Athletes Unlimited co-Founder and CEO Jon Patricof is rethinking how professional sports leagues are structured based on changes in the way fans consume sports during the digital age. The organization currently runs leagues in three different women’s sports, volleyball, softball and lacrosse, and is looking to break into additional sports for both genders soon. On the latest episode of “SBJ Unpacks: The Road Ahead,” our Andrew Levin sits down with Patricof to discuss the key insights that drove decisions on the leagues’ unique structure. They discuss eliminating team ownership, deemphasizing ticket sales’ role in revenue and the importance of granting fans unparalleled access to athletes.
On Athletes Unlimited’s playing model:
Patricof: The league itself is shortened duration. Our average league runs six weeks. It’s extremely intense. There’s no postseason. All the action happens in those six weeks. It was a general insight: pro seasons have gotten really long. They’re drawn out, and we wanted to make it really intense and great for both the athletes and the fans. … We’re doing it all in one city. There’s no moving around. We really were the bubble before the bubble existed, and that’s our model long-term. We think it’s a smart model that works really well, especially for younger properties and younger leagues that are coming up today. … We have no fixed teams. We bring together 56 of the best athletes. They come to the city, and they actually switch teams each week through a draft process. At the end of the season, those players show up on a leaderboard. Depending on how many games they won and how well they performed determines where you end up on the leaderboard.
On the benefits of eliminating team ownership:
Patricof: It’s streamlined decision making. You need to be able to move quickly. I am someone who has had experience in MLS, which is an amazing league and has the benefit of amazing owners, but certainly when I speak to commissioners or other leagues that I’ve thought about getting involved in, I think it’s really hard when you don’t have a group of like-minded owners who can come together easily and make decisions. There are multiple levels of competition in current league structures where you have a league with its own commercial, strategy and marketing objectives, but then you have local teams that each have its own objective. … You’ve got a lot of different parties that you’ve got to pull together.
On the role of fans:
Patricof: When you start from the beginning thinking about fans from a national or global level, it’s obviously a very different model. Most existing leagues, so much of the fan activity is around the ticket buying process, season ticket holders and what happens on a hyper-local level. I think the reality is most of those relationships are with those particular teams, not the league. We are trying to build relationships at the league level and then at the athlete level. At the league level, the pandemic really helped us hone in on what does that experience look like going forward for fans who may never come to a game in-person, and most of them won’t.
