The Business of Sport by Sportsfinda

The Business of Sport by Sportsfinda treats a sports headline as the start of a financial question. Host Ahmed El-Houli brings the story, often with a figure already attached, and co-host Rob, introduced on air as the founder of Gemini Sport, is asked what it means. Then the two work it out aloud. The subjects spread across a lot of sport. On the combat side, the UFC's partnership with the immersive tech company Cosm is framed around one limit: an arena only has so many tickets to sell, so the fight is rebuilt as a cage-side experience in venues planned for cities such as Los Angeles and Dallas. A Jake Paul and Nate Diaz fight in Dallas is sized up plainly as a moneymaker. Formula One's Las Vegas race gets a harder look. The discussion puts the cost of staging it at about 500 million dollars and notes a championship already settled, a start time that leaves half the country watching at 1 a.m., and complaints from other hotels on the Strip. The same stretch credits Netflix's Drive to Survive with making the sport take off, a clear case of streaming driving a sport's growth. Football brings its own arithmetic. Messi's arrival at Inter Miami is measured in Instagram followers set against the rest of MLS and in millions of jerseys, with the point that Adidas takes roughly ten pounds from an eighty-pound shirt. A new San Diego MLS club is explained through its valuation, which rests on the game's popularity, the 2026 men's World Cup and a league with no promotion or relegation, and through a 35,000-seat stadium shared with college football, the NWSL's San Diego Wave and a rugby side. Betting and merchandise come in through the rivalry between DraftKings and Fanatics, with talk of apparel and collectibles tied to La Liga. Episode titles fill in more of the range: Francis Ngannou signing with PFL, Pat McAfee signing with ESPN, FIFA+ expansion, Saudi transfers, a Serie A billion and an AC Milan profit. Not every episode is a roundup. One sits down with a D2 All-American track athlete and gets into how athlete pay has made talent harder to keep and expectations higher, and into what social media reach is worth to young athletes. That guest signs off with advice to focus on technique rather than chase times. Another episode features Tony Shan, introduced as one of Australia's leading journalists. The delivery is brisk and conversational, with sentences that loop back and correct themselves mid-thought, and it lifts into real excitement when a big number lands. The result sounds like analysis in progress rather than a finished report, and it keeps coming back to leverage, audience and who gets paid.