Mike Schur

It was bleak man.

The pandemic was a real bleak time.

Sports fandom at this moment of definitively unprecedented but seemingly infinite sort of economic power, amid all this fragmentation in which you can't make stars and entertainment the same way, you still can get these communities, especially around the NFL, to care about these games such that...

the valuations of these teams are, I mean, Joe, the idea that, hey, guess what?

The Lakers are a $10 billion franchise and we all just like nod along.

Sure, why not?

What's happening, my theory of the case, as we look into the, again, the foreboding crystal ball, is that because the only people

who can afford to buy these teams once we reach that threshold are not people but institutional investors.

Like private equity firms, we are entering a period where that humanness that we've been talking about for an hour, that ineffable but palpable fandom,

will never be less important to them, to the people who actually will own sports.

This is exactly the problem, I think.

If you own the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1934, you need to go sign a bunch of good players so that people will...

take a dime and buy a ticket to the game and then buy a hot dog and a soda or a beer because that's how you are making money.

That's right.

It is literally like you have expenses, which are your players, and you have revenue, which is tickets.

And we are so far away from that now.

Why is the NBA showing a Game 7 on Amazon Prime?

Because Amazon Prime gave them a ton of money.

And the degree to which fans attending games matters to the people who own these teams has never been lower.

And it's only going to get lower...