Numlock Sunday: Eben Novy-Williams and Jacob Feldman on Club Sportico
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week I spoke to Eben Novy-Williams and Jacob Feldman, reporters at Sportico and authors of the brand-new Club Sportico.
I love this new site, I’m a huge fan of Sportico and getting their more conversational and down to earth chats and was a day one subscriber. If you like sports and the business around it, you should check em out!
We spoke about the future of sports, the nationalization of sport fandoms, and changes in the broader media landscape.
Club Sportico can be found at club.sportico.com.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Eben and Jacob, thank you so much for coming on. You guys are two of my favorite writers over at Sportico, and you have a new project that you launched over the summer called Club Sportico. I want to talk all about it and the business of sports. So, how's it going? How's everything on your guys' end?
NOVY-WILLIAMS: Things are great, Walt. We appreciate you calling us to chat about it. For folks who don't know, we launched Sportico four years ago to cover the business of sports. We do a lot of things well, but I think one of the things that we have not done well historically has been adding humor and adding some opinion to the stuff that we're writing about.
Club Sportico was our attempt at creating that within the Sportico ecosystem. We're taking a lot of the serious topics we're writing about on a daily basis and, a couple of times a week, adding our own opinion, adding some fun, popping in some memes and some funny tweets that we've seen throughout the week, and then pushing those out every Thursday.
FELDMAN: It's also allowed us to put our — well, at least my — fan hat on. I'm still not sure Eben has a fan hat or not, which we can discuss, but it’s a chance to look at some of these big stories and also talk about sports from a fan perspective. What of it actually matters? How much should I actually care about if I just want to watch my team every weekend? That's been a helpful framing for me, too, just to keep that in mind on a weekly basis.
I really dig it because this past year, people have seen sports in particular branch out to areas where they'd never really been before. You can see whether that's the world of money, with the rise of these gambling apps in lots of different ways, or the world of politics; obviously the UFC and the universe around the UFC was very instrumental in Donald Trump's campaign.
Even in people's individual lives, sports used to be one niche of entertainment, whereas now it's supporting the entire entertainment business. It was very well timed when you guys branched out into this, just because the culture of this is such an interesting part of the business of this.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: It's interesting that fans are also getting more in tune to the business side of things. Maybe that started with thinking about salary caps and what players teams can sign and trades and things like that.
But I do think it has really branched out, with a lot of owners more public figures than they were 10 or 15 years ago. Jacob is the expert in this, but I think the way that media has fundamentally shifted across sports and the way that we watch sports has changed so much in the past 10 years also has fans thinking more about the money and the deals and the exclusivity behind the sports that they watch.
I agree with you, Walt. We've seen a big boost in interest in the business side of sports, not just from the core sports readers, obviously, which are owners and people who work in sports at high levels and executives like that, but also just average fans who understand that in addition to what happens on the field or on the ice during live games, there's a whole other layer of competition and news that's happening that really does impact who wins and who loses and everything else.
FELDMAN: I would say along those lines, sports is funny because in some ways we talk about these 100-year histories of college football or 70-year histories of the NFL, but what we're actually watching now is a fairly new invention. When we're talking about professional sports, we're talking about the ability to watch more than one college football game on a Saturday. These are things that are 10, 20, maybe 30 years old. They're talking about the type of money that's coming into sports. It is changing rapidly and it is a lot newer than I think we fool ourselves into thinking. That's also why people are awake when it comes to commentary alignment or franchise relocation. You can't avoid these business topics as a sports fan anymore.
That's a great area that I want to talk about: the nationalization of what used to be very regional and, in some areas, even municipal. If you were to describe yourself as an NFL fan in 1994, even 2004, what that probably meant was that you watched Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football, as well as your local team midday on Sunday. Now, the entire premise of being an NFL fan — shout-out to Rob Lowe — is essentially totally different.
FELDMAN: Ahead of its time, yes. I do think there's a lot of people who still view sports as a regional business, regional media, regional ticketing, regional fandom. But it's very much not that. We're seeing even now the launch of these leagues; we have an Unrivaled basketball league, or we have the TGL, this golf league that's launched.
You can be a national sport without having a team in every city, and that does radically change the relationship between fan and team, between media and fans, fans and each other. Obviously fan and team betting plays a big role in that, too. But again, it is a totally different type of offering than it was 30 years ago, like you're saying, when it was solely your local teams that you had the bandwidth to care about.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: Not to geek out too much on the media side, and you know this more than anybody, but the way people are consuming media in terms of news is also changing and getting way more fragmented. It's interesting we're having this conversation this week, because of all the attention that's been paid to the election and how alternative forms of media, podcasts and newsletters and all, were effectively or ineffectively used by both candidates.
But in what you're doing at Numlock, and what you're doing in your day job, as well, the way that large media entities in some ways are feeding a lot of their power and their influence to smaller groups of people are maybe by using more opinion or more experts, or they're more laser-focused on specific areas or specific opinions or specific types of posts. It does feel like in some ways the alternate presentations of news and opinion is the future that we are hurtling toward, just like in sports, as you said, the one-size-fits-all national consumption of your favorite league or your favorite team is also changing drastically.
On that point, even the ManningCasts essentially emerging seem like something that's fundamentally new, and that's not even begun to hit the saturation of what it's going to be one day.
FELDMAN: That kind of thing — I've coined it as an “all-cast,” but there are a lot of words for these kinds of co-broadcasts — is something that is radically changing. The NBA has a partner called Playback TV that basically allows anybody to launch their own ManningCast, and anybody can tune in to watch. I think that's the direction we're going. If you're a sports bettor, you can watch a sports-betting-focused broadcast. If you're a fan of the Mannings, you can watch that. If you're a fan of the Simpsons, you can watch the Simpsons' version. And we're about to see on Monday Night Football in a couple of weeks here how this ManningCast is an all-cast.
That all stems from an existential fear within the sports industry that people aren't going to sit down and watch a three-hour game anymore, which we can talk about. It has been somewhat subdued in recent years because of these advances, and because it turns out that this next generation will watch something if it's compelling enough. But that has been a key driver of a lot of the new and different ways we've seen to engage with sports over the last five or 10 years.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: One of the things in this where Jacob and I work well together is that our consumption of sports is very different. I am someone who watches almost all of his sports on mute, almost exclusively. The idea of some of these all-casts, like the ManningCast, almost doesn't exist for me because it's just a muted screen where the sport is actually in a smaller form on the television.
But I do think, and the folks who follow Sportico will very quickly pick this up, but we are coming to this industry from two very different angles, both as fans and also as journalists in the things that interest us and the way we do our jobs. It's one of the things that make the product really interesting, is that we are two very different people in many different ways, and that will show to people who read.
I actually want to give you a chance to talk a little about that. One thing I like about Numlock is that it's a point of view, right? This is the entire world from the point of view of numbers.
And one reason that I love Sportico is that it is a point of view. It looks at sports from the idea that the decisions made in the financial books are just as consequential on the field as the decisions that any of these players are making in the aggregate, and that you can trace direct links between the industry that surrounds this stuff to the actual, on-field stuff. I really enjoy the point of view that Sportico has.
Do you want to talk a little about where you're coming from on this, how your perspectives differ, and what folks can expect from Club Sportico?
FELDMAN: I love this question, but Eben, I want you to go first. I want to hear your answer.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: I think that my approach as a fan is getting increasingly disconnected from a lot of the things that a lot of sports fans — and certainly me when I was younger — were connected to. To give you a quick personal history of me, I grew up in the New York area. I was a die-hard Mets fan and a die-hard Islanders fan. I was exactly the prototype of what fandom used to be and what maybe among young people it still is.
Now that I'm an adult, and I think largely because I've worked in this industry for a very long time, I don't root for either of those teams anymore. The Mets were one of the great sports stories of this year, from a social media standpoint, from a meme standpoint, from a sport standpoint, from an ownership standpoint. I could not have cared less if the Mets were good and fun again, and that would have shocked and appalled my 15-year-old self if you'd told him that 20 years ago.
You and Jacob and I were on a podcast recently, on the Sporticast, talking about our consumption. Personally, I'm watching fewer types of sports than I used to. I used to watch a little bit of baseball, a little bit of basketball. I don't watch either of those sports almost at all anymore. I am very into smaller-format, one-off things. I got deeply addicted to the T20 cricket World Cup this year. I love the Tour de France. This is actually one thing Jacob and I have in common, that we both love professional cycling. But I am finding my sports fandom and my sports consumption actually shrinking in the last few years, as we talk about all these trends. I'll hand it over to Jacob here because Jacob, I think your answer about shrinking is actually expanding, correct?
FELDMAN: Yes, exactly. I do want to say before I launch into my background that Eben is in his 30s, not in his 60s, like you might imagine hearing that answer. But yeah, I come to this area of comfort, area of curiosity, from a point of frustration. I used to cover the NFL directly at Sports Illustrated, and probably six, seven years ago now, came to this point where everything in our world is changing. The way we watch movies, the way we date, the way we order food, the way we learn, the way we talk to people, is all evolving. Yet the way we watch sports is almost exactly the same as it was in 1987 — it's just a wider-screen TV.
I wanted to know why that was. I think it's gotten a lot better in some ways; it's gotten a lot worse in other ways, over the last seven years. I've always tried to keep the perspective of helping fans understand why things are the way they are. Why are NFL games on six different platforms? Why are half these NBA games blacked out? Why is everyone buying comps on NFTs all of a sudden? There's been a rapid change in sports and there's nobody steering the ship, right? Sports in many ways is being dragged along the currents of wider societal and technological change. Sometimes we're the beneficiary of that and sometimes we're not.
Going to what Eben said, I come to sporting events on the micro level, for spectacle. I'd much rather watch a championship E3 bowling match than your run-of-the-mill 1 p.m. Bengals-Giants game. I write seasonal sports. I'll watch the World Curling Championships in March and then, as Eben said, I'll switch over to cycling to watch the Grand Tour there. Then I'll switch to women's soccer this weekend for the playoff of the NWSL. I'm addicted to those big, high-pressure moments and spending four hours diving into the storylines and the characters, and then a week later moving on to the next thing.
That is something you could not do 20 to 25 years ago without massively expensive satellite dishes, or a friend in Italy who could explain to you how this course works. But now it's literally at your fingertips to become an expert in cycling tactics, or the history of curling, or take your pick. That's the part of it that I enjoy. I try to make it a little easier for people as we move into whatever this next world of sports fandom looks like.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: All of this is reflected in what we put out as journalists. I sometimes joke that Jacob's beat at Sportico is “cool shit.” It's the new-age media; it's the new tech; it's explanations of why the NHL app sucks and why this new streaming service that you haven't heard of is doing something really interesting.
On my end, I don't think I'm writing that much about cool and new hip things. I'm doing a lot of, “this team is for sale,” or, “DraftKings is doing this with its loan and credit facilities.” It's very different, and I think it's a good balance for sure.
Again, I really dig both of your work, both on the mainstream stuff that you do at Sportico and this conversational, more immersive version of talking about this stuff at Club Sportico, which I think people should read. It's delightful, and I have a really good time with it.
It's felt like this year has been a very dynamic year in sports and I actually do not see it slowing down. Where do you guys look ahead for the rest of the year and into the next?
NOVY-WILLIAMS: It's definitely not slowing down. It depends on what sport you're talking about. Just imagine being a college sports fan, like a die-hard Iowa State football fan. The entire industry has melted around you, and people that thought they were in safe places are now very worried about their future. There's so much coming to college sports from an athlete empowerment standpoint, from a compensation standpoint, from a NIL and regulatory standpoint. We're also about to have a new set of leaders in government that feel differently than the ones we currently have.
There's so much uncertainty there, but it's pretty much every sport. I agree. There are massive changes underway in all the places, and an influx of money from the Middle East and sovereign wealth funds and institutional funds that are getting their hands on things, and the dissolution of the old media model that Jacob was talking about, and an opportunity here for everyone else.
Then there's the rise of, as Jacob mentioned, alternate sports opportunities. If you love Angel Reese, you're going to get to watch her in a very, very intimate three-on-three setting in a way that you didn't get to watch her in the WNBA. If you love Tiger Woods, you're about to see him on Tuesday nights in January and February in a very different setting than when you watch him play in the Masters or the U.S. Open. There are a lot of really interesting, alternate spin-offs of the sports and the stars that are so prominent right now, which I do think are going to change the sports landscape and the sports business landscape in various ways.
Eben, to your point, New York was not a college football town. But it feels like in the past several years it has become one, much to my surprise, as a person who is from this area. It does seem like the pie's getting bigger.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: Everybody's now fighting for New York as a market, right? Brett Yormark, the commissioner of the Big 12, is trying to get every Big 12 basketball championship at Madison Square Garden. Off the top of my head, I can't even think of a Big 12 school here. Cincinnati? Maybe West Virginia? I have no clue who it is. That's another shift we've seen, is that the regionalness, the geography mattering in a lot of ways in sports, is disintegrating as well. Your fandom is no longer tied to your geography, et cetera.
FELDMAN: That's a great point to add. It's funny just to look at the location. The Big Ten is going to be in Las Vegas, and then ACC is going to try to be somewhere in the South. It is fascinating to watch that.
I think women's sports, the flow of foreign money and the disintegration of the TV model to me are the three biggest drivers of change across sports. Ultimately, I still think there's a big question about whether — and we've written about it in Club Sportico — women's sports as they mature are going to resemble our biggest men's leagues, whether they're going to start a new way forward for the men's leagues to follow, or whether they're going to become solely different in the way that we associate ourselves with teams versus players, the way we watch them, the way that we engage with them. It's an extremely wide-open question to me and something I do think we will get answers to over the next couple of years.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: I agree with that, and that's something we're going to write about a lot, I'm sure. But the ongoing labor fight right now between the WNBA players and the WNBA/NBA — because there's a very thin line between those two organizations and in some cases no line at all — that labor fight is going to be very instructive about this idea that women's sports can grow in a very different way than men's sports, or whether they'll continue on the exact same path.
If I'm thinking ahead toward next year or in the next two months, what are the biggest sports stories on our radar? It's that labor fight, and what the gains will look like that the WNBA players are getting at a time when their social power is at an all-time high. It's going to be absolutely fascinating.
It's a really cool time. This is somewhat unrelated, and it's been a minute since this was a thing, but Jacob, I believe you wrote about this a while ago: I got into the Overwatch League for a few years, which was an e-sports league, and it was really interesting to see them try to start a new league from the ground up — what they borrowed from existing structures and what they rejected.
That didn't work, and they folded that league a few years ago, but it opened up my mind to the idea that leagues don't have to operate the way that current leagues do. To your point about women's sports potentially going in a different direction, I don't even think that people knew there was a different direction a couple of years ago.
NOVY-WILLIAMS: I think a lot of people, fans of Overwatch, would say that they tried too hard to be like the NFL. They had salary caps, they had revenue sharing, and they tried to sell their media rights in the same way that sports leagues sell theirs, with exclusivity and all that. And yes, if people in e-sports could go back and do some of that stuff again, maybe transport back to 2018, I do think there are different ways they could have built a lot of these franchise leagues that maybe would have made them more sustainable and more popular than figuring out the mold of the NBA and trying to copy it, the style that they ended up choosing.
FELDMAN: The new leagues are learning from that. We're already seeing it. Looking at the way Unrivaled is set up, it's smaller at start, it's player-owned at start, it's leaning into individual personalities rather than this idea that you put New York on a team name and all of a sudden New Yorkers are going to be a fan. That's just not how sports work anymore. I do think there's been a recognition of that, but even beyond that, like you're saying, what is the role of a fan of these organizations? Are we going to have heroes and villains? Are they going to be different? Is it going to be like reality TV in certain ways? There are so many different threads that these new leagues are pulling from now, and they're a lot smarter than they were 10 years ago, even though in some cases, the same people are investing and building them.
You have been so generous with all your time. Where can folks find you? Where can they find the work?
NOVY-WILLIAMS: They can find Club Sportico at club.sportico.com. You can find me on Twitter at @Novy_Williams. Then Sportico is @Sportico on Twitter, and sportico.com is the main site. That's where most of my stuff is.
FELDMAN: I will add, I think one of the reasons we launched Club Sportico was to look for an alternative to what Eben will go to his grave calling Twitter. I think we're experimenting a lot more with chats and notes and trying to be more engaging there. I definitely recommend finding us on Club Sportico. Feel free to join, and reach out — let us know what kind of coverage you want to see on all these topics. Again, this is something we're charting when it comes to how much business coverage people want. We're still calibrating exactly what that looks like.
I am a big fan. I look forward to reading more from you guys. Thanks for coming on.
BOTH: Thank you.
Edited by Susie Stark.
If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.
Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber!
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.