Baseball in Dubai, The Potential Impact of the NBA’s In-Season Tournament and the Growing ROI of Women’s Sports

October 27, 2023

Each week, we sift through a ton of content and then debate it ad nauseam at FEVO HQ. And since good content, like the mind, is a terrible thing to waste, we are also sharing it here with you, our fans, in the form of this weekly blog post on e-commerce, media and life on the internet.

Fast Company: How the NBA designed its new In-Season Tournament

America’s major sports leagues have gotten increasingly comfortable with changing up the format of how competition operates over the course of the season. The NFL recently added an additional playoff spot and extra regular-season game to the season; MLB expanded the playoffs with extra wild cards and play-in games; and the NBA now has the play-in tournament, a Covid-era supplement that happened to stick. However, the NBA’s new in-season tournament is the first foray into creating an entirely new competition in quite some time. Designed after the league cups popular in European soccer, the In-Season Tournament will be, essentially, a season within a season, with a goal “to create a second championship that has meaning to players, teams, and fans.” It’s likely that the tournament will take some time to develop the sort of prestige the NBA desires, but with the right marketing, player buy-in and storytelling, it can become a staple of the sport. It will be interesting to see how it impacts mid-season attendance — a period that can be a lull in the schedule for many teams.

Sports Pro Media: 83% of brands plan to increase media investment into women’s sports in 2024

Sports Pro delivers a synopsis of a really impressive study done by the Sports Innovation Lab on The ROI of Women’s Sports (link to download study here), illuminating just how keen brands are to increase their sponsorship of the rapidly growing women’s sports industry. According to the study, brands currently spend a paltry 9% of their sports media budget on women’s sports. This, as the study also points out, is mostly due to a perceived lack of interest from fans, which in turns correlates with a perceived lack in media value, preventing major investment. However, brands would be wise to rethink their strategy, since women athletes in many sports have proven to be more powerful influencers than their male counterparts.

Yahoo Sports: Bartolo Colon, Robinson Canó among former MLB players drafted in new Dubai-based league

The new league, which features four teams total (Mumbai Cobras, Karachi Monarchs, Dubai Wolves and Abu Dhabi Falcons), is set to begin play in 2024 in an attempt to appeal to cricket lovers with a similar sport. To drum up interest, the league has enlisted the help (at a rather hefty salary) of some recently retired legends and also instituted new rules to make the game more exciting (they’re promising “things you’d never see in other professional baseball leagues”). Whether this will go the way of the Saudi Pro [Soccer] League, which has successfully lured away in-prime athletes, is yet to be seen. Either way, it represents another step for the Middle East’s rise as a dominant force in the world of traditionally Western sports.