Kyle Scott Laskowski

We're rethinking the way a B2B media company works. Our @BuyingSandlot MCP is coming soon. For a year now, we have thought about how to make our coverage and data more accessible to our premium subscribers. 🤖 The answer has become clear: MCP access. 🌎 Sure, your chatbot can search for youth sports news and trends, and often it will pull in content from Buying Sandlot. But any given query, even with the most powerful models, only searches a thin slice of publicly available content— often leaving holes in the results. And especially leaving holes when relevant data exists in proprietary datasets, polling, and long-form interview transcripts like the ones we churn out every day. ✅ Enter the Buying Media Group MCP. Premium members will soon get direct access to our entire corpus of data: - 714 newsletters and posts, totaling nearly 600k words - 138 podcast transcripts, including all Summit panels, totaling 1.22M words, pulled from 90 hours of audio - A database of 2,807 known companies in youth sports and 259 facilities under development - 520 acquisitions, deals, and partnerships All made possible by our forward thinking platform @beehiiv, which enables us to tap into our content, build things with the data, and monetize it through subscriptions. It will also include all content from our other brands: @BuyingSideline, which covers the business of sports hospitality, and our upcoming vertical covering the business of sports academies. One subscription to unlock what will become the deepest pool of sports business intelligence around. Why? 📰 For media companies, input is becoming more important than output. AI does a really good job on the latter. And yet, most operators in media are simply applying AI to inputs that already publicly exist. That adds little value.  But Buying Sandlot provides inputs that no one else covering youth sports does - or comes even close to doing - and we understand that some people may eventually prefer to have their agent of choice curate their own personal daily newsletter on a range of topics they find interesting. An MCP allows our paying subscribers to use our data in whatever way they see fit. Oh, and it’s a must-have for anyone investing in youth sports.

This is why teams will increase invest in hospitality. They will need to offset revenue declines or sofening from RSNs with something that has demand and substantial upside. We're covering it all @BuyingSideline

This is why we’re building @BuyingSandlot @BuyingSideline and more

So there is now some meat on this bone, but not a lot of meat. Like a B- hot wing. Anyway, I’m conflicted whether this will work or be a complete disaster. Why? On one hand, I believe we’re entering a world where sports participation and consumption will increase substantially, to levels that even the most bullish estimates aren’t accounting for. Existing major pro leagues won’t be able to meet demand, especially for in-person viewing, without substantially increasing the supply of their product. This is why we are already seeing skyrocketing ticket and hospitality prices— or as Reddit co-founder and investor @alexisohanian said, “The Wimbledon ticket is gonna continue to be even more exclusive, even more scarce, because there’s just a finite amount of access to it.” The major pro events will get more expensive and exclusive, creating a larger opportunity for secondary and upstart leagues. Ergo, the rise of the WNBA, creation of NBA Europe and USL Premier, LOVB’s youth-to-pro pipeline, heavy investment in MLS Next Pro, and the NFL’s foray into pro flag. ON THE OTHER HAND, there’s a graveyard of these sorts of efforts, and I’m uncertain flag will ever become a meaningful consumer sport (obviously it’s an excellent participation sport). The announcement today being thin on infrastructure and business details, and rather focusing more on branding and social media strategy, raises more questions than it answers. Never mind the one-stadium nature of this indicating a made-for-TV product, which doesn’t capture the in-person demand I just talked about. There’s something inauthentic about The Shield trying to muscle out all competitors in a version of the sport that it doesn’t necessarily own but desperately wants to. I’m way more bullish on the NFL expanding internationally, since it can create new supply of its core product with effectively no competition, than I am on it owning and succeeding in professional flag. But flag’s popularity and tailwinds combined with the NFL’s deep pockets and influence are tough to contend with. This will be fun to watch play out.

All formats are just a roundtrip to the same starting point.

Major pubs are looking at covering the business of sports all wrong. One high-level reporter that goes 3 miles wide and an inch deep misses the larger story of what’s happening in the business of sports. This is why we’re starting deep on specific topics like youth sports, sports hospitality, and soon, the intersection of education and sports, at Buying Media Group. We know the $500k per year facility operator just as well as the PE-backed tech platform CEOs. The pro team President just as well as the guy who makes the seats in the stadium.

3 months ago, we launched our second Buying Media Group property: @BuyingSideline — covering the business of sports hospitality and premium experiences. This week, @MSE invited us to DC to take in Capitals and Wizards games from the best seats in the house and show off their ongoing premium upgrades at @CapitalOneArena (stellar, btw). From idea for a media platform covering sports hospitality to sitting courtside at an NBA opener. As they say on this platform, you can just do things.

Pretty incredible stuff from @MSE and their 3-year renovation @CapitalOneArena. Full hospitality experience. Lots more coming @BuyingSideline.

Great book too @AriEmanuel

I don’t know why you’d subscribe to any other sports business publication.

Sports academies are a big deal right now.

This is why we formed @BuyingSideline to add to @BuyingSandlot. The combining of youth sports with pro experiences and hospitality is where sports is headed. Massive IRL trend in an AI-world. Sports keeps us human-- participation, fandom, travel. Youth sports, sports experiences, sports hospitality. These are 3 things, they're 1, and we cover them all at Buying Media.

Great time to be running a deep niche business publications @BuyingSandlot (covering the business of youth sports), @BuyingSideline (covering the business of sports hospitality), and soon...

There's lots of good with what Norway does for youth sports. But the media hysteria over aping their methods in a country with 340M people is overdoing it. Camping at fields because you can't afford a hotel room and eating "shoulder-to-shoulder in a large gymnasium" would receive incredibly aggressive negative press coverage in the US, and rightfully so. "Youth Sports Parents Are Forced To Sleep In Tents So Their 7-Year-Old Can Play Soccer" would be the NY Times version of this practice.