Beyond the Scoreboard

A season ticket looks like a discount for loyal fans. It is really a small financial contract, and teams have spent sixty years learning how to stretch it. Benjamin Hartenstone follows the money that arrives before the games do: from the Green Bay Packers' waiting list of more than 155,000 names, to the Astrodome's leased skyboxes, to Joe Robbie's ten-year club seat contracts in Miami. Then to Charlotte in 1993, where marketer Max Muhleman turned a free thank-you gift into the permanent seat license and helped win an NFL franchise. Plus what resale marketplaces, the San Francisco Giants' 2009 dynamic pricing experiment, and flexible memberships did to the oldest deal in the ticket office.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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In June 1976 the NBA absorbed four teams from the dying American Basketball Association. Two other teams were left out. Kentucky's owner took a cash buyout. The owners of the Spirits of St. Louis, brothers Ozzie and Daniel Silna, with their lawyer Donald Schupak, took something stranger: one-seventh of each surviving team's national television money, with no end date. Benjamin Hartenstone traces how that clause was built, why the four teams thought it was cheap, how it grew into hundreds of millions of dollars, and what the NBA and its teams reportedly paid in 2014 to end it. A story about leverage, definitions, and the real price of the word forever.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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In April 1966, a Dallas Cowboys executive and the founder of the American Football League met in a parked car at a Dallas airport. Both leagues were growing, both had television money, and both were being drained by the same thing: bidding against each other for players. Benjamin Hartenstone follows the money from Lamar Hunt's "Foolish Club" to Joe Namath's record contract, the kicker whose signing nearly wrecked the peace talks, Al Davis's raid on NFL quarterbacks, the June 1966 agreement and its eighteen million dollar indemnity, and the antitrust exemption Congress passed that autumn, twelve days before New Orleans was awarded a team. Who won, who paid, and what fans got in return.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In June 2016 Bill Foley agreed to pay the NHL five hundred million dollars for a Las Vegas team that had no players and no name, and the league handed the money to the thirty clubs he would be competing against. This episode explains why. Benjamin Hartenstone follows the expansion fee from the Dallas Cowboys' six hundred thousand dollars in 1960, and the fight song that secured the last vote, to Bob McNair's record seven hundred million for Houston in 1999, to Vegas and Seattle. Along the way: what dilution means, why players get the jobs but not the fee, what a new owner actually receives, and how the expansion draft became part of the price.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 1984 the best basketball players in the world were paid a flat fee to wear somebody else's shoe. Then a rookie who wanted to sign with Adidas was talked onto a plane to Oregon, and an agent from a tennis firm asked a struggling running-shoe company for three things: a product with his client's name on it, a percentage of every sale, and a written promise to market it. Benjamin Hartenstone follows the Michael Jordan and Nike contract from the market that came before it to the first-year sales that nobody forecast, separates the "banned" shoe legend from the one letter that documents it, and lays out who claims credit, and on what evidence.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On one night in March 1984, moving vans carried the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis, hours after Maryland moved to seize the team by law. Eleven years later Baltimore did to Cleveland what had been done to it. This episode follows the relocation threat from Brooklyn in the 1950s to the Browns settlement of 1996, explains how tax-exempt municipal bonds and a 1986 tax law shaped who pays, and sets out what three decades of economic research found about jobs and growth. It also gives the strongest case for public money: the value a team creates for people who never buy a ticket. Benjamin Hartenstone walks through who sits at the table, and why the empty chair matters most.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On one Friday in April 1953, a St. Louis ballpark had three names in a single day, and nobody paid a cent for any of them. Decades later the same idea is priced in the hundreds of millions. This episode reads an actual public naming rights contract line by line to see what a sponsor really buys, then follows the money: to a county legislature in Buffalo in 1972, to the Houston Astros and Enron in 1999, and to Miami-Dade County and FTX in 2021. Who owns a stadium's name, who gets paid for it, what happens when the sponsor collapses, and what the research says about whether the price is ever justified.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

Selected research sources:

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In December 2025 the Los Angeles Dodgers were billed $169.4 million for spending too much on players, and they had not broken a single rule. This episode explains the luxury tax: a price on payroll rather than a limit. Benjamin Hartenstone traces it from baseball's 1994 strike and the 1996 owners' vote that flipped after one free-agent signing, through the 2002 deadline deal the Yankees alone voted against, to the NBA's repeater tax and the record bills paid by the Nets, Warriors, Mets and Dodgers. Who wanted a tax instead of a cap, where the money actually goes, and what the line tells a fan about their own team's choices.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On the last day of March 1983, one NBA owner voted against the first modern salary cap and asked what a cap means if you are allowed to go over it. This episode answers him. Benjamin Hartenstone explains why a cap is really a percentage of league revenue, how the contract definition of that revenue drives the number, and why soft caps leak by design while hard caps bend through accounting. The story runs from the NBA's 1983 agreement and its three point six million dollar cap, through football's courtroom fight and the 1994 NFL cap, to what both sides gained and gave up, and what a fan is actually hearing when a team says it has no cap space.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In July 1961 a federal judge in Philadelphia blocked a contract in which fourteen NFL clubs agreed to sell their television rights together and split the fee equally. Seventy-two days later, President Kennedy signed a law that made the same arrangement legal. This episode follows the money from Bert Bell's blackout rules and the 1953 antitrust judgment, through Pete Rozelle's election, the rival AFL's pooled ABC deal and the voided CBS contract, to the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. Benjamin Hartenstone explains how pooling works, why big-market owners agreed to it, what equal shares did for Green Bay, and the trade-offs fans and broadcasters still argue about.

Hosted by Benjamin Hartenstone. Beyond the Scoreboard is a Narratique original.

Selected research sources:

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.