David Stern Comparing Notes With The EPL

Taking care of some leftovers from yesterday: This Financial Times item on Stern’s new relationship with the Premier League warrants consideration: ↵↵⇥Representatives from the football and basketball organisations have met in London to discuss how they might work together. They have also compared notes on their respective media rights strategies – particularly in Asia, which is a huge and still largely untapped market for western sport.↵⇥
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↵⇥David Stern NBA commissioner said: “We are unapologetic imitators. The Premier League’s ability to negotiate their [media] deals and the way they split their packages [of media rights] . . . is something we can learn from.”↵↵What’s so intriguing here is the dizzying array of possible outcomes: NBA and Premier League work together, the two “compare notes,” or the NBA starts to pursue some pretty aggressive restructuring of what happens with revenue. Seeing as the EPL has no cap, but shares revenue—like a combination of everything baseball’s ever been—it might seem like an odd fit for a sport that has a PR problem with supposedly lazy, overpaid players and almost experienced a labor collapse when Kevin Garnett signed a contract that exceeded all human decency.↵
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At the same time, the big issue now is teams losing money, which makes revenue redistribution that much more appealing. And for there to be excess revenue to go around, it figures you’d want a few teams loaded up with name talent. So while the article points to gripes about a few teams dominating, and Stern remarks that “In boom times an absence of restraints is attractive to investors and risk takers,” this might also be a way to solve a lot of the league’s short and medium-term financial issues.
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