sports business Archives - Wakeman Consulting Group

What’s Not in the Deck? Lakers Investor Deck is Missing Something.

September 22, 2026
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Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner are leading a group of investors to buy the Lakers for $12.5B. That’s a big sports business story. The group is circulating a deck to potential investors that claims the Lakers will be valued at $30B in a decade. The numbers: · Doubling of revenue · TV and streaming rights doubled as […]

August 20, 2026
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A recent UCLA football game announced an attendance of 27,143. The turnstile scan was 12,383. That’s a huge gap. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Applied Sport Management looked at 48 Division I men’s basketball programs over three seasons. Almost a thousand games. The average no-show rate was 37 percent. In my experience, that’s […]

The World Cup: A Global Game of Chicken

The World Cup is two weeks away. Thursday brought a few interesting stories: This is what a game of chicken looks like. A structural standoff where the people with tickets thought they’d be able to get football fans to pay anything to see “the biggest World Cup ever.” All they had to do was wait. […]

The GWS Giants Don’t Need a Rebrand. They Need a Real Strategy.

The GWS Giants are reportedly considering a name change. “Greater Western Sydney” doesn’t pop. The club president says that people don’t identify with it. It doesn’t support the brand. He’s not wrong about the symptom. He is wrong about the solution. When someone says, “Let’s rebrand!” Your answer should always be, “No.” The Vessel Is Empty. […]

When Sports Broke?

You can only push people so far. That’s the sentence FIFA cannot say out loud. That’s the sentence that On Location may be whispering internally. The host cities don’t want to admit it, not yet, not while there’s still time to hope a wave of visitors is coming. But it’s the truth. The extraction machine […]

Premium Seating’s Consistency Problem

How to fill seats when the buzz wears off Walk into any new or renovated arena. Premium seating…as far as the eye can see. Capital One Arena: 4,500 new premium seats. FC Barcelona: tripling Camp Nou’s hospitality inventory. The trend is everywhere. The real problem isn’t building the seats. It’s filling them. Consistently. The first […]

August 21, 2023
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James Andrew Miller went on one of The Ringer podcasts this week to talk about the ongoing challenges that ESPN is dealing with as viewing habits are changing. TV is less than 50% of viewing hours now. As James talked about what the strategic path forward is for ESPN, I got to thinking about “The Power Framework”, […]

sports business

What’s Not in the Deck? Lakers Investor Deck is Missing Something.

Real Attendance: The Only Attendance Number That Doesn’t Lie

The World Cup: A Global Game of Chicken

The GWS Giants Don’t Need a Rebrand. They Need a Real Strategy.

When Sports Broke?

Premium Seating’s Consistency Problem

ESPN’s Changing Strategic Power

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