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“At the worst moment of the world’s history, that’s where we began,” David Lane, the CEO of Sports Illustrated Tickets, told me. He was referring to early 2020, the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over a few days in March, the major American sports leagues suspended or delayed their seasons. The live-music industry soon stopped in its tracks, too. Lane was running Lunatix, a website where people could buy and sell secondhand tickets for live music and sports events. “There’s no playbook when you’re a live-event company in a pandemic,” he said. He feared his company was doomed.
In search of a lifeline, Lane met with Authentic Brands Group, a licensing company with a unique specialty: scooping up brands that have fallen on hard times and leveraging their waning name recognition for profit. (Authentic says its brands generate thirty-six billion dollars per year in worldwide sales.) The company’s roster includes bygone favorites such as Airwalk (for skaters) and Juicy Couture (for lovers of velour). In 2019, Authentic paid a hundred and ten million dollars to Meredith Media to acquire the intellectual property of Sports Illustrated, the once-totemic sports magazine. Since then, Authentic has never run the magazine’s editorial operations, instead licensing the publishing rights out to other companies.
In June of 2021, Authentic struck a deal with Lane, and Lunatix became Sports Illustrated Tickets. Authentic collects licensing fees from Sports Illustrated Tickets, as well as from Minute Media, the publisher of Sports Illustrated. (Lane did not disclose how much he pays Authentic in fees.) Compared with the likes of StubHub and SeatGeek, Sports Illustrated Tickets is a relatively small player. Since nearly going extinct in the pandemic, however, it’s on the upswing: this year, Lane said, he expects to reach five hundred million dollars in revenue.
But since Sports Illustrated Tickets operates independently from Sports Illustrated, the publication, none of the money that Sports Illustrated Tickets makes facilitating ticket sales supports the magazine’s journalism. When I asked Andrew Sharp—who was the senior NBA writer at Sports Illustrated for several years, and with whom I worked at Grantland—about Sports Illustrated Tickets, he said it looked “especially bleak,” but added that “no feat of synergistic corporate ingenuity surprises me at this point.”
Stephen Cannella, Sports Illustrated’s editor in chief, declined to discuss Sports Illustrated Tickets’ business practices or the fact that Sports Illustrated Tickets’ revenue does not support the magazine’s journalism. “Like any legacy media brand, Sports Illustrated is constantly looking for ways to evolve,” he said. “In a crowded media landscape, increasing the profile of the brand is paramount.” (When reached, Authentic Brands declined to comment. Minute Media did not respond.)
When I asked Lane if he was trading on the goodwill of the Sports Illustrated name to persuade people to buy tickets at inflated prices from his company, he shrugged off the question. “Somebody sets a price, and buyers are either willing to pay that price or not,” he said. “Just like any free market. You can list that ticket at a hundred dollars, or you can list it at a thousand dollars. The seller determines the price.”
Lane repeatedly used the word we to connect his company to Sports Illustrated the magazine: “Think about what we meant to you and remember who we are.” This may reflect a weird reality of the dynamic. While Sports Illustrated cannot use the revenue generated by Sports Illustrated Tickets, Sports Illustrated Tickets can use Sports Illustrated’s archive. The company has opened hospitality suites in stadiums throughout the United States and Europe where “you see iconic Sports Illustrated covers, articles, images, and storytelling,” Lane said. “We have a connection to the fans that nobody else does. Our competitors don’t have positively viewed consumer brands,” he added. “In fact, they’re looked down upon.”
The secondary ticket market isn’t just looked down upon: Increasingly, it’s become a focus for regulation. Maine and Vermont have passed some form of price cap legislation; similar bills have been introduced in New York, California, and about ten other states. Just this month, Washington, DC, passed a bill (which applies to live music specifically) that not only caps resale prices at 10 percent above face value, but also caps resale fees and institutes a string of other measures designed to protect consumers.
According to a class action lawsuit recently filed against StubHub, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of resold tickets are being peddled not by fans who had actually planned on attending the event but by scalpers who are likely using bots to snatch up tickets on a massive scale. During the NBA finals, tickets for Knicks games on Sports Illustrated Tickets went for as high as seventy-six thousand bucks apiece. Sports Illustrated Tickets takes an 11 percent cut on every transaction, which is on the lower end for the industry. (In the state of New York, StubHub and the major platforms have been found to charge an average of nearly 40 percent in fees.) Jason Webb, who runs a fan-to-fan marketplace called Tixel, which caps resale prices, said that companies like Sports Illustrated Tickets are cogs in a ticketing industry that “wants to artificially drive up prices to maximize profit.”
Sports Illustrated Tickets is just one avenue through which Authentic Brands monetizes the Sports Illustrated brand; it has also licensed the name for a Sports Illustrated protein powder, a Sports Illustrated CBD cream, Sports Illustrated Resorts, and Sports Illustrated Swimsuits, as well as for an annual event called Sports Illustrated The Party, a celebrity-filled Super Bowl–weekend bash. (This past year, performers included the Chainsmokers and Ludacris.) Seeing Sports Illustrated The Party splashing cash while Sports Illustrated could barely afford to send reporters to cover the Super Bowl itself was particularly frustrating, a former Sports Illustrated writer told me.
“They make money off the name, but they don’t reinvest back into the publication that makes the name valuable,” the former writer said of Authentic’s business model. “They’re taking the bet that readers aren’t going to notice the incremental deterioration enough to tank the value of the brand. The magazine does have to exist: you can’t have a Super Bowl party for a publication that doesn’t exist. But it doesn’t have to be any good.”
The end result, the writer said, was that when the staff nonetheless managed to do good journalism, it felt like “a miracle” and a “testament to how good the people were and how deeply they cared about the place.”
Ahead of the World Cup, Sports Illustrated Tickets received a fifty-million-dollar loan from a company called Eagle Point Credit Management in part “to help fund its plan to purchase World Cup tickets and resell them with huge markups,” according to the Financial Times. (Eagle Point Credit Management did not respond to a request for comment.) Days before the World Cup final, between Spain and Argentina, on July 14, tickets on Sports Illustrated Tickets were going for between sixty-seven hundred and forty thousand dollars. The Athletic and The Guardian diligently covered the issues of exorbitant World Cup ticket prices—as did Sports Illustrated. “It seems near impossible for fans to avoid shelling out thousands of dollars just to enter a stadium,” a Sports Illustrated reporter wrote this spring.
Despite the legislative push for price caps, Lane is projecting a rosy future for Sports Illustrated Tickets. The company is working on opening more stadium suites and is an official Verified Resale Platform for the 2028 LA Olympics. The New York Red Bulls, a Major League Soccer team, now play at Sports Illustrated Stadium—so named thanks to a sponsorship deal with Sports Illustrated Tickets, not Sports Illustrated magazine. “We continue to accelerate,” Lane said. “You’re seeing a magazine transform into a live-event and hospitality company. We’re one of the biggest opportunities for Sports Illustrated to expand. We are really starting the next evolution of who we’ve been for the last seventy years.”
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