Saudi Arabia’s grand boxing project is going global. At London’s Wembley Stadium tonight, British fighters Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois face off in the first European showdown organised by Riyadh Season. It follows last month’s fight night in Los Angeles also under the Riyadh Season brand, which began life as a programme of cultural events in the Saudi capital.
This is a sign of things to come. Unlike golf, those leading Saudi Arabia’s sporting push have found a rhythm in the world of boxing, bringing rival promoters together under the Riyadh Season umbrella so that fans and broadcasters get the fights they’ve been craving. Boxers and promoters, meanwhile, get bumper paydays.
Boxing is one of the most biddable sports with a global audience, but the Saudis have had recent success in tennis too. Perhaps this is the big lesson drawn from the expensive LIV Golf experiment — it’s much cheaper to join forces with the establishment than to upend it.
This week we’re looking at the latest big news from Nike, where the chief executive is out. And we ask if football fans are reaching breaking point in the face of rising prices. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor
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How outgoing Nike CEO John Donahoe lost the plot
On June 27th, Nike chief executive John Donahoe presided over one of the bleakest earnings calls in the history of the sportswear maker. Not only was the company still trying to find its level between online and brick-and-mortar sales, he said, but consumer demand for the brand’s trainers and athletic apparel was slowing.
The company made its name outfitting world-record runners, but the swoosh earned a dubious distinction of its own that day: the worst stock drop in Nike’s nearly 44-year history as a public company. So swift was the market reaction that co-founder Phil Knight issued a rare statement saying “I am optimistic in Nike’s future and John Donahoe has my unwavering confidence and full support.”
Barely three months later, Knight yanked that support away. On Thursday, the board of directors announced Donahoe will retire next month, to be succeeded by Nike veteran Elliott Hill.
Donahoe, 64, leaves a mixed record at the world’s largest athletic brand. He ably steered the company through the pandemic, despite only taking the helm in January 2020, accelerating a push towards higher-margin online sales that padded profits. He pulled the company to its overdue revenue goal of $50bn just last year. But while Donahoe proved adept at tech and sales — he was poached by Nike from software company ServiceNow after a career spent at consultancy Bain and online retailer eBay — he lacked an essential component for a shoe brand: knowing what’s cool.
Several of Nike’s shoe “drops”, or limited edition releases, either missed the mark or reeked of desperation, such as an announcement this summer of the commercial sale of a once, collector-only Wu Tang dunk. Partner retailers which sell Nike shoes like JD Sports and Foot Locker praised rival brands like Adidas, New Balance, and On, for “newness”.
In selecting Hill, 60, as the next CEO, Nike’s board is going back to the future. Texas native Hill was once an assistant athletic trainer for the Dallas Cowboys and later started at Nike as an intern after business school. He has 32 years experience at the swoosh, including five years at European HQ in the Netherlands, and oversaw all of Nike’s commercial and marketing operations before his retirement in 2020.
“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Elliott back to the team. His experience, understanding of Nike and leadership is exactly what’s needed at this moment”, said Knight in a statement issued on Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of work to do but I’m looking forward to seeing Nike back on its pace”.
Price hikes: have football fans lost patience?
When the European Super League launched (briefly) in 2021, one of the main arguments for tearing down football’s status quo was that fans were being deprived of exciting matches between elite teams.
Evidence this week suggests that argument was built on sand. When Liverpool visited AC Milan in the opening game of this season’s Champions League, one of the main talking points was of empty seats inside the San Siro. While the Italian club had an average home attendance for league matches last season of just under 72,000, local estimates put Tuesday’s turnout at around 60,000. So what’s going on?
Milan have started the season slowly — and lost the game against Liverpool 3-1. But more than 71,000 showed up a few days earlier to see the Rossoneri host Venezia in an Italian league match.
The main culprit for Tuesday night’s empty seats appears to be rising ticket prices — seats in the lower tier of the San Siro began at more than €120.
The issue of rising costs for football fans has been creeping up the agenda across Europe in recent months.
This year 19 of the 20 English Premier League teams announced increased season ticket prices, while some did away with certain discounts for concessions.
At Nottingham Forest, for example, a child’s ticket in one part of its home ground more than doubled. Fans of Wolverhampton Wanderers urged the club to reconsider price hikes in order to “preserve the very lifeblood of this famous old club”. Fulham supporters held up yellow cards to protest against the £3,000 rate for a season ticket in some sections of the new Riverside Stand.
“Ticket prices are a ticking time bomb and club executives have their hands over their ears. Something has to give”, the Football Supporters Association said last month.
And it’s not just ticket prices. The cost of replica shirts has also been rising fast. The new Manchester United home shirt starts at £85, but will set you back over £100 if you want a name and number on the back, or if you want an exact copy of the match-worn version. (Although that’s still some way off the £900 options outlined in this weekend’s HTSI.)
Price rises are being propelled by various factors. Inflation across the globe has driven costs for everything from electricity to wages and food. Ticket prices are a quick and easy lever to pull in response — effectively passing on rising costs to the end consumer.
But there are other pressures at work. Tighter spending rules both at European and domestic level are pushing clubs to focus relentlessly on maximising revenue.
The globalisation of the game also means there is a growing pool of football-mad tourists only too willing to pay whatever it takes for a chance to see a top team in the flesh, especially in holiday hotspots like Rome, Paris and London.
In the Milan example, it’s hard to ignore the influence of institutional investors. After private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners bought the club in 2022, revenue generated on matchdays rose to €73mn from €33mn a year earlier and €34mn pre-pandemic. Commercial, TV and sponsorship income all rose considerably too — helping the club to its first annual profit in 17 years.
Tuesday night’s empty seats may prove a one-off. The issues could also be specific to club and competition.
But as the pull from new regulation and the need to generate investment returns leads more clubs to raise prices wherever they think they can, executives will face increasingly tough choices — and less forgiving supporters.
Highlights
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Cricket has been booming thanks to the Indian Premier League gold rush. But are we reaching saturation point? And is there now a bubble? Those are some of the questions we look to answer in this Big Read.
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Lord Sebastian Coe is one of seven candidates to replace Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee who steps down in March next year.
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Adrian Wojnarowski, veteran NBA journalist for ESPN who single-handedly transformed sports reporting for the social media era, announced his retirement from the industry and will become the general manager of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University.
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Glasgow has agreed to stage a slimmed down Commonwealth Games in 2026, which will be partially funded by Australian taxpayers. The state of Victoria had previously been lined up as hosts, but pulled out after deciding it was too expensive.
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Raj Sports has paid $125mn to bring a new WNBA team to Portland, Oregon, the latest step in raising the total number of teams in the league from 12 to 15. Raj Sports also owns the Portland Thorns women’s football team.
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The Diamond League has announced an increase in prize money, the latest salvo in the battle for the future of athletics.
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Qatar Airways has replaced Turkish Airlines as a main sponsor of the Uefa Champions League. The six-year deal is worth up to €500mn, according to SportBusiness.
Final Out
Shohei Ohtani had the single best game by a baseball player in the history of the sport on Thursday night: three home runs, two stolen bases, ten runs batted in for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their 20-4 rout of the Miami Marlins. Even wilder, he became the first player in more than a century of Major League Baseball to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season, establishing the so-called 50/50 club. (Non-baseball fans may be familiar with the 40/40 club, the previous benchmark of a power player, as it inspired the name of Jay-Z’s exclusive Manhattan lounge.)
“That has to be the greatest baseball game of all time”, Ohtani’s teammate Gavin Lux said Thursday night. “I’ve never seen anybody do that even in little leagues.”
Watch the incredible performance here.
Scoreboard is written by Josh Noble, Samuel Agini and Arash Massoudi in London, Sara Germano, James Fontanella-Khan, and Anna Nicolaou in New York, with contributions from the team that produce the Due Diligence newsletter, the FT’s global network of correspondents and data visualisation team
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