covered everything from Bee prep to the NFL player who would make the best Bee participant (spoiler: M-Y-L-E-S G-A-R-R-E-T-T).

Here is one of my favorite parts:

Bardahl: You’ve said you want to bring a big-game feel to this year’s bee. How do you hope to do that?

Kimes: When I watch it, and especially as I’ve been watching these past bees, to me, it is like the Super Bowl of academic events. I make the comparison for a few reasons. One is the level of competition. These kids are stars. They’re so prepared, and they are so composed, and they really are elite competitors in a way that, for me, feels reminiscent of the NFL athletes that I cover in my day-to-day job. So I want to highlight that.

Kimes and Bardahl also engaged in an amazing video of a spelling quiz involving NFL player names. Highly recommend giving it a watch here.

Their convo begs the question: Is the spelling bee sports?

To Kimes’ points: It’s a cut-throat competition. It requires prep that makes traditional sports training look modest. It’s on TV, live, with a host, analysts and a championship trophy.

(FWIW: I rank 2002’s “Spellbound” among my top five favorite sports documentaries of all time, so you know where I stand on the question.)

Curious for your take, so let’s just get right to this week’s MoneyPoll:

Get Caught Up

Big talkers from the sports business industry:

The Knicks as a case study in … organizational competence? I lived in NYC in 1999, the last time the Knicks made the NBA Finals. The city gets a surge of energy around the team’s success like no other sports result. There is real cognitive dissonance between the managerial doldrums of the past three decades and this. How did it happen?

Related data point: $3,326. That’s the lowest get-in price I can find on StubHub this morning for Game 3 of the NBA Finals, the first Knicks home game of the series. And that’s for Section 416, way up near the rafters and behind the basket.

(The last time we discussed a $3,000 ticket price just to be somewhere in the building for a game, it was Indiana football fans for the College Football Playoff national championship game — fwiw, of the hundreds of emails I got that week in response to whether that kind of cost was worth it, only a handful said “Yes.”)

Investor of the Week: Cleveland’s own Travis Kelce, who went from courtside with Taylor Swift at the Cavs-Knicks game to buying an ownership stake in the Guardians.

World Cup countdown: Two weeks from tomorrow

• $50 tickets! Early WC W for NYC Mayor Mamdani.
• Brady x Zlatan: I’m here for Zlatan!
• Water breaks. Halftime breaks. Get ready for more TV ads.

Your WC must-have: Our free World Cup Briefing daily email newsletter. It will be the foundation of how I keep up with things. Two-second signup here.

Remembering Kyle Busch: “You never know when the last one is, you know?”

“Nothing moved the needle in the NASCAR world like Busch, for better or worse, over a generation of racing. And as it turned out, it’s because we all got to witness the entirety of the man’s adult life.” — Jeff Gluck on how Busch was larger than life

“What Busch accomplished on the racetrack goes beyond the numbers. … If he was on the track, it was hard not to watch him, as he produced innumerable eye-popping moments that left spectators wondering how he did that.” — Jordan Bianchi on Busch’s greatness

(Also sending my deepest condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of longtime AP sportswriter Howard Fendrich. Fendrich was two years ahead of me on our award-winning, all-consuming high school newspaper, the Walt Whitman (MD) Black & White, and he was part of the paper’s leadership team when I was a mere eager news reporter. Long after we both graduated, it was always a treat to see his byline and continued journalistic impact.)

Premier League pro/rel glory/misery:

? Hull City (“True underdog story!”)

? West Ham (“Absurd and abysmal!”)

MLB franchise valuations: Cap impact? At the heart of the looming MLB labor negotiations stalemate that threatens the 2027 season is the idea of introducing a salary cap in baseball. Most owners want it. For the players, it is anathema.

The owners think that a cap will take their franchise valuations to the stratosphere — the kind of financial certainty that has helped NFL and NBA franchise values soar. This is a smart analysis of the dynamic from Evan Drellich.

Enhanced Games: An inflated farce? That everyone covering this had to put “world record” in the most sarcastic of quotation marks — and I would argue that defining any result that happened there as record-breaking in anything but chutzpah is folly at best — tells you all you need to know.

But, in the spirit of bio-maxxing, in case you’re looking for more concrete health and performance data, let’s check in on the stock price of Enhanced Group Inc. (ENHA) … down 40% on Tuesday in one day? Oh.

PWHL salary transparency: Yes, the league is new, but — per newly released data — the salaries are pretty low for a league in growth mode that is crushing attendance records and adding multiple new franchises. Only a handful of players make more than $100K, and some are as low as mid-$30Ks and the average is roughly $60K.

As PWHL league and franchise valuations rise over the next five years (2031 is when the players can renegotiate their labor agreement), this kind of transparency will help identify if that ratio of valuation to salary is getting too far off-kilter.

Other current obsessions: Naomi Osaka’s couture-inspired French Open fits (there’s an Athletic newsletter for that, too!)… the Portland Cherry Bombs … the MLS game shot for TV on iPhones … the Pirates’ “Dr. Robby” bobblehead …

What I’m Wondering

What do you want to know?

This week, host of The Pulse newsletter Chris Branch is on vacation, so he asked his readers for their questions, which he then put to our colleagues for expert answers. Here was one from today that caught my eye:

The potential tennis boycott kind of reminds of the situation that led to paying college athletes, athletes fighting for a fair share of the revenue. Given that the major sports are collectively bargained, are there other sports that could follow tennis players’ lead? Which sport is likely to follow? Golf feels like the obvious answer, but they just got a pay raise after the LIV situation. — Reader Chris J., San Jose, Calif.

? Mike Vorkunov: I think maybe the next potential similar effort could actually be in college basketball or football. Things seem like they’re going to eventually get to a breaking point. Maybe that means employee status. Maybe that means unionization and collective bargaining. They’re making more money than ever. There isn’t a friction point at the moment, but if the money spigot turns off, then things can change. I think that’s the interesting one to monitor and would bring us full circle after individualized pushes for NIL rights.

Have an inquiry of your own? You can send your questions in here. (Or you can always email me a sports business question at [email protected], and I’ll pick out a selection to try to get answered. Also, look for a guest appearance by me answering one of these in The Pulse later this week!)

Grab Bag

Name to Know: Christian Pulisic
With two weeks to go until the World Cup starts, arguably THE name to know — certainly for the U.S. — is Pulisic, the face of American soccer and shifting from an entirely disappointing European pro season to the biggest moment of his sporting life.

Data Point: $5.11 million
Extending our “Business of Wemby” coverage from last week’s MoneyCall, that’s what a Victor Wembanyama card sold for. Hear from the buyer.

And don’t miss Jared Weiss’ reflections on covering Wemby all season.

MoneyCall poll, cont’d
Last week’s MoneyPoll results: 75 percent of respondents think I should invest in The Sports Bra sports bar. OK, this is getting serious!

Beat Dan in Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle No. 611
Dan’s time: 00:27
Try the game here!

Worth Your Time

Great business-adjacent reads for your downtime or commute:

Melanie Anzidei and Megan Feringa on improving support for moms returning to pro soccer after pregnancies.
Two more:

Luke Smith completes the auto racing triple crown and attends his first Indy 500.

Mirin Fader on “Read Like Wemby,” easily the most wholesome marketing campaign of the year.

Back next Wednesday! Text your colleagues this link so they can get MoneyCall every week for free. And, as always, give a try to all The Athletic’s other newsletters. (Again: All always free.)


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