Sports can be a tricky beat, because so many journalists focus on the teams and the outcomes of the games, and miss the vast sums of money that surround professional and college sports. Sports business coverage is critical to understanding the role agents, managers and stadium financing have not only on the game itself, but the local community and fans. In this week’s episode co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard discuss the business side of sports, emphasizing the importance of covering sports finance. They highlight tips and insights from Jon Paul Morosi of Fox Sports and the MLB Network who is an expert on sports transactions.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Thinking like a business reporter, even when you’re not one. Welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. We’re based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Micki Maynard, Director of the Reynolds Center, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a Cronkite school alum and a reporter and anchor with KTAR News in Phoenix. Hi Mark!
Remillard: Hello Micki.
Maynard: Today we bring you. Series 1, Episode 9: Covering Sports and Money
Remillard: Yes, this is a subject that ought to be covered a lot more, and really doesn’t get the coverage it should. That’s the business behind sports.
Maynard: That’s right. A lot of journalists are sports fans, and there are a lot of sports journalists, and as we know, there’s a lot of money in sports, but it’s a subject that doesn’t get covered all that often, because, like everybody else in journalism, a lot of sports writers are afraid of money.
Remillard: And you have some tips, you actually learned from one of the best in the business on this topic. Tell us about that.
Maynard: Yeah, I had a great conversation with John Paul Morosi from Fox Sports. He’s a former reporter with the Detroit Free Press, and he’s now considered the expert on sports transactions, that’s everything from trades to contracts.
Remillard: What are some of the tips that John gave you?
Maynard: Well, John suggests that people look at covering sports and money in the same way that they would another beat. Like covering a company or covering politics, just as you would at a company that you were covering. He suggests that you have sources at every level of a sports league or a sports team. So let’s talk about baseball. Since spring training is underway and it’ll be baseball season coming up. He says that you want to have sources everywhere from the executive offices of Major League Baseball, literally down to the minor league. So you need to cultivate people in the executive offices of the teams and while it helps to know the players, it also is very important to get to know sports agents.
Remillard: When I think of sports agents, I think a lot of people do. They think of Jerry Maguire, of course, but that’s really where a lot of people got a taste for sports agents and what they do. Right?
Maynard: It’s been absolutely fascinating for me to dive into the world of sports agents, because these people are not only the people that negotiate your contracts, but more and more and more importantly, they’re the person that will help you manage your money. I was talking to somebody at a Major League Baseball team recently who told me that the agents have taken very, very broad responsibilities for not just the players contracts, but for their lives. These rookies are getting million dollar bonuses for signing and then they have to figure out how to manage the money. That’s where the agents come in. They offer all kinds of guidance, like how to buy a house, how to invest their money, and even where to live. There was a super cool piece on the Players Tribune recently, and that’s a website that Derek Jeter has started so the players can post first person stories about their lives. And one of the posts was by Sean Avery, formerly with the New York Rangers, who’s actually known for the Avery Renewal.
Remillard: Pretty notorious name in hockey, for sure.
Maynard: And Sean Avery was actually writing about the specifics of what happens when you sign a contract and the kind of purchases you make. You know, he bought a truck, but then he realized when he got to training camp that his truck wasn’t as good as the other truck. So he went, bought another truck. And then he realized that after agent fees and and payments and house payments and all that, he had no money left. And this was someone playing hockey in the NHL. And there are all kinds of these stories about the fact that you sign these young folks, and then they don’t know how to manage money, they don’t know how to look at the long term. And so these sports agents are becoming more and more important.
Remillard: Yeah, and I think that’s something, when you look behind the scenes, you start to see how these people who make these multi-million-dollar deals per year, I mean, and then people wonder, like, how does this person lose all their money later in their life? And it’s, well, you know, once you talk like you said, these cuts and you have to pay your agent, pay this person and this person in accountants, it’s really, by the time it trickles down to them in their pockets. You know, it might not actually be as much, nearly as much as it sounded like it was,
Maynard: Right. And I think what happens with some sports reporters is that they only see the exterior of this. They see Justin Verlander driving up to spring training in Lakeland, Florida in a Lamborghini, or something like that. And there are only a very few Justin Verlanders, and there’s far more people that bump along in the minor leagues and end up in the majors for only a few years. And to me, that’s just an absolutely fascinating story, and the agents are a key part of that.
Remillard: So how do you go about getting to know sports agents and everyone from the top down, like, where we should be doing?
Maynard: Well, John Morosi says it’s the same way you would cover political primaries or a trade show. You show up, you meet people, you collect information, and then you do lots of stories. The reason why you want to do a lot of stories have sort of a river of news on sports business is that, he says the league and the teams and the agents basically read everything that’s written about them and listen to everything that’s said about them. So if your work, your work really speaks for you. And if you show that you’re smart, if you ask good questions, you’ll build up your source list, and eventually you’ll start to get scoops.
Remillard: Yeah, there’s really no way around pounding the pavement, I think. It’s just like any reporting position, you need to make sure that you’re out in the field, your face is in front of these people, and then they know you, then they start to trust you. And like you said, you might get those scoops, but those scoops sometimes, you know, you have to, you have to be careful with those, or at least maybe not you. But the agents are careful with those scoops, because legally, there’s only so much they can say.
Maynard: Right. One of the things I didn’t know before I started looking into this that John told me is that the Collective Bargaining Agreement with Major League Baseball basically says that agents are not supposed to talk about the status of pre-agents, and we had a big free agency season this last winter. He says that the fans get frustrated with the reporters because it seems like they don’t know what’s going on, but often they don’t, because the agents are legally not supposed to tell them.
Remillard: So what are some of the things that they can tell you?
Maynard: Well, it depends on the sport. So in the NHL, the NHL Players Association lists the full addresses and information for every agent, and it’s astonishingly easy to find an agent for a hockey player. And the agents that have only 10 guys that they represent have more time, and they’re easier to get to know than some of the major agents, like Scott Boris, who represents all of the big blue chip pitchers and players in Major League Baseball.
Remillard: We talked about how you need to be an expert. We’ve done this a lot from CEOs. You got to have your background. You have to be knowledgeable about what you’re about to interview or talk about the story you’re going to do. How do you become an expert in sports and business?
Maynard: Well, John compares what’s been happening in sports reporting to what’s happening in political reporters. These days, there are different reporters specializing in different things. If you think about politics, there are some political reporters that only show up once it’s clear who the candidate is going to be. They don’t care about the primaries, you know, or even the caucuses, and then there are others that will drive all over Iowa before the caucuses, because they want to be there for every single moment of what’s going on. So there’s been a fracturing of this coverage in sports as well, and I think that leaves the door wide open for sports business coverage. You figure out your niche, and you find a way to own it. The other thing I would highly recommend is that you learn Spanish, because that’s going to open up about 1/3 of what’s going on in Major League Baseball. And just imagine how valuable you will be if you are bilingual and able to talk to every single person in the locker room and their agents, who are increasingly becoming very important in Latino baseball as well.
Remillard: One of the things that doesn’t get covered a lot in sports as well, and we’re no stranger to that here in Arizona with the Phoenix Coyotes and now the Arizona Coyotes and their stadium, is the stadium deals actually, not just the players, but the stadiums.
Maynard: Yeah, we’ve had a number of stories on our website, businessjournalism.org, about the changing nature of the way stadiums are financed. It used to be that cities and counties would put up public money in order to get a team or keep a team from leaving, but now the municipalities are pushing back against the teams that demand that they finance the stadiums. It’s been very interesting, because a number of municipalities have been left holding the bag when teams decide to leave or the stadium doesn’t produce the revenue that they were expecting, and they’re starting to get very itchy about this whole thing. So it’s a good idea to have your sources, not just at the teams, but also in local government, because the teams have to have all kinds of permits to build a stadium and to get all kinds of approval from governing bodies. So if there’s going to be any kind of public money involved, you don’t want to just have sources at the team. You want to have sources in your local government as well.
Remillard: Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of that here in Arizona with, like I mentioned, the Arizona Coyotes, but recently we had the Super Bowl. There were so many stories that involved finances and the way that Glendale was working to get the money they needed for the public safety of the event, everything. And there was actually a big, a lot of news stories recently about how the mayor of the town was where the city was really upset with the fact that he felt like Glendale was holding the bag for a lot of the public money that was needed to put on this event, but they were getting none of the return. You know, while Phoenix and Scottsdale and all the local other places were the places where all the tourists really wanted to be and when they were in town, so people were only coming in the city for the game and then leaving. And so there’s a lot of dynamics there that that you can really dive into.
Mayanrd: Right. There’s a story just sitting there for somebody up in Boston who wants to do it, I guess when the snow melts. And that is the story of Boston bidding for, I think, the 2024, Olympics. So there’s a lot of controversy over that, because it’s been found time and time and time again. The Olympics never make money for the host city, and, in fact, can cost them tens of millions of dollars, the facilities get built, and then they just sit there empty. And Montreal is a good example of a city that put up a lot of public money for an Olympics. And here we are, 30 years later, almost, and some of those facilities don’t get used. Some of them were never able to be reused, but then some of them have become tourist attractions. So I think the Olympics are always a great story. A major sporting event coming to your city is always a great sports business story. And you should keep your eyes open and your ears pricked up. And one of the things I want to caution people about in covering sports business is that, what interferes a lot of times is that people become fans. So they’re fans of the Detroit Tigers, they’re fans of the Arizona Coyotes, they’re fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers or the San Francisco Giants, and that tends to cloud the way they approach the stories. So if you become a sports business reporter, you’re interested in sports business, you know, no cheering in the press box kids, because this is money and it’s serious stuff, and it’s also very potentially fruitful.
Remillard: That’s it for Episode 9 of How to Cover Money. Next week we’ll bring you the final episode for this season. We’ll be looking at money in politics.
Maynard: Support for How to Cover Money comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Visit our website at businessjournalism.org, you can find us on Twitter @bizjournalism. That’s at B I Z journalism. You can also look us up on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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