World Congress 2020: Ben Fischer

Below is a sampling of the questions he fielded, edited for clarity and brevity:

Why did the NFL keep its free agency seasons as planned as everyone else was canceling events?

The NFL is mostly where most of us are about their businesses. They’re in a different position in an offseason in that there aren’t live public-facing events going on, and they are basically making the same decisions that a lot of us have: We’re going to try to maintain our business affairs to the extent we can, given all the limitations we’ve got, and that the start of the league season, to start free agency, are things that don’t literally happen virtually but could happen virtually without too much trouble. They figured, let’s keep that going, and there was some criticism in some corners and some questions raised about the fairness, or the appropriateness of signing eight-figure contracts during the crisis. But ultimately, I think in reality there wasn’t a lot to that. And on the whole, people were pretty pleased to have something approaching normal business at the time, to write about and to talk about that week.

Should sports leagues and teams be looked at differently, in terms of cutting costs, than other major Fortune 500 companies, when it comes to layoffs and salary reductions?

A business is a business and if you’re staying out of the red, you’ve got to cut costs and people are costs, right? From a neutral perspective, from an arm’s-length business analyst position, you’d say, do what you got to do. But I think we’ve all seen already how high a stakes it is for teams to be cutting personnel costs at the time like this.

Teams are particularly dependent on the goodwill of their fans, and there’s a lot of talk in better times about how teams have an obligation to their communities more than just making a profit and winning games. And I think undoubtedly you can point to some examples of people that would tell you now that, based on media coverage and the intense pressure that came to them, that, yes, they do need to be viewed differently. 

What lasting impact might this postponement have on future Olympics and how entities on both sides structure their deals?

I suspect that sponsorship contracts will now likely make reference to specific numbers of Games rather than given years.

One of the biggest, most obvious challenges we’re going to face right now is that all of Team USA’s domestic sponsorship deals expire Dec. 31, 2020. It was structured that way to give LA28 and Casey Wasserman and Kathy Carter’s team open ground to sell for the ’21 through ’28 period. That is a perfectly logical and reasonable thing to do, but it’s going to be a bit challenging to figure out how those deals apply for 2021. The reasonable thing to do is to let those current sponsors go on another year if they’d like to, but that turns into some conflicts with global and LA28 deals that have already been sold. I would expect Olympic sponsors to try to pin down the properties much more on the exact number of Games rather than years because now we know that years don’t necessarily mean Games happen.