A proposed new international women’s basketball league, currently called Project B, promises players multimillion-dollar salaries and league equity. It’s set to tip off next fall. If all goes according to plan, it could upend the sport. And the “B”? Yeah, it (most likely) stands for basketball.

Founded by tech moguls Geoff Prentice (co-founder of Skype) and Grady Burnett (former Facebook exec), the 5-on-5 pro league will play seven two-week tournaments across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The founders believe Project B is capable of delivering “tech-like returns.”

• Earlier this year, Project B set out to raise $5 billion, according to Bloomberg. The league is reportedly offering some players at least $2 million, far exceeding the proposed $1.1 million maximum salary cap under negotiation with the WNBA.
• Project B signed its first four players this month: former WNBA MVP Nneka Ogwumike, Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, New York Liberty power forward Jonquel Jones, and Las Vegas Aces guard Jewell Lloyd.
• On Friday, Project B announced its first international acquisitions: Kamilla Cardoso of Brazil, Janelle Salaun of France, and Li Meng of China all got “equity-laden deals,” according to Sports Business Journal.

Some observers have raised concerns about the league partnering with Sela, an entertainment company that’s a subsidiary of the Saudi royal family’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. Burnett told Front Office Sports, “Sela is one event partner that we pay money to. We do not have any dollars coming from them. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary based in London that has done a ton of events globally.”

Women’s basketball is exploding. The only options for elite athletes in the sport used to be playing in the WNBA during the summer and then heading to the EuroLeague in the off-season. But new opportunities are raising the stakes. Athletes Unlimited, a four-week “playoff intensity competition” held in Nashville each winter, debuted in 2022, and Unrivaled, a 3-on-3 professional league founded by NBA stars Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, ran its inaugural season from January to March this year.

But don’t count the old guard out: The WNBA inked a record $2.2 billion media rights deal in 2024.—MM

Best known to some as the sport the teen wolves play in Teen Wolf, lacrosse is not (yet) considered among the giants of professional team sports. But it’s much closer today than it was six years ago.

The Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) was founded by brothers Paul and Mike Rabil in 2019 as an upgrade to Major League Lacrosse (MLL), which had long been criticized for low player salaries and inconsistent media exposure. “Our goal was to fix professional lacrosse,” Paul, a former legendary midfielder at Johns Hopkins and perhaps the sport’s most recognizable name, told Morning Brew. “Innovation has always been our engine.”

With the backing of investors like Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, the PLL made a handful of bold moves:

• Player equity: Every player has an ownership stake in the league—a model adopted by a number of upstart leagues (like Unrivaled).
• Touring model: The league plays all of its games in one city each weekend (think: the WWE), though plans eventually call for moving to a traditional home-and-away schedule.
• Broadcast experimentation: The PLL mics up its players (and refs) and has them analyze plays on the sideline in a “Breakdown Booth” right after they happen.

The early returns have been generally positive: ESPN was so happy with its media deal that it bought a minority stake in the league, and PLL reports that viewership and ticket revenue are climbing from their modest beginnings. The MLL no longer exists—the PLL absorbed what was left of it in 2020.

Still...most players don’t make a living on their PLL salaries alone. Many have full-time jobs or supplement their PLL income by coaching and running camps and clinics. A future in which “lacrosse player” is a lucrative career path wouldn’t have seemed possible a decade ago, but now, you don’t have to strain super hard to see the potential.

Looking ahead: The Brothers Rabil and the PLL have been instrumental in securing lacrosse’s return to the Olympics competitively for the first time in 120 years at the 2028 Games in LA. But a major question looms about whether the IOC will allow the Haudenosaunee people from present-day New York and parts of Canada—who created the first version of lacrosse almost 1,000 years ago—to compete under their own flag.—AE

Last season, the NBA generated $12.3 billion in revenue while the NFL had $23 billion, both records for the leagues. And with virtually untapped markets across the Atlantic, these leagues are looking to boost their bottom lines through expansion into Europe.

The NFL’s idea: a European division

In 2007, the NFL began sending teams to play games in Europe, a tradition that has grown in popularity and frequency over the years, despite the heavy involvement of the Jacksonville Jaguars. This year, there were a record seven international games (six in Europe), and now reports of something more permanent are afoot. Per Pro Football Talk:

• The NFL Players Association is preparing for the league to make a push for a four-team European division.
• The report also states that the league could opt to create expansion teams rather than relocate four established teams (hello, Jacksonville) to an overseas division.

But more immediately…the league wants to increase the number of permissible international games in the next collective bargaining agreement from 10 to 16. The NFL played its first game in Spain last Sunday, and league Commissioner Roger Goodell raved about the response, saying, “We will be back, we are excited.”

The NBA’s idea: a European league

While the NFL is more in the planning stages with its division idea, last week, the NBA announced its intentions to start a 16-team European league:

• Its goal is to launch in October 2027, and it’s already enlisted JPMorgan Chase and the Raine Group to find investors.
• Initial talks have begun with sovereign wealth funds, private equity companies, and wealthy families.

Untapped market: George Aivazoglou, the NBA’s SVP and managing director for Europe and the Middle East, says Europe has a $50 billion sports market, with basketball leagues currently accounting for less than 0.5% of it. EuroLeague, the Continent’s biggest basketball league (which recently finished its 25th season), has seen steady growth in recent years.

Zoom out: While there are fewer NBA fans in Europe than in the US, there is a higher concentration of younger viewers who love watching North American hoops, according to an S&P Global survey of 2023 viewership data. Tapping into that audience—along with teams potentially paying franchise fees as high as $1 billion—would make this a fruitful endeavor for the NBA.—DL

Americans may be in the midst of a passionate love affair with pickleball, but a new courtship is forming. Racket sport padel—which combines elements of tennis and squash—is growing beyond its niche status into a smashing success.

What is padel?

Take a tennis court, shrink it down, then enclose it with walls. That’s basically what a padel court is. The rackets don’t have strings and look more like big pingpong paddles with holes. There’s still a net, but you can also play balls that bounce off the walls. Games are typically played in a doubles format.

Sultans of swing: Padel was invented in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1969, and the game caught on with some of the celebrities who frequented the coastal city. Star power is still driving the sport’s popularity, with David Beckham, Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, and Prince William and Princess Kate all counting themselves among the 30+ million amateurs who, according to the International Padel Federation, play padel across nearly 150 countries.

Padel to the metal: Like with pickleball, padel took off during the pandemic. According to a report by Syracuse University and consultancy group Padel 22:

• In 2020, the US had fewer than 30 courts.
• In 2024, it had more than 600.
• By 2030, 30,000 courts are projected.

Despite its recent growth, padel is still getting served by pickleball, numbers-wise. According to Pickleheads, a digital pickleball community, the sport already has more than 68,000 courts and millions of players in the US.—BC

Rip ’em all up, if it were up to NFL players. It seems nothing has been able to stop synthetic fields—not the league’s widespread preference for real grass, not mounting evidence of safety risks, and not the bad press that follows when serious injuries occur on turf.

Two in two months: Turf discourse flared up in late September, after New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers tore his ACL at MetLife Stadium, which uses artificial grass. Earlier this month, San Francisco 49ers rookie Mykel Williams sustained the same injury…also at MetLife. The stadium is a focal point for the pro-grass camp, which argues that turf—the water-saving and allegedly less expensive option—is also the more dangerous one:

• More than a dozen players have sustained knee ligament or Achilles tendon tears at MetLife since 2020, with most occurring before the stadium upgraded its turf in 2023, according to ESPN.
• After Nabers’s injury, free agent Odell Beckham Jr.—who fractured his ankle at MetLife in 2017—criticized the NFL for taking “all The precautions in the world with EVERYthing else when it comes to players’ ‘health’ and ‘safety.’”

But…NFL data reportedly found MetLife to be ninth-best for lower-extremity injuries out of all 30 NFL stadiums in 2024. Half of them use real grass, and half use turf.

Players (and researchers) don’t really buy it

More than 90% of pro ballers prefer natural fields, according to multiple years of surveys by the NFL Players Association. Since turf has less give than grass, many athletes feel sorer after practicing on it, which can cause more wear and tear during games.

Scoreboard: Most research on this topic has found that synthetic grass has a higher injury rate than real grass. There’s also growing evidence that turf fields may spread microplastics to the environment—and onto players’ bodies.

Installing plastic turf can cost $1+ million, but it’s billed as a cheaper alternative to grass because it requires less upkeep. Still, critics say this doesn’t account for the physical and financial cost of a benched star player. Nabers, who’s out for the rest of the season, has a ~$7 million/year contract.

Zoom out: Turf-haters say that if the league doesn’t get rid of artificial grass, the least it could do is pick one type and stick to it: There are five popular turf brands in the NFL, which can make each away game a new exercise in finding your footing.—ML