Sports as AI Insurance
Within five weeks this spring, the reporter, the banker, and the fund all said the same thing: sports is the asset AI cannot synthesize. They are right — and the corollary they have not priced is where the next decade's margin lives.
May 8. June 3. June 11.
Within five weeks this spring, three of the most sophisticated actors in and around sports finance said the same thing in public. On May 8, Axios’s Dan Primack reported that sports deals are becoming “AI protection” — investors, in his words, treating sports as “the last bulwark against AI disruption.” On June 3, Mary Callahan Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management division, called sports “the antithesis of AI” from the stage of the Forbes Iconoclast Summit, and predicted team valuations would keep surging because of it. On June 11, PitchBook reported — citing Alastair Seaman, a partner at Arctos, the private-equity firm whose business is minority stakes in sports franchises — that PE firms are pushing deeper into leagues major and minor, “betting on the lasting power of live events as something that can’t be replaced with AI.”