Bolade Maiga @THEBOLADE

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Isn't it great to be alive on a Saturday afternoon in Turin, or what? @BeckyLynchWWE

Rebecca Quin @BeckyLynchWWE

2 weeks ago

GOOD MORNING ITALIA!!!!!!!

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@ITRWrestling_ Shelton Benjamin Baron Corbin Rusev

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@FirstNameJ0hn Stone Cold Steve Austin Roman Reigns Triple H Antonio Inoki Scott Hall (Razor Ramon)

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Media companies inherit passive minority stakes in acquisitions all the time. Sometimes they keep them, sometimes they unwind them, sometimes they ignore them. What they don’t do is redesign their sports strategy around equity they never intended to buy. If Paramount inherits a minority stake in AEW, it doesn’t change either side of your argument. It wouldn’t influence Paramount’s NFL relationship, and it wouldn’t suddenly make AEW a strategic pillar for the company. Networks license sports programming based on audience performance, advertising value, and cost efficiency. They don’t build programming strategy around a small piece of equity they happened to inherit in a merger. Now zoom out and look at the scale Paramount would actually be operating at if the Paramount–WBD deal closes. The combined company would have one of the deepest sports portfolios in the industry, potentially rivaling or even surpassing ESPN. Paramount already carries the NFL, The Masters, the PGA Championship, PGA Tour events, Big Ten football and basketball, Champions League, and starting next year every UFC event. WBD adds MLB playoff rounds, half the national NHL package with ESPN, Big 12 football and basketball through sublicenses, College Football Playoff games, plus NASCAR, the French Open, Big East basketball, and Unrivaled. Both companies also share the men’s NCAA tournament. That would give the combined company sports across broadcast through CBS, cable through TNT, and streaming through Paramount+ and Max, with rights touching nearly every major U.S. sports property outside the NBA and the SEC. That’s the scale Paramount is operating at when it evaluates sports. The NFL deal alone runs roughly $2.1 billion per year for CBS as part of a broader league rights ecosystem that now exceeds $10 billion annually across partners. David Ellison just reiterated publicly that the NFL is one of Paramount’s most important partners and that they plan to keep that relationship for the foreseeable future. The current deal runs through 2033, with an NFL opt-out clause in 2029. Against that backdrop, the idea that the Khan family owning the Jacksonville Jaguars somehow gives AEW leverage with Paramount collapses immediately. The Jaguars owner doesn’t control NFL television rights. The NFL does. NFL media rights are negotiated centrally by the league office. Individual team owners don’t sell games to networks, don’t negotiate broadcast agreements, and don’t influence where the league’s games air. The entire reason the NFL is the most valuable sports property in the United States is because the league sells those rights collectively for all 32 teams. CBS doesn’t have a relationship with the Jaguars owner. CBS has a $10B+ dollar relationship with the NFL. Paramount’s counterparty in that agreement is the league office, not any individual franchise owner. The Jaguars owner can’t steer NFL games to CBS, can’t use NFL ownership as leverage with the network, and can’t broker unrelated programming deals off NFL inventory. If NFL ownership created that kind of leverage, every owner in the league would be using their franchise to sell television shows to networks. They don’t, because the NFL’s structure doesn’t allow it. Paramount’s central partner in combat sports is obviously TKO. They’re paying roughly $1.1 billion per year for the UFC rights. So your premise mixes together three completely unrelated things: an inherited minority equity position from a corporate acquisition, Paramount’s real sports priorities which include the NFL and TKO, and NFL franchise ownership which has zero influence over league media rights. None of those things intersect in any meaningful way. And pretending they do just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the sports rights business actually works.

i’ve watched jon alba’s video a few times now, and to be fair, what he’s saying conceptually is correct. aew is owned by a billionaire. this is correct. well, the son of a billionaire. i don’t know how the family intermingles funds, or who is in whose last will and testament, but i concede the point. tony khan is in fact rich. aew is almost certainly not going “anywhere,” meaning aew is likely not going to go under. i agree with this. aew however, most certainly is going “somewhere” after this wbd deal. media rights markets aren’t built on sentiment. they’re built on architecture, leverage, scarcity, buyer pressure, strategic need and distribution power. once you map those things honestly, this outcome’s been staring everyone in the face for months. that’s why that “somewhere” isn’t paramount. that’s why the most likely “somewhere” increasingly looks like it will be youtube. i’m typing in stream of consciousness because i’ve only posted some version of this 10,000 times. now we’re getting “reports” that are basically just the same common sense i’ve been vomiting all over the timeline since last summer, except now it’s being filtered through the same people who helped sell the original fantasy math. the problem with the conversation is that people keep reducing media rights leverage to “aew makes relatively cheap live content,” but that’s not how media rights leverage works. that’s a programming fact. it’s not a market thesis. it’s not a buyer thesis. it’s not strategic necessity. live content can be useful. cheap content can be useful. useful inventory isn’t the same thing as leverage. leverage comes from architecture. it comes from where the product fits inside a buyer’s stack. it comes from whether the product reduces subscriber churn, drives acquisition, supports an ad tier, creates habit, bundles against other rights, strengthens a broader sports product, or forces another credible buyer to respond because they can’t let a competitor have it. that’s the difference between “this has value” and “this has a market.” aew has value. i’ve never said it doesn’t. it has a loyal audience. it has recognizable talent. it has weekly live programming. it has a rich owner, who lets everyone know that he is very rich. it has pay-per-view infrastructure, even if i’ve argued correctly that pay-per-view is an increasingly irrelevant and dead metric in 2026, which has only been reinforced by aew’s litigation with triller about missing international ppv revenues. the issue, in my mind, isn’t that aew needs the money that triller underpaid over the last several years or whatever the term of engagement was with triller. the issue is that no one is smart enough or honest enough with tony khan to ask him what the fuck are you thinking doing any deals with triller in the first place? triller has been the equivalent of an unreliable dumpster fire that has been plagued with a trail of litigation since it stumbled into the fight scene, which i absolutely fucking apologize for. i didn’t have authority over that deal, and you know i am talking about triller’s broadcast of the mike tyson vs. roy jones fight a couple years ago. we were the agency but not the promoter on that one. that was eros stx and sophie watts, and that’s how triller jumped over to the fight game. you do not do a deal with triller unless you get your money upfront. common sense around town. must not be common. aew has a library that’s worth something to someone. aew has a fanbase that’s loud, sticky and online. all of that matters. none of that automatically creates a competitive auction. there’s a huge difference between “someone will take this” and “multiple major buyers need this badly enough to bid against each other.” that’s the part people keep skipping. once you actually map the 2027 landscape, the buyer universe gets very small, very fast. wwe and tko’s relationships with the actual 17-20 buyers that exist for live sports rights in the u.s. aren’t theoretical. they’re tangible, binding relationships across almost the entire board. the board looks something like this: netflix - wwe raw / global wwe relationship espn - wwe ple package disney - espn parent / wwe ple relationship nbc - wwe saturday night’s main event / nbcu relationship versant (usa) - wwe smackdown / nbcu relationship peacock - prior wwe network / snme cw - nxt paramount+ - ufc cbs - ufc max - merged paramount/max stack, plus current wbd/aew complication turner sports - current wbd/aew relationship, but inside the same broader wbd transaction/consolidation reality fox - former smackdown partner, let wwe go because the economics didn’t work for what fox needed fox nation - adjacent, but not a clean real aew answer. also humorously, eric bischoff’s raf is killing it on fox nation amazon - not directly tied to tko the same way, but already focused on nfl, nba, global sports, commerce, ads, prime retention and massive scale apple - not directly tied to tko, but its sports mandate is premium, global, clean, centralized and ownable youtube - not traditional buyer for media rights but did pay a lot for sunday ticket and the oscars roku - probably off the board for a $$ play after the cw and nxt tie up tubi - fox ecosystem / low tier avod / wwe evolve vice - low tier / not a serious economic answer once you overlay the actual product map, the “wide open market” that people who sold you the original fantasy math keep imagining basically disappears. raw is with netflix. wwe premium live events are going to espn. smackdown is with usa/nbcu. nxt is with cw. ufc is going into the paramount/cbs stack. zuffa boxing and pbr are in that same broader ecosystem. peacock had the wwe network relationship and nbcu still has major wwe product. fox already had smackdown, a bigger and more advertiser-friendly wrestling product, and let it go because the economics didn’t work for what fox needs broadcast sports to do. so when people say “someone will want aew,” yes, probably. i agree. someone probably will. but that’s not the same thing as saying amazon, apple, fox, paramount, disney, netflix, nbcu, max and youtube are all sitting there creating a real auction. that’s where the entire dirt sheet version falls apart. amazon isn’t a buyer just because something’s live. amazon buys against prime retention, advertising, commerce, data, nfl habit, nba scale and global ecosystem value. amazon cares about whether a sports product reinforces the prime bundle, drives ad sales, creates consumer habit, touches commerce, or gives them something they can scale globally. “it’s live” isn’t enough. servicing ppvs through prime video channels isn’t the same thing as underwriting a major guaranteed rights fee. a storefront isn’t a rights strategy. a transactional lane isn’t the same as a rights partner. amazon can absolutely monetize aew if aew’s there. that doesn’t mean amazon needs to write the check that saves the fantasy. apple’s even less likely. apple buys clean, premium, global, brand-safe, elegant sports products that fit the apple ecosystem. mls made sense because it was centralized, global, clean and ownable. f1 made sense as a chase because it’s premium, international, culturally upscale and commercially elegant. apple wants products that make apple look like apple. aew doesn’t fit that mandate cleanly. and the issue isn’t that aew’s ratings are wildly volatile. they’re not. it’s actually the opposite problem. aew is steady, defined and capped. the audience is there every week, but the audience hasn’t shown a serious ability to grow, broaden, or generate new fans at scale. that’s a different problem than volatility, and honestly it may be worse for media rights. volatility at least lets you sell upside. a steady 600k-730k-ish cable audience with a narrow demo shape tells a buyer the product has a core, but it also tells the buyer the core might be the whole thing. this is where the nielsen conversation matters, not because the numbers are “bad” in some childish wrestling twitter way, but because the shape of the numbers tells you what the product is. aew’s ratings are relatively steady. that’s the point. they have a loyal core audience that shows up, especially men, especially the wrestling-hardcore demo. but when they drew around 730k viewers on that programming insider sheet, the story wasn’t “wow, look at the growth.” the story was roughly a 0.15 adults 18-49, around a 0.20 men 18-49, around a 0.09 women 18-49, a 0.22 adults 25-54, around a 0.30 men 25-54, and 12th in total viewers. that’s not a broad audience profile. that’s a concentrated audience profile. it means the 18-49 number was being carried heavily by men. it means the 25-54 number was being carried even more heavily by men. it means the total viewer number looks fine in isolation, but the internal composition doesn’t scream “this is growing into a broader mainstream property.” it screams “this is a reliable core product with a defined ceiling.” that matters because media buyers don’t just ask whether something’s live. they ask what kind of live audience it delivers, whether that audience is growing, whether it’s broadening, whether it can bring in new subscribers, whether it helps reduce churn, whether it can support ad tiers, whether it creates habit outside the existing fanbase, and whether it has enough scarcity to make multiple buyers compete. aew’s nielsen profile says it has value. it doesn’t say it has major auction leverage. there’s a difference. a stable 600k-730k audience with a male-heavy demo is useful inventory. it can absolutely be monetized. it can absolutely have a home. it can absolutely justify a deal somewhere. but it doesn’t demonstrate the kind of expanding audience, broad demo composition, or subscriber-acquisition power that makes amazon, apple, fox, paramount or disney wake up and say “we have to have this.” fox is also not some empty programming shelf where you can write “aew” in sharpie and call it a strategy. fox had smackdown. fox had the bigger brand, the better reach, the cleaner ad sales story, the better mainstream awareness, and the stronger promotional utility. fox still let it go because broadcast economics require scale, predictability, ad yield and return. if smackdown became too expensive for what fox needed, the aew case isn’t magically stronger because people on wrestling twitter want there to be a door. fox is nfl, mlb, college football, nascar, world cup, big event programming. that’s the mandate. that’s the ad sales machine. that’s the broadcast proposition. the question isn’t “could fox air wrestling?” obviously it could. it did. the question is why fox would take a smaller wrestling product with a narrower audience profile after walking away from the stronger one. that’s not analysis. that’s logo fantasy. paramount is the one that makes the least sense, and that’s been obvious for a while. ufc is sitting there. wwe is sitting there. tko is sitting there. ellison is sitting there. the idea that aew is casually sliding into a long-term paramount/max home while all of those relationships and strategic interests are in the same ecosystem is not serious analysis. it’s people pretending the corporate map doesn’t exist because they don’t like what the map says. that’s why youtube has always been the weird logical answer. youtube doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional rights buyer list, but youtube can make a money play when it wants to. sunday ticket is the obvious example. the oscars are another one. youtube also understands communities, fandoms, search, clips, creator ecosystems, long-tail monetization, direct audience behavior and algorithmic distribution in a way that probably fits aew better than almost anyone else. if you’re asking where aew can land, youtube makes sense. if you’re asking where aew has leverage, that’s a much harder argument. youtube can give aew reach. youtube can give aew audience behavior data. youtube can give aew a global discovery engine. youtube can clip the product into the bloodstream of the internet better than almost anyone. youtube can probably monetize the hardcore fanbase more cleanly than a traditional cable network that needs broad audience delivery and ad-sales predictability. but youtube also doesn’t need to pretend aew is the nba. youtube doesn’t need to bid against itself. youtube doesn’t need to underwrite somebody else’s fantasy multiple. youtube can be the best landing spot and still not be the leverage case people want. that’s the nuance people keep losing. “aew will not go out of business” isn’t leverage. “aew is owned by a billionaire” isn’t leverage. “aew makes cheap live content” isn’t leverage. “aew has fans” isn’t leverage. those things may explain why the company survives and why it finds a landing spot. they don’t create a competitive media rights auction by themselves. this is also why the new meltzer/won framing is funny to me. what dave and won are now reporting that wwe and tko supposedly think about aew and its media rights viability is basically the same common sense i’ve explained 7,500 different ways. up, down, backwards, forwards, up up, down down, left, right, left, right, b, a. there’s nothing new in these “reports” that people who work in hollywood, understand deal architecture, and have paid attention to the 2027 consolidation landscape haven’t already known was the most likely outcome since late last summer. i’ve vomited this all over the timeline. the buyer universe isn’t infinite. tko’s relationships aren’t theoretical. paramount never made sense. amazon, apple and fox were always mostly fake doors unless something dramatically changed. youtube was always the obvious weird door. the current aew deal was always dressed up with creative math, in-kind value, option-year nonsense, fox/shockwave fan fiction, ppv revenue dreams, library value dreams, and dirt sheet laundering to make it feel closer to the 5 year, $1b pr flex tony clearly wanted than it actually was. tony clearly wanted the 5 year, $1b number because that was the pr win. and if you go back through the fightful/podcast/dirt sheet ecosystem around those negotiations, that number kept floating around over and over again. then when the market didn’t give him that, suddenly it became 3 years at $170m-ish, plus a year 4 option nobody was ever going to pick up, plus fox speculation, plus “what’s shockwave?”, plus ppv revenue, plus library value, plus whatever else could be glued to the side of the deal to keep the headline near the number they wanted. that’s not the same thing as a clean rights fee. by the way, my best guess remains is that aew got something like $480-510m in rights fees (not in-kind) over 3 years from wbd, which is a good deal! it’s a good deal! but it’s not the deal tony khan wanted people to think it is. it doesn’t prove the next market is stronger. if anything, the next market looks more consolidated, more politically complicated and more closed off than the last one. and that’s the part nobody wants to sit with. the last negotiation happened before the full 2027 stack was this obvious! before the board got this compressed. before tko had this much product spread across this many key buyers. before ufc moved into the paramount/cbs stack. before the wbd/paramount/max future became this politically and strategically loaded. before the buyer universe started looking less like an open field and more like a parking garage with three exits and one of them says youtube. yes, aew will survive. so yes, aew will go somewhere. yes, youtube is probably the cleanest answer. the reason this keeps trending toward what i’ve said is likely inevitable isn’t because of tribal wrestling discourse, or because people want wrestlers to lose jobs, or because twitter manifested anything. it’s because the market structure keeps pointing to the same place. after you finish mapping the architecture, leverage, scarcity, buyer pressure, strategic need, distribution power, and when you map it HONESTLY, this outcome’s been staring everyone in the face for months. that brings me back to paramount, because this is the part people really want to pretend isn’t there. no, i don’t think aew is casually walking into a long-term paramount/max home while ufc, wwe, tko, ari, ellison, cbs, paramount and that whole stack are sitting there like none of those relationships exist. ari emanuel is the ceo of tko. that’s the guy who is sitting in the middle of this ecosystem. the guy who has been david ellison’s agent/advisor for 15-20 years. DID YOU READ THAT SENTENCE CAREFULLY if you don’t know who ari emanuel is very well, ari emanuel is a very successful agent turned ceo. ari emanuel is not a man you want to fuck with, in the same way you don't want to compete against michael jordan or kobe bryant in just about anything, because they will out compete you. that is a fact of life. certainly not someone like tony khan who would get eaten alive in any sort of situation where he was up against ari. i am not suggesting there is beef or pre-determined plan. THIS IS LITERALLY JUST THE FOOD CHAIN. THE CIRCLE OF LIFE. and, no: this does not mean i am white knighting ari or that i suck tko dick or whatever the fuck you virgins on the internet want to believe. you have no clue what you are talking about. try to understand that please. it will be the thing that gives you the most peace as this next year plays out. ye. out. please read the 2013 emails between ari and irving azoff: deadline.com/2013/06/ari-em…

@kunwarabhi7 Indian wrestlers wasn’t making them money, simple.

@NoTalentJobber @BrandonTheHeel Imagine this happening in 2026 😂 Dirt sheets, would have the full backstory, planned finish, and backstage footage before Hall even hit the ring.

@YEAHRevolution_ Scott Hall sold this invasion perfectly. Today it would be ruined in 5 minutes by Meltzer tweets. This is why we’ll never get another moment like it.

🔗open.substack.com/pub/proptechro…