Latest news with #FreeAgent
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why You Should Care About the Club World Cup (If Your Team or Rival Is In It)
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Remember with everything else in the news this week, there's always a sports angle. We've got a full soccer takeover of the newsletter today (except for a few of the bullet points below). We've got the Club World Cup, some MLS labor issues with it, the regular World Cup, and a few thoughts about Welcome to Wrexham, which I'm a newcomer to. Locker Room Links Money Talks The vibes around the Club World Cup are not great. Advertisement The first expanded, 32-team version of the tournament started last weekend with concerns about low ticket sales and low fan interest (viewership numbers don't seem to be available yet). In its old format, the European Champions League winner usually crushed the non-European competition, and there haven't been any good upsets yet. Admittedly, I've been traveling, so let me know if I've missed some absolute bangers—but the goals seem to be feast or famine, with two scoreless draws and one 10-0 pasting from Bayern Munich over Auckland City. The results so far probably aren't helping, and many fans already didn't care about a tournament with little prestige or historical relevance. But there's one reason to care about how teams perform in the tournament: money. FIFA has gone big with a $1 billion prize pool, with the winning team bringing home up to $125 million. Some of the money will go to players (more on that below) but a lot of it will go to the team itself, to be invested as they see fit—and the winner's prize money is more than all but a handful of the biggest transfer fees in soccer history. Even if a big team like Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain wins, that money can go a long way toward bringing in a player who could transform the team next season (and beyond). The prize money is spread throughout the knockout stages with increasing returns per game the farther a team goes. The two teams losing in the semifinals will have still earned about $45 million, enough for a solid transfer target in Europe. If a non-European team can make a surprisingly deep run, they could earn an insane amount of money for their league. The $1 million prize for a draw in the group stage is still a lot of money for some of the smaller teams who have made the field. Advertisement So if a team you love (or loathe) is in the tournament, it's worth watching for the monetary implications. I never understood why I should care about sporting events that tout big-money prizes for the winner. NASCAR's All-Star Race, for example, is an exhibition race that gives $1 million to the winner. Even if my favorite driver wins, I'm not going to see any of that money, and it's not going to make him any better in real races. FIFA, though, has given fans 1 billion reasons to care. Sounding Off Seattle Sounders players and fans are mad at the team's owner and MLS for not sharing more than $1 million (combined, per team) in Club World Cup prize money with players. The dispute has led to on-field protests and an angry confrontation with the owner. But instead of being mad at the owner and league, Sounders players should be mad at their union. Advertisement The fight is over a section of the MLS Players Association's 2021 collective bargaining agreement with the league which, for tournaments not mentioned in the agreement, capped the players' portion of prize pools at $1 million. To be fair, the union did not know in 2021 that in March 2025 there would be three MLS teams competing in the Club World Cup for portions of a $1 billion prize pool. But the Club World Cup very much existed, and every year several MLS sides competed in the CONCACAF Champions League for a shot at participating. Plus, FIFA President Gianni Infantino had talked about expanding the Club World Cup as far back as 2016, and FIFA actually announced an expanded version of the tournament in 2019 (but that was supposed to take place in China in 2021, so it got scrapped due to the pandemic). The MLS Players Association very much could have negotiated for Club World Cup prize money in its collective bargaining agreement, but it didn't. On Sunday night, the Sounders lost 2–1 against Brazilian side Botafogo in their opening match in the tournament. With their two remaining group stage games against European giants Paris Saint-Germain and Atlético Madrid, it seems likely the players won't have to worry about missing out on a lot more prize money. If You Build It June 11 marked one year until the start of the 2026 World Cup, five-plus weeks where "America will welcome the world" and "there will be millions of people coming"—so says Infantino. The major hitch in that plan is that the people now managing the U.S. immigration system are infamously not so fond of having millions and millions of foreigners coming across the border. Advertisement That's why potential visa issues are apparently keeping World Cup organizers up at night, according to The Athletic's Adam Crafton (as stated in his colleague Adam Leventhal's excellent podcast documentary about the World Cup). The last two World Cup hosts, Russia and Qatar, offered ticketholders a streamlined visa process that gave out something called a Fan ID they could use to enter the country. No such visa process has been announced for the three 2026 World Cup host countries—yet. Without it, a lot of fans will be in a bind: The wait times for U.S. visa interviews are frequently over a year long. "The wait times for U.S. visa interviews in two Mexican cities are already in excess of 800 days, while it is 685 days in the Colombian capital of Bogota," as Crafton wrote in April 2024. Certain fans might be entirely out of luck even if the Trump administration approves a streamlined Fan ID visa process. Iran, for example, qualified for the World Cup but is also on the administration's list of 12 countries put under a new travel ban. A further 36 countries could be added to the list, including several African countries with solid odds of qualifying for the tournament (such as Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Ghana). One assumes the Trump administration would at the very least give team members and their staffs from those countries an exception to the travel restrictions. Haiti was given an exception for its team to play in the ongoing Gold Cup. But with someone as erratic as President Donald Trump, you never know. Goodbye to Wrexham I didn't hop on to the Welcome to Wrexham craze when it began, maybe because I already had rooting interests in European soccer (a couple big teams and various small teams). I've now dipped my toe into the waters and watched a few episodes of the ongoing fourth season—and I still don't really get it. It's not that funny? There are a bunch of subplots that aren't about team performance or players that I don't really care about. It's a semi-interesting look into important decisions for a growing team but the behind-the-scenes access isn't as deep as other sports documentaries. Advertisement Maybe I just saw a too-small sample size, or maybe I missed the show at its peak in earlier seasons, but it's just not for me. I can kind of see why someone might like the show if they had little to no exposure to European soccer before—that's basically how I was with Drive to Survive and Formula 1. But if you're already committed to a European soccer team, I'm not sure I see the appeal. Replay of the Week For whatever reason, amid the Club World Cup and also the U.S. Men's National Team playing in the Gold Cup, MLS is still ongoing. But that means we were lucky enough to have this happen. That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real match of the weekend in Spain (where club soccer is also apparently still happening), Real Oviedo vs. Mirandés with a spot in La Liga on the line. The post Why You Should Care About the Club World Cup (If Your Team or Rival Is In It) appeared first on
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Amateur Hour Is Over: College Athletes Can Get Paid by Schools
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Hold onto your buckets and your babies—this might be a wild ride. College sports is officially entering a new era. Amateurism is over and professionalism is (mostly) here. Athletes can officially get paid directly by their schools without a workaround involving boosters or a name, image, and likeness (NIL) collective. Instead of our usual format, the newsletter this week is focused on this monumental change. Advertisement But first, I want to thank everyone who voted in our survey last week about who you're rooting for in the NBA and NHL finals. Free Agent readership was surprisingly evenly split in both series. Shoutout to the fan who said "Seattle kid. Anyone but Thunder." You'll have your team soon, I'm sure. As for hockey, I was amused by this response: "I want Ron Desantis to have more Stanley Cups than Canada." Three down, 40 to go. Locker Room Links A New Era of College Sports Late on Friday, a federal judge gave final approval to a settlement in House v. NCAA, bringing to an end three antitrust cases against the NCAA and power conferences. It's a huge change: Starting July 1, college sports will spend a decade (at least) in a revenue-sharing system, with schools directly paying athletes for their NIL. Next school year athletic departments will be allowed to pay a combined $20.5 million to athletes across all their sports, with the number rising in the future. (The NCAA and power conferences will also pay almost $2.8 billion in damages to athletes who, dating back to 2016, weren't allowed to sign NIL deals.) Advertisement I talked to Mit Winter, an NIL attorney at Kennyhertz Perry, about how all of this is going to work. Hopefully this answers all the questions you might have about the new system, although a lot of it is still in limbo. I've been following this closely and I still learned a lot from our conversation. If you have lingering questions, email me at freeagent@ and I'll try to figure out an answer for you. Q: With final approval of the House settlement, colleges will be able to directly pay athletes for the first time. Give us a brief breakdown of how these payments are going to work. A: Looking forward for college athletics, schools will be able to directly pay their athletes NIL compensation. So they are actively entering into contracts now with their athletes that spell out, "All right, here's how much we are going to pay you for the use of your NIL in various ways." That's obviously a change from how things have worked in the past in college athletics where the cardinal rule was, "Schools, you cannot pay your athletes." Q: But the athletes still aren't technically employees, so that's causing some other complications, right? A: Correct, they're not currently considered employees. These agreements they're entering into with schools are just NIL licensing agreements. Sometimes they include a services component as well, where the athlete might make appearances or sign autographs or something like that. Advertisement Q: But there are some new restrictions on outside NIL deals with boosters? A: In addition to now allowing schools to directly pay their athletes, the House settlement also contains some new rules around deals athletes can do with NIL collectives and boosters. Athletes will have to disclose to a new clearinghouse entity called the College Sports Commission all third-party NIL deals they do. The College Sports Commission is contracted with Deloitte to do this review process of all of the deals. If an athlete submits a third-party NIL deal and it's determined that the deal is with an associated [to the school] entity or individual, then there's a couple of extra layers of review of that deal. First, the deal has to be for a valid business purpose. Once that determination is made, then the next overview Deloitte will be performing is, "Okay, is the amount being paid to the athlete within what's being called an appropriate range of compensation for the services being provided by this specific athlete?" But if Deloitte determines either the deal's not for a valid business purpose, like they think it's just a "pay-for-play" booster deal in disguise, or if the amount of compensation being provided to the athlete is not within the appropriate range of compensation, then Deloitte will notify the College Sports Commission that, "Hey, there's a problem with this deal." Then at that point it's up to the College Sports Commission to say, "All right, athlete, you can go ahead and do this deal if you want to, but you might be ineligible to participate in college athletics." Advertisement Q: Some believe this might lead to the old ways of under-the-table payments and recruiting violations. A: It's a definite possibility because the amount of NIL compensation that schools could pay their athletes is going to be capped at, for the first year, $20.5 million for the entire year for all of the school's athletes, so not just the football team. And there are some football teams making well over $20 million in NIL compensation from booster and collective deals for this upcoming season. So you can see if you have a football team right now taking $30 million, and then in the future, the cap for all of the school's athletes is going to be $20.5 million, there's obviously a $10 million gap right there, that if you can't do it through legitimate deals, third-party NIL deals and Deloitte is shooting down all these third-party deals, that's when you might go back to under-the-table payments from boosters to win recruiting battles or keep a guy at a school. Q: Talk to us about this from the conference level. A: Every Division I school, no matter what your athletics revenue is, you're going to be able to pay [athletes] up to $20.5 million. That money can come from any source that the university can use to find that money. Obviously, it's going to be easier to come up with that money for some Division I schools than others. Big Ten and SEC schools might have the easiest time just because the amount of TV revenue those conferences receive and then distribute out to their members is higher than any other conference, including the Big 12 and the ACC. But schools, they're going to be heavily reliant on donors for sure, but then there are other potential strategies they're going to use. Advertisement There's a lot of talk about private equity or private capital that some schools might access. There are businesses out there that are very heavily focused now on helping schools generate revenue through different types of creative partnerships, so it's going to be all over the map in terms of how schools are trying to come up with this new $20.5 million. And then you'll have some schools that will cut staff. Some have already cut staff, including Oklahoma, who's an SEC school, obviously, so they've cut staff. You've had some schools announce they are dropping a few sports, like tennis programs have been dropped in some places, swim and dive teams. So it's going to vary from school to school on how they come up with this money. Q: Now, back to the athletes themselves, there are no changes to the transfer system, right? Athletes are still kind of on these one-year contracts, with a fair amount of ability to move at will? A: Yes, correct. The transfer rules are going to stay the same, they're not affected by the House settlement at all. Although schools and conferences would love to be able to put some more transfer restrictions back in place and they're hopeful that Congress will pass a law that gives them an antitrust exemption that would then allow them to put some of those transfer rules back in place because courts have held right now that those transfer rules violate antitrust law. Some of the contracts that schools are entering into with their athletes, they have some provisions that are trying to prevent as much movement as there has been, like buyouts and clawbacks and things like that. [It] remains to be seen whether those will be effective or not in limiting movement, so we'll just have to see how that plays out. Advertisement Q: There are already some lawsuits challenging the current NCAA eligibility rules, but what lawsuits are coming next, or are already in play after the House settlement? A: A big one's going to be Title IX. There will be a lot of Title IX lawsuits, because as we talked about earlier, [schools] will be able to pay out $20.5 million to their athletes, and most schools are planning on paying out, at least if you are a [Power Four] school with a football team, are paying out 75 percent to 80 percent of that $20 million to the football team, around 15 percent to the men's basketball team, maybe 5 percent to the women's basketball team, and then 5 percent to other sports, which might be softball, baseball, whatever other sport a school chooses—85 percent to 90 percent of that $20 million is going to go to male athletes. Some people think that's not in compliance with Title IX, other people think it is. It's a gray area right now, there's no black-and-white law. That will be litigated probably in lots of places and there will be probably lots of lawsuits filed against schools on that issue. I also think we will see some litigation related to the salary cap, because it was not agreed to by a player's association where, like in pro sports, the salary caps and things like that are collectively bargained with a players association, which makes them exempt from antitrust law. But this salary cap in college athletics is not going to be exempt from antitrust law. So future college athletes coming into college athletics will be able to bring damages, lawsuits, challenging that salary cap, so I think we'll definitely see some of that. I think we'll probably see some more employment litigation for determination that college athletes are employees. There's already one big case pending on that issue called the Johnson v. NCAA case in federal court. It said college athletes can be employees, it didn't say they are. It said, "They can, and here's the test to determine whether they are." That was an appellate court, it's now down at the trial court level to actually make that determination. But I definitely think we'll see some more of that litigation, especially now that you have the schools contracting with athletes. It potentially makes that employment argument stronger than it was before. Advertisement This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. Replay of the Week Lots of great candidates this week that you've probably already seen, like the Tyrese Haliburton game-winner, a brawl in the Stanley Cup Finals, and perhaps the best home run robbery you'll ever see (the A's still lost). But here's a wild golf shot you probably missed (and that wasn't even the craziest golf shot this weekend). That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, the UFL championship game featuring the D.C. Defenders against the Michigan Panthers (Saturday, 8 P.M., on FOX). Many are calling it the Jason Bowl due to my dual loyalties. The post Amateur Hour Is Over: College Athletes Can Get Paid by Schools appeared first on
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The SEC (the Sports One) Is Acting Like It's Invincible
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Maybe think twice before jumping for joy today (especially because the A's still lost). Plenty to talk about today, with college football in turmoil again (I could copy and paste that every week), plus an interesting sports-related tax issue to discuss, along with two new racing documentaries and the NBA and NHL reaching the final stages of their playoffs. Let's get to it. Locker Room Links S-E-C Guarantee? The SEC seems to think it's invincible. If it gets its way, it just might be. Advertisement We've only had one 12-team College Football Playoff and even though the format is already changing for this season, the college football world can't stop talking about expanding the playoff (again) and changing the format (again). The all-powerful SEC and Big Ten don't want to take any chances. They think they can design the best system: four automatic qualifiers for each of them, plus two each from the ACC and Big 12, one team from the midmajor Group of 6 conferences, and three at-large spots. Based on tradition and hubris, they think they're the best conferences, they've always been the best conferences, and they always will be the best conferences, so they deserve multiple automatic qualifiers even if their top teams have a relatively bad year. Multiple automatic qualifiers would be unprecedented in American sports. The other college sports, to my knowledge, don't give out more than one automatic qualifier per conference. The NFL doesn't guarantee the NFC East two playoff spots just because the division has some of the league's most powerful and historic teams. The only parallel I can think of is European soccer, where the international club competitions dish out a given number of qualification spots to the top teams in each country (though the number of spots per country is based on a coefficient formula calculated by team performance in the last five years of the competitions—sounds a bit like the old BCS, doesn't it?). Advertisement It's not, however, all that unprecedented in American business. Startups rise to the top of their new fields, and once they become powerful enough to crush their competition, they call for rules and regulations that will hold back any new upstarts with funny ideas or better business practices. But no matter how dominant they get, a new competitor eventually comes along to knock them off their pedestal. The SEC is following this playbook, the sports version of crony capitalism. It has long been the best conference in college football, but its grip might be slipping—they haven't sent a team to the national championship in two years. The system is changing (expanded playoff; name, image, and likeness payments; direct "revenue-sharing" payments to players) and different teams in other conferences might find different ways to succeed amid the chaos. But if the SEC can guarantee that a quarter of its conference gets into the College Football Playoff, that's going to be an advantage in recruiting players and coaches. Of course, if the SEC and Big Ten each have four of the best 16 teams in the country, they don't need to worry about automatic qualification. So why not just stick to proving it on the field? We'll see if they decide to take their ball and go home. They're the Ones Writing It Off Did you know the Los Angeles Dodgers can write off Shohei Ohtani's contract for tax purposes? Advertisement Not just Ohtani's contract—Mookie Betts', Freddie Freeman's, Yoshinobu Yamamoto's, and everyone else on the team too. For tax purposes, these contracts are "intangible assets" that can be written off over 15 years. It's a good deal if you can get it, but the gravy train may soon slow down (but it's not getting scrapped). Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by the House of Representatives, only half the value of those contracts could be written off instead of the full value, the New York Times reports. But that change will only affect future owners. One NFL owner told the Times the provision "felt punitive" and speculated that Trump is using the possible change to get leverage over sports owners. (Leverage for what isn't exactly clear, but who knows when Trump will want leverage for some kind of deal.) A White House spokesperson suggested to the Times that the change had more to do with ticket prices to sporting events: "The president is committed to ensuring that sports teams overcharging ticketholders do not receive favorable tax treatment. His focus is on fairness for fans, not team ownership." (This feels like grabbing a screwdriver to try to put out a grill fire—they don't seem especially related.) Advertisement One team to watch in this space is the Atlanta Braves. The team is owned by a publicly traded company. Under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, publicly traded companies will have limitations (starting in 2027) on how much of a write-off they can take from their highest-paid salaries. It could mean a $19 million tax hike for the Braves—though not if their new lobbyists have something to say about it. Green Flag Let's go racing. Two new documentaries dropped last week that will be of interest to motorsports fans. There are a ton of new sports documentaries these days, but Earnhardt (four episodes, one hour each, on Amazon Prime Video) shows them all how it's done. Too often we get documentaries that are too one-sided—usually too deferential to the star power of the main character. Earnhardt could have been like that, and if anything, the racing aspects could have used a little more of a "Raise Hell, praise Dale" vibe. But with the late Dale Earnhardt only able to speak for himself through archival footage, the documentary gets three of Earnhardt's four children to open up about their family life—the positives and the negatives (with a lot of the latter). Sports documentaries should give viewers a fuller picture of their subjects, and Earnhardt absolutely succeeds. Advertisement On a completely different note, Netflix gave the Drive to Survive treatment to the 2024 season of the all-female F1 Academy racing series in the super creatively titled docuseries F1: The Academy (seven episodes, 30–40 minutes each). Whether you saw all the racing action last year or skipped it but had your interest piqued, it's worth a watch (as long as you can put up with a bunch of "girl boss" pop music in the soundtrack). The stakes and racing action are compelling enough on their own, and they're coupled with the interesting backgrounds of girls who dream of making it to Formula One someday. Plus, Americans Lia Block and Chloe Chambers get a solid amount of airtime. It's unlikely anyone from this crop will eventually make it to Formula 1, but it's fun nonetheless to learn their stories and watch them compete. The Finals Who you got? We're doing another Free Agent reader survey, and I want to know who you're rooting for in the NBA and Stanley Cup finals. Personally, I'm pulling for the Indiana Pacers. I don't have much against the Thunder (other than their crazy stadium deal—$1,200 in tax dollars per resident!). But I have forgiven the Pacers (franchise, not the players of the time) for the Malice at the Palace and I think some Midwestern solidarity has them pulling at my heartstrings. Also, apparently they're weird. Advertisement On the ice, I'm hoping for a Florida Panthers repeat. I'm not super happy about rooting for a repeat, but I'd rather see that than see Canada finally break their three-decade Stanley Cup drought. Canada already got to win the 4 Nations Face-Off this year, they can't get the Stanley Cup too. (Although los petroleros are one of my preferred Canadian teams.) Take a minute to fill out the survey here and let me know what you're thinking. Replay of the Week I knew this was legal in pickleball. I had no idea it was legal in tennis. That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, the Kalamazoo Growlers against the Battle Creek Battle Jacks. The post The SEC (the Sports One) Is Acting Like It's Invincible appeared first on
Daily Mail
02-06-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS NFL star Jedrick Wills chooses to miss the entire 2025 season due to concerning medical issue
NFL offensive tackle Jedrick Wills could miss the entire 2025 season in a bid to recover from a lingering knee issue. The 26-year-old, who was a first-round pick by the Browns in the 2020 NFL draft, started just four games for Cleveland last year as he dealt with the injury. Wills is now a free agent and, according to Fox Sports, he is planning to sit out most - if not all - of the upcoming campaign.
Washington Post
01-06-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Wade Miley becomes a free agent after opting out of his minor league deal with the Reds
CHICAGO — Wade Miley has opted out of his minor league contract with the Cincinnati Reds, making the veteran left-hander a free agent. Miley, 38, is coming back from Tommy John surgery . He went 1-2 with an 8.84 ERA in seven starts at Triple-A Louisville this season. Cincinnati had until Sunday to make a decision on Miley, who is looking for a starting opportunity. The Reds could have brought him up and put him in their bullpen.
