Episode summary
Wall Street’s Plan to Make Sports an Investable Asset | Trillions
Trillions
· · 35 min · Hosts: Eric Balchunas, Vildana Hajric · Guests: Leigh Taylforth, Jodie Gunzberg
Summary
The episode lays out a plan to turn sports performance into a tradable financial benchmark, with FutureSports building the index layer behind proposed sports ETFs and futures. The guests argue that sports data can be standardized into point-based indexes that track teams throughout a game and season, then used as a reference for futures contracts, ETFs, and hedging by broadcasters, sponsors, stadium owners, and other businesses exposed to sports outcomes.
They say the product is not a binary bet on who wins tonight. Instead, it prices accumulated statistics and expectations, with official index values published at 9:00 a.m. Central time and futures reflecting where the market thinks the contract will settle. The guests also stress that the structure is meant to create utility for institutions first, even if retail investors may eventually access the theme through ETFs.
The discussion also covers scale and ambition. The guests point to a $2.5 trillion sports market and say their research suggests about $650 billion is invested into sports across ticketing, media rights, merch, and sponsorships. They say hockey futures have launched via CME, more leagues are being courted, and NFL-related products remain the “holy grail.”
Key takeaways
- The guests say sports indexes are designed to help institutions hedge revenue and capital exposure tied to teams, leagues, and media rights.
- They say hockey and baseball indexes use fixed point tables with 53 and 70 stats respectively, and index values are published at 9:00 a.m. Central.
- They say the best teams can reach 11,000 to 14,000 index points, while the worst can fall to 2,000 to 5,000, creating large dispersion.
- The host says the ETF structure could make sports exposure easier to access for retail investors through futures-based funds.
- The guests say NFL products are the biggest target and that the business is being built as a long-term benchmark platform, not a short-term trade.
Notable quotes
“we decided it was time for a change for us. So we started tooling around with some ideas”
“the challenge for us was to work out which statistics we included in the index methodology, how we weighted them”
“the team indexes are really designed to measure the performance throughout the game in the season”
How the episode opens
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Apollo Sports Capital recently um produced a report saying sports is a $2.5 trillion market. Our own research, we think there's about $650 billion per random invested into sports across ticketing, media rights, merch.
We're speaking to every league. Every league that you can think of. Um, the subset for us globally is probably about 15 leagues.
Welcome to Trillions. I'm Eric Balchunis and Joel Weber, who normally does this intro, uh, is out this week. He's at a wedding.
Uh, so I'm going to basically run point this episode, but I have a great co-pilot in Vana Hierrick from Bloomberg News. Hi, Vanna.
Hi. Thanks so much for having me. — Good to have you here. This is a great topic for both of us. — For both of us,
I've been wanting to cover this for a while. Von and I look at all the new filings um with baited breath and we love looking at what the industry is coming up with and over the last two months we've seen a bunch of filings for sports teams ETFs for example like an ETF for the Philadelphia Flyers, an ETF for baseball, so it would be like the New York Mets. And there's been multiple issuers file filing for all of these different sports teams ETFs including leveraged.
And this is really a new potential world opening up here. Some people are skeptical. Um but we wanted to talk to the people who are behind this.
The ETFs aren't out yet, but the index makers, they're called future sports. And um what do you make of this?
I think it's really exciting wherever there is whites space within the ETF world. We have so many ETFs already. And anytime that somebody comes up with a new way to put something into the ETF wrapper, an innovative way, so to say, I do think it's worth paying attention to because then each time it's a test case of whether or not it takes, whether or not people are interested in it, whether or not they actually put their money towards it.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- sports etfs
- indexing
- futures
- new asset class
- hedging
Companies and tickers mentioned
- FutureSports
- Bloomberg News
Watch the episode
Watch “Wall Street’s Plan to Make Sports an Investable Asset | Trillions” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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