The ROAR Podcast

No new episode this week. We’re bringing back a conversation worth a second listen.

Almost every sports real estate conversation starts from the same premise: the venue anchors the district, and the district delivers the return. Mike Carney builds from the opposite direction — and that inversion is why this episode keeps coming back up for us.

Mike leads On Deck Partners, the minor league baseball platform established inside Avenue Capital Group’s sports fund, which came to market with club acquisitions in Visalia and Montgomery and has since added Wilmington. He’s direct with Adam about what On Deck is not: a real estate developer. The thesis is that in a small or mid-sized market, the ballpark already functions as the community’s central entertainment hub, and anything built around it should reinforce that hub rather than compete with it. The return comes from attendance and engagement, not the ground lease. Residential is the early area of interest — including player housing, a recurring ask from both municipalities and major league affiliates.

Before On Deck, Mike spent ten years with the Washington Nationals, arriving in 2015 from a data engineering and consulting background and eventually leading business operations. He walks through what actually changed across that decade: a club that began with ticketing data used only to run a ticketing business, a centralized platform MLB built in partnership with Google, and the customer data and marketing automation work that largely landed post-pandemic. He’s specific about what worked with fans — targeted surprise-and-delight credits, a Kids Eat Free program he’s now eyeing for the minor league clubs — and clear about the trade: fans will share data when they feel they’re getting value back.

The harder material holds up too. Running a business through a rebuild with no control over the on-field product. Planning around winning streaks and quiet stretches instead of projected win totals. Zip-tying seats and re-manifesting the ballpark coming out of the shutdown, which Mike names as one of his fondest memories with his team. And on leadership, the line he returns to: transparency up and down, and no surprises in either direction.

On AI, he draws a boundary that’s worth revisiting now. Because minor league front offices already run lean, he argues this is a growth play rather than a headcount play — which means AI eventually has to touch fans, and that’s precisely where he slows down. On Deck is leaning in on internal workflows and creative production, and holding back on anything that puts a non-human between the club and a customer in communities built on relationships.

Adam and Caroline are back next week with a new episode.

00:00 Best Of introduction

00:45 Welcome and introductions

01:25 On Deck Partners, and ten years with the Nationals

02:44 NASA, consulting, and the move into sports data

04:42 What data looked like at the Nationals in 2015

07:06 How fans actually want to be marketed to

09:04 Winning on the field vs. working the business side

11:12 COVID: revenue to zero, and the return

13:17 Zip-tying seats and working the concessions register

13:42 Managing the business through a rebuild

16:14 Getting alignment up and down the organization

17:57 Leadership: the decisions get harder

19:43 A decade of change in data and technology

21:27 Leaving the Nationals for On Deck Partners

24:29 Avenue Capital, the sports fund, and the thesis

26:47 Why multi-club ownership changes the math

29:23 The real estate and mixed-use thesis

31:44 Real estate that feeds the ballpark, not the reverse

33:47 Programming mix, residential, and player housing

34:55 Institutional capital in minor league baseball

36:46 AI as a growth play, not a headcount play

39:40 Where On Deck is using AI today

41:16 What AI-powered growth looks like at the ballpark

42:51 Closing thoughts

Jackie Krutz started her career as a therapist. Today she leads development at Titletown, the Green Bay Packers’ 45-acre mixed-use district just west of Lambeau Field.

In this episode, co-host Caroline Valvardi talks with Jackie about her unusual path. She left counseling psychology for real estate during the 2008 downturn and helped shape community at Playa Vista in Los Angeles. Then a cold email to the Packers changed her trajectory. Jackie explains why roughly a quarter of Titletown is free public space, and how the Packers’ community ownership shapes the way the district is planned and run. She also describes what it took to prove that a market like Green Bay could support this kind of development.

The conversation also covers Titletown’s atypical financing model, the role of TIF in funding infrastructure, and how the district reset local expectations for rents and home prices. Jackie shares a surprising data point from Titletown Flats: residents who leave their units are often upgrading to bigger apartments in the same building.

00:00 Welcome and introduction

00:32 From therapist to real estate

03:00 The Hail Mary email to the Packers

05:49 What is Titletown?

07:40 Beyond game day: year-round activation

09:31 Lessons from Playa Vista

12:55 Community ownership as a differentiator

15:07 Balancing residents, tenants, and visitors

18:41 Challenges, opportunities, and the next parcels

23:56 Economic impact on Green Bay

26:00 Resetting market expectations

29:54 The capital stack: how Titletown was funded

32:24 Why TIF matters

35:15 Building public support

37:45 Data and AI in decision-making

42:22 The surprising apartment data

45:03 Becoming a Packers fan 46:36 Impact and legacy

Rick Wade is Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances and Outreach at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he leads the organization’s work connecting small businesses, athletes, and the broader business community to the sports economy.

He grew up in Lancaster, South Carolina. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of South Carolina and a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His career has moved between business and government. He served as chief of staff to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor and as a vice president at Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, and he ran for South Carolina Secretary of State. In 2007 he joined then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign as a senior advisor. He later served at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he led trade missions around the world.

After founding a global advisory firm, Rick began working with the U.S. Chamber as a consultant in 2016. He has been there ever since and has served six years on the board of USA Track & Field.

00:00 Welcome to The ROAR Podcast

00:47 Rick's non-linear path: 

01:45 The phone call from Senator Obama

02:56 From Commerce to consulting, and crashing the Chamber's party

05:06 What the U.S. Chamber is, and why it's focused on sports

08:48 Mega events as long-term economic engines

12:24 Sports districts and why "all business is local"

13:58 Using data to drive policy

15:33 Small businesses and AI adoption

18:24 Balancing large tenants and local businesses in districts

19:35 The 2027 NFL Draft and small business procurement

21:11 Athletes as "pro CEOs" and the Hiring Our Athletes idea

24:43 NIL and support for college athletes

25:21 Why athlete entrepreneurs need different support

27:54 Leading across the public and private sectors

32:08 Sport as a unifier and sports diplomacy

33:32 What brings Rick joy

37:51 What's next for Rick and the Chamber

38:55 Wrap-up: "Let's ROAR together"

We’re resurfacing one of our favorite conversations this week. Kirtan Mehta, Chief External Affairs Officer for the Washington Commanders, joined Caroline Valvardi for a clear-eyed look at one of the most complex real estate projects in American sports — and it’s only gotten more relevant as the RFK project moves forward.

From Harvard Law to two U.S. Senate offices to an early stint at Robinhood, Kirtan brings a government-relations lens you rarely hear in sports business. The conversation covers aligning owners, fans, and three separate jurisdictions; the case for building a neighborhood rather than just a stadium; how data and AI are being deployed from construction phasing to fan experience; and the leadership ethos the franchise calls the Commander Standard.

If you missed it the first time, this is the one to start with. 

00:00 Best of — intro

00:31 An unlikely path: math, mock trial, law, and politics

03:02 What Capitol Hill experience brings — politics as "a sport of addition"

04:52 Finding intersection among diverse stakeholders

06:04 Translating between groups — the 11–2 DC Council vote

07:49 Why listening is the underrated skill in public affairs

11:46 Three jurisdictions and the federal-land overlay of the RFK site

14:42 Building a real estate team for a real estate project

17:12 Legislative timelines and the 2030 / 2031 World Cup deadlines

20:05 The $2.7B case: housing, environment, and a food desert

21:40 The Nationals ballpark as the blueprint everyone points to

24:23 Partnering with the city — and the mayor's role

26:57 Data & AI: Voice of Fans, the team's RFI, and a roofed stadium

30:51 Experiential design inside and outside the stadium

34:25 The transportation puzzle: Metro, tunnels, and a river

36:09 What drives him: service, joy, and a product you believe in

38:56 Leadership and the Commander Standard — the five C's

41:15 Close

When the final whistle blew at World Cup matches this summer, fans weren't ready to go home. Where the stadium gave them a place to gather, they stayed. Where it didn't, the party moved elsewhere, sometimes miles away.

Adam sits down with Lauren Adams, Global Director of Lifestyle Research at Gensler and lead author of The Fandom Effect: Sports Urbanism 2026. It's a three-part study from the Gensler Research Institute, Oxford Economics, and ROAR, and the research tracked fans before, during, and after the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It combined a baseline survey of fans across the U.S. and Canada, real-time social listening tied to every host stadium, and a post-tournament survey of host-city residents. Together, those show how a global event shaped the way fans felt about their venues, their districts, and their cities.

Lauren and Adam unpack the study's headline finding. Fans used words like "we" and "us" 70% more often when posting from the public spaces outside the stadium than from inside the bowl. When they used awe words like "goosebumps" and "electric," that collective language jumped 189%. They also cover "afterglow," the spontaneous celebrations after a match, and what it means when a stadium ringed with parking sends that energy somewhere else.

00:00 Intro: The afterglow that went to Times Square
01:55 Welcome, Lauren Adams
02:17 Inside The Fandom Effect: before, during, and after the World Cup
04:41 The loneliness crisis and the stadium as the new town square
06:45 The scale of the study
08:09 Voice of the Fan and AI-powered language analysis
10:00 "We" vs. "I": collective language outside the bowl
11:41 Designing for awe: lessons from Rockefeller Center
13:52 From crowd to community: access and programming
16:21 The "awe-free zone": entry, ingress, and safety
18:50 Inside the bowl: whistle-to-whistle documentarians
20:59 What is afterglow?
23:07 How ROAR measured afterglow
24:50 New York / New Jersey and the afterglow catcher's mitt
28:26 Families, locals, and superfans
32:45 A catcher's mitt for everything: zoned programming
33:30 Collective effervescence explained
35:09 What's next for Gensler and host cities
37:52 Lessons for everyday game days
40:22 Expanding the fan base beyond the core
41:34 Designing for the next 5–10 years
43:36 Wrap-up

In 2007, a young high school math teacher in Ohio asked a simple question: why does the end of a basketball game reward teams for breaking the rules? His answer was to turn off the clock and play to a target score. It took a decade of cold outreach, rejection, and reinvention before TBT gave it a shot in a small Division II gym in Philadelphia. Since then, the Elam Ending has been used at the NBA All-Star Game and in the NBA G League, the Canadian Elite Basketball League, Unrivaled, the Women's College All-Star Game, and grassroots leagues around the world.

Adam Grossman sits down with Dr. Nick Elam to talk about the persistence it took to get a radical idea adopted, why simplifying the concept was the breakthrough, and the call from the NBA that came while Nick was sitting in an airport terminal. They also explore why rule changes matter far beyond the court, shaping fan experience, ticket sales, and sponsorship value. Finally, they make the case for a dedicated innovation segment in sports media.

In this episode:

• How the flaws of late-game basketball (intentional fouls, stalling, and "blooper reel" shots) sparked the idea
• Pitching roughly 80 commissioners, executives, and media members, and why a thoughtful "no" still matters
• Why moving to a flat target number made the concept easier to sell
• Why TBT was the ideal first home, and the comeback that won over the crowd
• The NBA All-Star Game run, and why exhibitions are a different test
• Nick's take on MLB's pitch clock, pickoff limits, and the ghost runner rule
• Rule changes as a "recalibration" that restores the style of play fans love

00:00 Introduction
01:58 Welcome and What Is the Elam Ending?
03:35 A Math Teacher's Lightbulb Moment
06:58 Ten Years of Tomorrows
09:27 Learning to Sell a Radical Idea
13:41 Early Believers: Dan Bonner and the ABA
16:53 Inside TBT: The Perfect Landing Spot
20:00 That First Weekend in Philadelphia
23:46 The Call from the NBA
26:43 Why Rules Drive Revenue
27:59 Pitch Clocks, Ghost Runners, and Recalibration
30:29 The NBA All-Star Game Run
33:58 Building a Personal Brand
35:52 The Case for an Innovation Expert in Sports Media
38:44 Wrap-Up

When Pau Gasol went looking for someone to run his business in 2015, he wasn't looking for a sports insider. He wanted someone who could be Catalan in Barcelona, Spanish in Madrid, and American in the U.S., and who understood investing, startups, and leadership. He found that in Ferran Prieto, a Barcelona-born engineer whose career ran through the automotive industry, General Motors' corporate strategy and venture team, and Dan Gilbert's startup ecosystem.

Nearly eleven years later, Ferran is CEO and Managing Director of Gasol 16 Ventures and Managing Partner at Everest Advisory Services. In this conversation with Caroline Valvardi, he explains why athletes in the U.S. are years ahead of their European counterparts in building businesses during their careers, and what cultural pressures keep many European stars quiet until retirement. He breaks down the three pillars of Gasol 16 Ventures: Pau's institutional role in sports, including the Olympic movement; the Gasol Foundation's work against childhood obesity; and a business arm spanning brand partnerships, advisory work, and investments across sports, health, and wellness.

Ferran also shares where he sees the biggest opportunities in sports as an asset class. He's bullish on women's sports and on the WNBA, where he invested early. He explains why investors increasingly want to know whether a team controls the real estate around its venue. And he looks at MotoGP and select startup leagues. He discusses how data and AI help him compare deals, why confidentiality and human review still matter, and the advice he gives athletes: use your platform while you're competing, because the window closes faster than you think.

In this episode:

• Ferran's path from automotive engineering to running Pau Gasol's business
• The differences between U.S. and European athletes as business leaders
• Why honesty and "earning your role every day" sustain long-term athlete relationships
• Inside Gasol 16 Ventures and Everest Advisory Services
• The investment case for women's sports and the WNBA
• Sports-anchored real estate and why owning your venue matters more as valuations rise
• How AI is changing deal evaluation, and where to stay cautious
• Leadership lessons and career advice for active athletes

00:00 Welcome and Spain's World Cup win
02:00 Ferran's path
04:25 Founding Everest and helping athletes plan for life after sports
05:34 Athletes as business leaders
08:43 What makes athlete relationships last
11:47 Inside Gasol 16 Ventures
16:06 Everest Advisory Services
17:24 Where the investment opportunities are
19:58 Sports-anchored real estate
22:07 Finding markets where athletes have an unfair advantage
24:37 How data and AI shape deal evaluation
27:41 Using AI responsibly

31:48 The passion of sports and the athlete's superpower
37:36 The early WNBA bet and the league's rise
39:44 Leadership philosophy and advice for active athletes
43:39 Wrap-up

Most sports real estate conversations start the same way: the venue anchors the district, and the district delivers the return. Mike Carney is building from the opposite direction.

Mike is the head of On Deck Partners, the minor league baseball platform established inside Avenue Capital Group's sports fund, which came to market in December with its first two club acquisitions in Visalia and Montgomery and has since added Wilmington. He's explicit that On Deck is not a real estate developer. The thesis is that in a small or mid-sized market, the ballpark already functions as the community's central entertainment hub and anything built around it should be designed to reinforce that hub, not compete with it. Residential is the early area of interest, including player housing, a recurring ask from both municipalities and major league affiliates.

Before On Deck, Mike spent ten years with the Washington Nationals, arriving in 2015 from a data engineering and consulting background and eventually leading business operations. He walks Adam through what actually changed on the data side across that decade: a club that started with ticketing data used only to run a ticketing business, a centralized platform MLB built in partnership with Google, and the customer data and marketing automation work that mostly landed post-pandemic. He also gets specific about what worked with fans targeted surprise-and-delight credits, a Kids Eat Free program he's now looking at for the minor league clubs and his read on the trade fans will make: they'll share data when they feel they're getting value back.

The conversation covers the harder parts too. Managing the business through a rebuild with no control over the on-field product. Planning around winning streaks and quiet stretches rather than projected win totals. Zip-tying seats and re-manifesting the ballpark coming out of the shutdown, which Mike names as one of his fondest memories with his team. And on leadership, a position he returns to repeatedly: transparency up and down, and no surprises in either direction.

On AI, Mike draws a sharp line. Because minor league front offices are already running lean, he argues this is a growth play rather than a headcount play — which means AI has to eventually touch fans, and that's exactly where he's slowing down. On Deck is leaning in on internal workflows and creative production, and holding back on anything that puts a non-human between the club and a customer in communities built on relationships.

00:00 Welcome and introductions

00:40 On Deck Partners, and ten years with the Nationals

01:59 NASA, consulting, and the move into sports data

03:57 What data looked like at the Nationals in 2015

06:21 How fans actually want to be marketed to

08:19 Winning on the field vs. working the business side

10:27 COVID: revenue to zero, and the return

12:32 Zip-tying seats and working the concessions register

12:57 Managing the business through a rebuild

15:29 Getting alignment up and down the organization

17:12 Leadership: the decisions get harder

18:58 A decade of change in data and technology

20:42 Leaving the Nationals for On Deck Partners

23:44 Avenue Capital, the sports fund, and the thesis

26:02 Why multi-club ownership changes the math

28:38 The real estate and mixed-use thesis

30:59 Real estate that feeds the ballpark, not the reverse

33:02 Programming mix, residential, and player housing

34:10 Institutional capital in minor league baseball

36:01 AI as a growth play, not a headcount play

38:55 Where On Deck is using AI today

40:31 What AI-powered growth looks like at the ballpark

42:06 Closing thoughts

Steve Lefton has spent twenty-nine years at what he jokingly calls "the largest firm you've never heard of." Kimley-Horn is eleven thousand people across a hundred and sixty offices — engineers, planners, landscape architects and environmental scientists who handle nearly everything on a project except the architecture. As Executive Chair, and previously as president and CEO during a stretch in which the firm doubled in size, Lefton has watched sports venues transform from standalone buildings into full districts that have to work three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

He joins Caroline to trace that shift from the ground up. The conversation moves from his early redevelopment work in post-Hurricane Andrew Miami, to why the districts that succeed feel like organic neighborhoods rather than projects, to the scale problem hiding in plain sight: a New York City block runs about three acres, and these developments can span sixteen to a hundred blocks. That math, he argues, makes public partnership unavoidable.

Along the way: what a Kimley-Horn employee is doing beside a police officer on game day with an earpiece in, how the firm moved 2.8 million fans during the World Cup, where Lefton draws the line on AI in a profession of licensed professionals, and why a Commanders project on the RFK site is personal.

00:00 Welcome

00:52 What sports mean to him: family, coaching, and a son playing college lacrosse

03:37 Cornell, landscape architecture, and the "spaces in between"

06:05 Leading Kimley-Horn: doubling the firm in seven years

07:37 Two projects that shaped him: the Miami River Corridor and Midtown Miami

10:36 "The largest firm you've never heard of" — and how the sports practice grew

14:11 Public-private partnerships and playing the honest broker

16:33 Beyond the deal: moving 2.8 million fans at the World Cup

19:54 AI as amplifier: agents on the team and moving up the value chain

22:52 Where he's cautious: faster isn't better, and what a licensed profession can't outsource

25:04 Game day traffic ops: the earpiece, the command center, "go green north"

29:20 What makes a district work: organic neighborhoods, art and science, silo delivery

34:17 Mobility, not transportation — and creating value 365 days a year

36:36 Local insight at national scale, and why the Battery is still the gold standard

37:37 Full circle: Formula One, the Commanders, and RFK with his dad

41:34 Leadership and humility: "you're not that important"

George Barrios walked away from a signed offer to run Univision in July 2020, called his former WWE co-CEO Michelle Wilson the next morning, and told her he'd rather build something with her instead. In his second appearance on The ROAR Podcast, he walks Adam Grossman through everything that decision produced: taking Bowlero public via SPAC at the peak of the frothiest IPO market in decades, returning to WWE to architect the merger with UFC that created TKO, and closing this past April on Global Sports Group — a holding company built with CVC around minority stakes in LaLiga, Ligue 1, the WTA, FIVB, and three rugby properties. Leagues and federations only. No teams, by design.

Along the way, George unpacks the lesson a former boss gave him at thirty-one — that running a business for the short term is easy, running it for the long term is easy, and doing both at once is the actual job — and the three questions he believes any management team should be able to answer clearly enough for a six-year-old. Then the conversation turns to AI, and the two of them stop agreeing. George argues that a company's alpha lives in its workflow and its data, and that handing that to a vendor under an AI-as-a-service model is a mistake he wouldn't make: build the harness around the model yourself, own the code. Adam pushes back hard from a data governance and partnership angle. Neither one gives ground. Which, as George notes at the close, is about right for a guy whose book is called Sometimes Wrong, But Never in Doubt.

00:00 Round Two

00:31 The Book: Sometimes Wrong, But Never in Doubt

01:29 From Operator to Investor

04:07 The July 2020 Phone Call

06:15 Back to WWE and the Road to TKO

08:58 Taking Bowlero Public

11:38 Why Bowlero — and Why Not the Flying Taxis

13:28 Three Hundred SPAC Sponsors

14:38 The Hardest Thing in Business

17:00 What the Public Markets Expose

20:51 Three Questions, Explained to a Six-Year-Old

23:09 A Detour Through Richard Feynman

24:50 How Global Sports Group Came Together

27:59 Why Sports Wins the Re-Architected Value Chain

30:24 Human Provenance and the Next Three Billion Fans

32:53 Leagues and Federations, Not Teams

35:18 "Nine Times Out of Ten, It's an Email List"

36:27 Not the First Inning — Batting Practice

37:43 Moving the Needle Without Control

40:23 The Chief Electricity Officer

43:29 Why He Wouldn't Sign Up for AI-as-a-Service

46:47 Build the Harness, Not the Model

47:48 Where Adam Disagrees

51:50 Willing to Be Wrong