Field Notes: 4 People Moves, 3 Announcements, 2 Things Worth Your Time, and 1 Stat That Matters in the Sports Economy.
Curated and delivered every other Thursday.
4 People Moves
Farid Masmoudi: RedBird is deepening its Middle East institutional footprint, and hiring a longtime Ardian MENA operator suggests the region is becoming more deliberate in how the platform is built.
Elizabeth Lee Cohen: MLS elevates a core strategist into the CSO seat at a moment when league planning, data, and commercial positioning matter more than ever.
Jamie Gersch: Fanatics Commerce hiring its first true marketing leader signals a shift from licensed commerce to a more fully built consumer brand organization.
Brenden Coleman: Emerging leagues like the PLL get one real structural advantage: they can build modern infrastructure from scratch instead of unwinding legacy tech debt.
Tracking the starting lineups and MVPs at every company worth watching in sports, media and entertainment.
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3 Announcements
Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro among new Raiders investors as Egon Durban expands his minority stake | SBJ
I’ve written about MARI on multiple occasions before. Its namesake leaders, Mark + Ari, now join Michael Dell and Blackstone’s Joe Baratta as new Raiders LPs. Existing owners Egon Durban (Silver Lake) and Michael Meldman (Discovery Land) doubled down. A cap table full of world-beaters across categories (and of course, TB12 is in the mix).
Shamrock Capital Launches Fourth Content Strategy Fund Since 2015 With $813 Million in Commitments | Variety
The firm that bought (and sold back) Taylor Swift’s masters just closed another $813M for content library acquisitions. While this fund is catalog-focused, Shamrock’s PE arm has had big sports hits (Learfield, Excel). Things could get interesting if this catalog playbook creeps into the sports IP market.
NFL removes teams’ ability to protect home games from international export | Pro Football Talk
Owners voted this week to strip teams of their right to block home games from international export. The international appetite is real — UTN listeners know that tickets for German NFL games sell out in minutes. But there’s still a case for the league to build up, not out — pricing power comes from scarcity, not ubiquity, and every game shipped overseas trades one for the other.
2 Things Worth Your Time
Dana White: The Operator Behind the UFC | David Senra
If you don’t know David Senra, consider this my gift to you and get to know him. He’s spent a decade-plus studying history’s greatest entrepreneurs (he’s 400+ biographies deep) and his ability to connect dots across them on his podcast, Founders, is unmatched. I’ve been a fan for years. This Dana White conversation is my favorite episode of his new interview series so far, and required listening if you want to understand the grind required to get UFC where it is today. You’ll be entertained, learn a ton, and at times, feel ready to run through a brick wall.
PSA explains $200 million investment, 1,000 new jobs as card grading demand surges | The Athletic
There’s something poetic about a 35-year-old human-led authentication business booming in the AI era. PSA’s parent, Collectors, is pouring $200M into expansion after grading 19M cards in 2025 (up from 2M in 2020). The more synthetic the digital world gets, the more valuable a real, scarce, verified physical object becomes.
See: Visceral Capital (Apr 2026)
See: The Presence Premium (Feb 2026)
See: In Real Life (Dec 2025)
1 Stat That Matters
0.03% – The portion of artists on Spotify that generate 50% of all streams on the platform (The Write Path)
Remember the Shamrock thesis? When 3,300 out of ~11,000,000 suppliers drive half the demand, owning the rights to even a few of those names is one of the most durable and asymmetric bets in media.
Pull of the Week
Jim Everett Attacks Jim Rome Live on ESPN2
Men used to
go to warget in brawls on ESPN2 in this country. The good ole days. Why do people love live streams? Because anything can happen.
ICYMI: This week’s episode with Carter Westfall, CEO of Natural Selection Tour, Co-Hosted by Matthew Jester, Investor at CNC Partners ⬇️
I’ll be publishing Field Notes every other Thursday.
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If you’re building, investing, or advising within this ecosystem — please reach out!
Email: underthenumberpod@gmail.com.
– Brent
Jim Everett T K O’s the start of Loud mouthed sports Rome … go hide behind the camera Romi