SportBusiness

When Don Garber took over MLS in 1999, the league was in trouble, having lost an estimated $250m in its first five years.

27 years later, he is handing it to Larry Berg in January with a record $500m entry fee, five clubs worth $1bn or more, and Messi.

Yet 19 of 30 clubs reportedly posted operating losses in 2025, and full club sales remain rare.

In this 𝘖𝘯 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 feature, @jonrest looks at how Garber made MLS worth buying, and what is likely to decide whether those valuations hold.

Together, football and American football account for 58% of global sports media rights value in 2026.

Our 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 values the market at a record $65.82bn, up 15% on 2025, with growth driven by the Fifa World Cup, the Winter Olympics and the NBA’s new domestic deals.

This is the industry benchmark for sports media rights worldwide, breaking down the market by sport, property and territory, with forecasts to 2029.

Ask enough people in sports media rights who shaped the last 30 years, and one name keeps coming back: Richard Scudamore.

Scudamore ran the Premier League from 1999 to 2019, and says nobody could have seen how big it would become: “Anybody who did would be telling fibs.”

@jonrest speaks with him on selling the league internationally, 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 NBC deal in the US, and the direct-to-consumer option now that the Premier League has launched a service in Singapore.

𝗘𝗫𝗖𝗟𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗩𝗘: SPFL offers end to UK’s 3pm blackout.

Broadcasters have been given the opportunity to acquire live rights to all Scottish Premiership matches for the first time, paving the way to the end of the UK’s Saturday 3pm blackout.

The SPFL is understood to have offered the option to bid for all matches in its next domestic cycle from 2029-30 and is increasingly confident the blackout will not be in place.

This would then allow other leagues, including the Premier League and EFL, to make their full inventories available in domestic rights auctions.

MLB is the first major US league to sell out its jersey patch inventory, with the market now worth around $266m per season.

Financial services accounts for 11 of the 30 deals.

In this 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘉𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 Snapshot, we look at how the last slots were filled and what a saturated market means for patch values going forward.