Friction, Tater Tots and the War on the Couch

Welcome to Sports & Co.

This is a newsletter for the people who run sports: the front offices, the athletic departments, the leagues, and the companies that work with them.

Every Wednesday, we’ll dig into a topic that matters to your job, along with the moves, hires, and openings worth knowing about. Our aim is simple. We cover the decisions and the people that shape the industry, for the people doing the shaping.

Our first three issues come from PEAK 2026, the sportstech gathering in Las Vegas last month, where founders and sports executives spent three days talking candidly about the future of the industry. There was a lot of agreement across panels, so I took what I heard and wrote about three trends. That’s what will lead off the newsletter the next three weeks.

We’re glad you’re here. If you have ideas for us or any feedback, reach out to me at [email protected].

Abe

Abe Rakov
Founder, Sports & Co.

Burkhardt von Wagner has every incentive to fill seats, and his view of the competition is not the obvious one. The corporate partnerships director at Munich’s SAP Garden has decided his rival is the living room.

“So the real enemy is the couch we’re fighting,” he told the room at PEAK 2026. “At home, you have a big screen, you have great sound, you have a pause button, you have snacks.” His main point: “You have to bring a strong reason why people come to your venue.”

That reason is rarely the thing a team would necessarily put on a billboard. Von Wagner’s team spends its energy on the small indignities of attendance, not the spectacle. “Not the sexy, not the shiny gadgets,” he said. “Try to do the best experience in terms of pain points, eliminate them, and people will be happy.”

His sharpest example was the parking lot. “If you wait an hour to get out of the parking lot, you probably not come back. Can be a good match, but you’re really not happy waiting an hour.” Whoever owns the exit owns the renewal, and most buildings still treat it as facilities’ problem instead of revenue’s.

Christian Lau has turned that instinct into an operating model. The CTO at LAFC and BMO Stadium runs his building about 310 days a year, some of it unticketed, and the tech that makes it work is invisible on purpose. His best story was about food. When concessions kept generating friction, his team pulled their chef into the technology decisions and worked backward from what survives a grab-and-go line.

“I’ve sat in meetings where we’re talking about tater tots for three and a half hours,” Lau said, and noted they were already on their second tater-tot vendor in two years. “These are the types of things we work on.”

Nobody in the stands focuses on the optical self-checkout or the menu engineering. “They just know they went and grabbed their chicken tenders and their tater tots, and they were really nice,” Laud added. The tots are beside the point. What fans rave about gets built out of decisions they aren’t even supposed to know happened.

Which is where the ticket comes in, and where David Lane gots blunt. The CEO of Sports Illustrated Tickets thinks the industry throws away its single best piece of data the moment a fan walks in. “Once they get in the gate, the ticket is useless to all of us. Nobody goes back to the ticket. Nobody cares about the ticket.” He thinks the barcode should stop being a turnstile credential and become the spine of a fan profile.

Lane is just as clear about why fans don't automatically opt-in to technology. Venues increasingly push facial recognition to speed entry, and his argument is that the trade, as pitched, isn’t worth it. “There has to be more than you’re going to save me two minutes of queue time,” he said, on what it would take to give up his own face. And on the friction of the purchase itself, he said what every season-ticket buyer has felt: “Why do we have to provide DNA samples and firstborn to be able to get this barcode?”

Gorka Llort, who runs digital business for MotoGP, had a reassuring counterpoint. Fans will meet you most of the way if the value is real. “They will come to you,” he said, “if you give them the right tools.”

The fan-data race goes to the venue worth the trip, and then to the one honest enough about the exchange that fans hand over the data on their own. The couch is always cheaper and always open. The buildings that beat it are the ones treating the parking lot and the chicken tenders as seriously as the product on the field.

Charles Nieves → Deputy AD, Chief Revenue Officer, Charlotte
Nieves leaves Georgia Tech, where he grew operating revenue from $94 million toward a projected $164 million, to run everything external at Charlotte: tickets, multimedia rights, partnerships, the works. The hire gives a Group of Five program a revenue-first org chart of the kind more often found a tier up, run by someone who built one there.

Ben Colabrese → Chief Financial Officer, New York Mets
Colabrese joins the Mets from the NHL's Ottawa Senators, where he was CFO, after six years in the same seat for MLB's Toronto Blue Jays. A finance chief moving NHL-to-MLB at the executive level shows how fluidly the money side now crosses leagues, especially at a club spending like Steve Cohen's.

Will Brown → Chief Commercial Officer, Formula E
Brown takes over global commercial strategy for the racing series from Legends Global, where he was global head of motorsport, with earlier stops at Manchester United and Arsenal. The hire is a bet that Formula E's growth now hinges on selling the property as hard as the established leagues sell theirs.

Nick Bowes → Chief Operating Officer, Big 12
The conference expanded its CFO into a COO role spanning sales, marketing, communications, and athlete services. Folding the business and competition sides under one operator is the kind of consolidation conferences are reaching for as they run more like media-and-commerce companies than membership groups.

Head of Creative — Sporting Kansas City (Kansas City, MO): Owns the creative vision across every fan touchpoint, leading an in-house team spanning design, video, copy, and merchandise, and reporting to the CMO. Works directly with adidas and the league office, which makes this less a design job than a brand-stewardship one, the kind clubs increasingly treat as core to how they grow. Apply here

Director, Athletic Hospitality & Special Events — Auburn University (Auburn, AL): Drives strategy and execution for high-profile events across Auburn's athletic venues, marketing the spaces, managing third-party promoter deals, and coordinating game-day hospitality inside NCAA and SEC rules. The job treats the stadium as a year-round venue business, not just a place the team plays twelve Saturdays a year. Apply here

Vice President, Ticket Sales — Forward Madison FC (Madison, WI): Runs all inside ticket sales for the USL club and its NWSL sister side, Rally Madison, managing the sales staff while carrying a premium and corporate book personally. A lower-division club putting a VP over ticketing reflects how much the gate still drives the model when the media money is thin. Apply here

Director, Student-Athlete Development — Grand Canyon University (Phoenix, AZ): Serves as primary academic advisor for assigned teams, monitoring eligibility, running study-hall and tutoring operations, and building development programming through the Office of Student-Athlete Development. As rosters churn under the transfer portal and revenue-share era, the people keeping athletes eligible and on track have quietly become roster-management infrastructure. Apply here

More from Las Vegas over the next two weeks. See you next Wednesday.