Media & Entertainment Law

More on the Impact of Credit Crisis

Posted on October 21, 2008
The credit crisis and economic downturn is affecting sports in a myriad of ways. One sign that the impact is deeper than perhaps first believed are reports from the NBA that the league has laid off 80 employees, which amounts to about 9% of its workforce...

Yanks and 'Boys Join Forces

Posted on October 20, 2008
From the "What took you so long department", came this announcement from the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys that they had formed a sports business enterprise together with, who else, Goldman Sachs and a private equity company from Dallas CIC Partners...

MLS Expansion Draws Interesting Bids

Posted on October 16, 2008
Major League Soccer took expansion bids last night for two franchises expected to begin play in 2011 or 2012. They will be the 17th and 18th teams in the league following the entrance into the league of Seattle next season and Philadelphia the following year...

WKU and the Costs of Big Time Football

Posted on October 13, 2008
You almost had to feel sorry for Western Kentucky University. There they were, one of the most successful programs in all of Division I-AA (as it was called then and as I will always continue to refer to it), having won the national championship in 2002, yet they still had trouble drawing more than 12,000 fans a game and received little media coverage outside of Bowling Green...

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Credit Crisis Hits NYC Teams

Posted on October 11, 2008
Any team building a new stadium and trying to sell sponsorships, luxury suits and personal seat licenses is facing a daunting landscape these days. The global credit crisis now strangling the financial world in a manner not seen in a generation has caused financial institutions to crumble and sponsorship and advertising dollars to disappear in a wisp of smoke and government takeovers...

The Credit Crisis and Sports or What's the Name of that Building Again?

Posted on October 02, 2008
Sports is often said to be a microcosm of society and to the extent that is true, we shouldn't be surprised to see that the ongoing global credit crisis is adversely impacting sports in a number of ways. The most visible way perhaps is something that teams and their fans have experience with and that is the ever changing landscape of stadium and arena naming sponsors...

Europe is Lovely This Time of Year

Posted on September 29, 2008
I'm back from my continental excursion and other than bringing back a unknown virus, it was a wonderful three weeks. It's good to get away and I should do it more often. Since I missed both an invasion of out of towners into the city as well as a major windstorm (the remnants of Ivan) that left my house without power for about ten days, I sure picked a good time to be gone...

Out of here

Posted on September 04, 2008
Posting will be light to non-existent over the next three weeks or so as I'm off on an extended vacation. My access to the internet will be limited at best so the opportunities to post will be few and far between. So, until I return in the last week of September enjoy the beginning of college football and the NFL seasons and the countdown to October in baseball (what little drama there appears to be there).

Sportsbiz Feed

Posted on September 04, 2008
For those of you interested in sports business, and why would you be reading this blog if you weren't, here's an interesting resource you should check out, the sportsbiz feed, a collection of the best stories from the sports business blogosphere. It's current and a great resource especially for those of you who don't use rss feed readers.

Carnival of the NBA

Posted on August 25, 2008
The 59th edition of the Carnival of the Edition is now up at A Stern Warning. Get over there and check it out, Jokers.

How Much Does Roger Goodell Make?

Posted on August 25, 2008
Nonprofit organizations in the US are required to disclose the salaries of their top executives on a form filed annually with the Internal Revenue Service known as the Form 990. The Form 990 is an informational return that applies to both qualified charities recognized under IRS section 501(c)(3), which are the organizations you commonly think of as charities, and trade associations and other nonprofits to which section 501(c)(6) applies, which are member organizations not operated as charities...

ESPN Pays $2.25 Billion for SEC Rights

Posted on August 25, 2008
Remember all the talk about a new SEC Network that was in all the papers during the SEC meetings back in the summer? Well, you can forget about that now. ESPN just agreed to pay the SEC a whopping $2.25 billion, yes with a "B" over the next 15 years for the conference's TV rights to football, basketball and baseball for all events not already taken by CBS...

Some Winners and Losers from Beijing

Posted on August 22, 2008
There have been many winners and losers during the Beijing Olympics, some obvious and others less so. I'm not really talking about the medal winners here, although some have won medals, but about the business winners - who will take home the gold bars, so to speak, and who has lost that chance...

ESPN Looks to Bid on 2014 and 2016 Olympics

Posted on August 21, 2008
NBC is experiencing some of the largest audiences of any Olympics since the Games were held in Atlanta in 1996. Thanks to Michael Phelps and the Golden Girls (beach volleyball's Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh and Nastia Lukin and Shawn Johnson, depending on your sporting preference) these Olympics are on course to be the most watched Summer Olympics in history...

Steve and Barry's May Survive

Posted on August 19, 2008
In what is a previously thought to be an unlikely event, it appears that a buyer for most of the assets of Steve and Barry's has been found. According to the Wall Street Journal, Bay Harbor Management LLC, a private investment firm is the leading candidate to purchase the assets out of bankruptcy...

NBA Considers Local Streaming of Games

Posted on August 18, 2008
The NBA is considering taking live video streaming of games where no league has gone before. It is currently negotiating a plan to allow live streaming of local games within a local market, so you could watch, say, a Celtics game on Celtics.com or on nesn...

Wanna Own a Piece of May-Treanor and Walsh?

Posted on August 15, 2008
Well, not exactly Misty and Kerri, more like the AVP tour itself. You see, almost alone among professional sports in this country the company that owns and operates the pro beach volleyball tour is a publicly traded company, AVP Inc. The company is not the however the financial powerhouse that May-Treanor and Walsh are on the beach...

MLS Expansion Fees League's Biggest Profit Center

Posted on August 12, 2008
At the time of the MLS All Star Game in Toronto back in July, Commissioner Don Garber announced the intention of the league to expand into two cities by 2009 and announced eight candidates for those two slots. Those eight markets are: Atlanta, Las Vegas, Montreal, a second team in the New York area, Ottawa, Portland, St...

Olympics Drawing Viewers but Where Are The Spectators?

Posted on August 12, 2008
The suits at NBC and parent company General Electric must be dancing in the aisle in offices in Connecticut and at 30 Rock. The ratings for the first couple of days of the Olympics telecast are higher than they could have possibly hoped to see. Opening ceremonies, benefiting from NBC's controversial decision to tape it and show it 12 hours later in prime time, averaged 34...

Self Joins $3 Mil Club

Posted on August 09, 2008
What is the price of a missed three pointer? For Kansas a missed three pointer by Jason Richardson meant a successful shot a the national championship and ultimately Bill Self staying home in Lawrence and signing a ten year, $3 million per year contract...

Should the NCAA Ban Beer Advertising?

Posted on August 09, 2008
The NCAA is going to be faced with an interesting decision at its next meeting. Letters requesting that the NCAA place beer on its list of products that cannot be advertised during college games has been sent to Myles Brand signed by 60 Division I presidents, 240 athletic directors and 101 football and basketball coaches...

Clubs Can Keep Players from Olympics

Posted on August 07, 2008
In a potentially far reaching decision, the Court of Arbitration for Sport handed down a ruling in favor of the clubs in the seemingly never ending battle between clubs and FIFA. This time, it was a battle over the services of Argentinian wunderkind Lionel Messi, whom Barcelona did not want to release to play in the Olympics...

Watching the Olympics

Posted on August 04, 2008
The run-up to Beijing has begun and if you haven't been in a cave for the last month, you know that Opening Ceremonies take place on Friday, 08/08/08. Eight being obviously a lucky number in Chinese. For the first time in this Olympiad, there will be several ways to see almost every Olympic event live, despite the sixteen hour time difference from the eastern US...

Dutrow Gets Slap on the Wrist; Congress Not Happy

Posted on July 29, 2008
Big Brown won this year's Kentucky Derby in impressive fashion. His win was so impressive in fact that many observers began to think that he was a wonder horse, the inevitable Triple Crown winner and perhaps, just perhaps, that long sought star in racing's firmament that can bring people back to horse racing...

Rutgers Stadium Expansion in Trouble

Posted on July 27, 2008
Shortly after Rutgers has a breakthrough football season in 2006, the Rutgers administration and Governor Corzine quickly got together and announced an expansion to the Rutgers football stadium. The expansion, which would raise the seating capacity from its existing 42,000 to 56,000 in two phases, with the first phase of 1,000 premium seats scheduled for construction to commence in August...

Wiil Rush Buy the Rams?

Posted on July 27, 2008
With the death of Georgia Frontiere and the possibility of a large estate tax bill, the prospect that the St.Louis Rams may be sold has been bouncing around for the last couple of months. Of course, the fact that new owner Chip Rosenbloom lives in California probably hasn't hurt the talk any...

Cubs Bidders Down to 5 - Cuban In, Canning Out

Posted on July 24, 2008
And now there are only 5. The Tribune Company has reportedly narrowed the pool of bidders for the Cubs down to 5, all of whom have bid more than $1 billion. In what can be considered a major upset, the early odds on favorite, Commissioner Bud's bff, John Canning, Jr...

Difficulties of a Basketball Only D-I Athletic Department

Posted on July 23, 2008
We have talk a lot in this space about the economics of running a major college athletic department. Most of the time, we are talking about Division I schools and mostly those with big time football programs. We don't spend that much time talking about the difficulties that face those schools without football and believe me, those difficulties are numerous...

Urine Test for HGH Discovered

Posted on July 23, 2008
When Major League Baseball finally got around to effective testing for performance enhancing substances, human growth hormones or HGH was excluded from the program because no effective non-invasive (read without drawing blood) had been developed. Commissioner Bud, who had never wanted to take on the union over drugs in the first place, certainly didn't want to do battle over whether players would have to submit to random blood tests...

The Stadium Curse Lives

Posted on July 21, 2008
Over the years, many people involved in sports naming rights have come to believe that there is a curse associated with a corporation, particularly a publicly traded corporation, placing its name atop an arena or stadium. For years, the stock of those corporations significantly underperformed the overall market...

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