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Welcome to Yahoo Finance Sports Report, a unique look at the business of sports brought to you by Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports. I'm your host, Joe Pompeiano, and I'm here to coach you through the financial game. We'll look beyond the headlines, analyze all the latest sports news, the teams, trades, and billion dollar deals. So you and your portfolio will win big. Let's huddle up and get right into it.We're kicking off this week with POM's Playbook. Why take a look at some of the biggest headlines in sports that you and your portfolio need to know? First, I'm talking about NBC's newest studio analyst for its return to the NBA next season. Last weekend, the network announced that 10-time NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony will be joining NBC for its NBA coverage starting this fall. Anthony, who retired from the NBA in 2023, also spoke about joining the network during last weekend's Kentucky Derby broadcast for NBC Sports.The 2025 Basketball Hall of Famer will work as a studio analyst for games on NBC and Peacock and will be in studio at least one night per week during the NBA regular season and playoffs. The 19 year NBA veteran is a massive acquisition for NBC as the network continues to build out its NBA broadcast talent roster.Anthony joins a star studded crew that includes Jamal Crawford and Reggie Miller as game analyst and Mike Tirico and Noah Eagle on Play by play. Now Anthony is the only analyst currently signed to NBC's NBA studio team. However, Andrew Marchand at the Athletic previously reported that NBC is considering Maria Taylor, the network's NFL and college football.Hot as the lead for its NBA pregame show. But it's clear that NBC is leaning on big name talent to support its massive $2.45 billion annual broadcast deal with the NBA, and it's leaning on nostalgia as the network also announced last week that its beloved Roundball rock theme song will be used for its NBA coverage starting next season.Next, I'm talking about a new media deal for the Upstart Women's Pro Baseball League. Earlier this week, the WPBL, a new professional women's baseball league in the US, signed a media deal with Fremantle, the company behind shows such as America's Got Talent and Family Feud. Fremantle will oversee the league's entire content strategy, including game production and distribution, shoulder programming like pre and post-game shows, or.Original content projects, documentaries, sponsorship sales, and even global marketing. But most importantly, Fermenta will work with the WPBL to find a national broadcast partner for the league's upcoming inaugural season. Now, the WPBL was co-founded in 2024 by lawyer and pro paddle league founder Keith Stein and former baseball player and coach Justine Siegel, who was the first female coach in MLB history.The league is scheduled to debut in the spring of 2026 with six teams based in the northeastern United States and will feature a schedule that includes a regular season, playoffs, and a championship final. The league is also hosting a national tryout ahead of its 2026 season and hold a player draft for its six teams this coming fall. Now the WPBL's development is another example of the skyrocketing growth in women's sports. The WPBL will be the only professional women's baseball league in the US and will look to build on the success of other.Women's sports leagues like the WNBA, NWSL, and PWHL. To round out Pomp's playbook, I'm looking at TKO Boxing's first event, which will be a massive debut for the new promotion, founded by TKO Group Holdings in Saudi Arabia's Turkey Al Ashik. After superstar Canelo Alvarez defeated Williams School to become the undisputed super middle heavyweight world champion last Sunday in Saudi Arabia, he immediately faced off in the ring against his next opponent, fellow superstar Terence Bud Crawford.The super fight is scheduled to take place on September 12th at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas with the ring, WBA, WBC, WBO, and IBF super middleweight titles on the line. The announcement also brought massive news outside of the ring as Turkey LSU confirmed that the superweight fight will be promoted by UFC President Dana White under the aforementioned TKO boxing promotion.Now it cannot be understated just how big of an event this will be for TKO boxing. TKO boxing is jumping into the deep end with one of the biggest fights in boxing history for its first event, and it will be a massive promotional undertaking for Dana White. However, White has promoted hundreds of UFC events in 25 years as the promotion's president and co-promoted.The Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor match in 2017, which is the second most watched pay per view boxing event in history. I'm also eager to see who will broadcast the Canelo versus Crawford match. Turkey Al Asik said on X, the TV partner will be a big surprise, and there are rumors that Netflix could be in line to stream the event worldwide.This week for the deeper dive, where I give you a play by play analysis of news in the sports world, the significance of your bottom line. We're talking about the Washington Commanders' new stadium deal with Washington DC. Now last week, the Washington Commanders announced a new $3.7 billion stadium deal with Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.The stadium plan includes an indoor venue on 180 acres of land at the site of their former home field, RFK Stadium, and an entertainment district with bars, restaurants, shops, and homes. Overall, the commanders will pay $2.7 billion towards the stadium project, and DC taxpayers will cover the remaining $1 billion. However, those are just the headline numbers. I read the 30-page term sheet that came out last week, and since I assume many of you have better things to do with your time, I want to run through some of the most interesting parts of the term sheet here.Now, for their financial contribution, the commanders will be responsible for any design and construction costs for the stadium, team administrative offices, and parking facilities that exceed DC's $1 billion commitment. On the other hand, DC will own the land and the stadium that it sits on.But DC will rent both the stadium and land back to the commanders on two separate lease agreements. The first is a 50 year deal for the stadium. The second is a 90 year deal for the commercial development surrounding the stadium. And here's the kicker. The commanders will pay just $1 for each lease agreement per year on the stadium and commercial land, respectively.Plus, the commanders will not be required to pay any property taxes on the land used for the stadium and parking facilities, and the team also won't be charged any sales tax on income generated from the sale of personal seat licenses, which give fans the right to buy season tickets for the new stadium and could raise $400 million or more in revenue for the team to help fund construction calls.And while the commanders do have to pay stadium operating costs, the team gets to keep all revenue from both NFL and non-NFL events, including ticket sales, merchandise, concessions, naming rights, and sponsorship deals. Now DC also built in some incentives of its own for the deal. The DC government will receive two complimentary 18 person suites at the 30 yard line for exclusive use by the mayor and city council, and these suites must have the same finishes, services, and benefits as comparable suites.The commanders will also be required to provide DC with a limited number of complimentary use days at the stadium for non-commercial public and community events such as graduations and high school football games. And while the commanders will be charged a sales tax and revenue generated inside the stadium, that money will simply be placed into a fund to pay down debt on the stadium and support ongoing maintenance and repair requests.Now there are a ton of other details that we don't have time to get into. However, the insights revealed from the term sheet show just how creative the commanders and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser had to get in order to push the stadium vision forward. Mayor Bowser will now look to get the deal approved this July by 7 of DC's 13 council members, and if it is approved, the stadium is estimated to be finished by the start of the 2030 NFL season.And if this deal can get done, Josh Harris will have been one of the hottest starts to a new ownership tenure in NFL history. The commanders reached the NFC championship in Harris's second year. The team has a bona fide franchise quarterback in Jayden Daniels, and DC was just awarded the 2027 NFL draft earlier this week.We've made it to the one on one, a conversation where I get to break down news and sports with the key player in the industry. This week, we're talking to Sinilla founder Ben Weiss and Reebok founder Joe Foster. Thank you guys so much for joining the show, and we have a lot to get to today, but I want to start, Joe, with a question for you just around some recentthat we've come up with Nike, Adidas and other footwear companies asking the president for tariff exemptions. Now, these companies have said that tariffs are existential threats to their business. I'm curious if you think that rings true and how Reebok would have handled something like this in its early days.

It's very early days and uh I, I, I mean, I, I can go back to uh many things that happened to us, and, and I think the big risk at the moment is that people are going to find ways around it. Uh, we used to get a chance shipping all these sort of things. It's interesting, we, we got to watch what happens. However, we must remember that these challenges really give us some opportunities, and finding those opportunities could be the answer to what uh the the problem that we're going through now.

Yeah, and do you think that it's likely that this would bring some manufacturing back to the US or to your point, do you think people will just find a way around it?

Well, unfortunately, I don't think footwear manufacturing is going to come back to the US. It's the same in Europe and the same in Britain. The footwear industry has just been decimated. To take it back into those countries would take an awful lot, plus you don't have the labor. Um, traditional shoemaking is labor intensive, and you have to have people who will, will actually do that, sit at a sewing machine for the girls. How many people will do that in Europe and in America?They won't find that, that's uh that's the difficult part of trying to bring this business back. I, I think what Benny's doing now by using uh AI and using 3D printing, there's some possibility here that a certain type of footwork will come back to the US and come back to Europe, but really the base when you talk about Nike, Adidas and Reebok, and a lot more, the volumes are just so immense that uh.It will not, it will not come back to the US. I don't think those are the industries really that uh that are are are really wanted back in in in the US or in Europe. I think those are the industries where you've got lots of people and you can make volumes. So, you know, I, I think the target should be what can we bring back to the US, what can we bring back to Europe or whatever, what and really target those industries and uh that way I, I think that uh tariffs will work, but um.Just a blanket tariff on on footwear, it's not gonna bring footwear back.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and it leads us over to Ben. Ben, I'd love if you could just explain how the idea for Scintilla came about, what you guys are doing, and how you're partnering with Reebok on the brand.

Yeah, so we realized that there was an opportunity to design footwear with AI and we thought about what could AI do in the footwear category, and we started to realize that the efficiency that would be possible here would be so great compared to the traditional methods. And so we have this designer Kidar based in India who has a unique process that we've worked with him on, and we now have the ability to generate the majority of our footwear design, about 70%. We use generative AI to create the patterns and textures on our shoes. We use AI to.Come up with the concepts around what we've actually designed for the whole product in general, and then we use it also to um do a lot of our other type of prototyping work. And so now we can make a brand new shoe in 3 months and 3D print it right away um and on demand. And so, like Joe mentioned earlier, I mean, our production is very different than a lot of the typical production and we're actually planning to have around Q3 of this year, our partner factory Zellerfe will have US production in Texas. And so we will be able to print on.And over there and now with our efficiency and design with AI, um, we and with our 3D printing, we'll be able to have a really rapid delivery that's really unprecedented and considering a lot of the environment going on now, um, it will give us a great competitive advantage. So we realized that AI design would be very interesting and we want to apply it to the space. 3D printing would be the best method to go and actually bring it to market, and we formed partnerships around that area, and now we've produced our first shoe, which is just under our brand, separate from Reebok with uh Joe advising us based on his experience.

Yeah, and how does the 3D printing process work, right? I'm curious how that compares from a production standpoint to some of the bigger shoe brands that everyone would know today.

Yeah, it's a very different process. Um, what we're doing is when somebody orders, which they, when they order, they get a shoe that's custom made to their feet. So you scan your feet with your phone camera, you put a simple 8 by 11 piece of paper next to each foot. We get your measurements, we get 12 different data points, your length with arch, and then we print it to fit you. Um, it's just print on demand, you know, like you would have a normal 3D printer, like we just printed, uh, with the printer. It's a specialized printer and about 4 to 6 weeks later it comes to you. So the traditional.Manufacturing process, you have to make a mold for every single size, size 6789, 10. If you're half sizes, you have that commitment, which is tens of thousands of dollars to do, if not more. And then you have your minimum order quantities for your inventory that you have to go and produce. Um, and with 3D printing, we don't have to do any of that. We can just have a new shoe that we roll out. We design a lot of it automated. We bring it to market, and it's coming to market in 3 months instead of 18 months, which is a typical time frame. Somebody orders, they scan their feet, 4 to 6 weeks later, they've got ashoe that's delivered at their doorstep, that's custom made to their measurements and it's only printed when somebody orders. So we don't have all these minimum order quantities. We don't have anything that we have to fulfill, um, much, much earlier on and be prepared for. It's just a much different, more efficient, and also cleaner process overall for this industry. So it's really unparalleled in terms of what we can create. We can take risks and bets on people, um, in this category that have never been able to do signature shoes before, which is really our goal here for Sinilla to become the content creator shoe brand.

Very interesting. So I know you started with uh an AI generated design for shoe slides, but it sounds like there is a point in time where you will start doing more sneakers, running shoes, and other shoes like that.

Yeah, I mean, we want to be a lifestyle first brand. A lot of the brands today, you know, what Joe built was a lifestyle and athletic brand. You have Nike, Puma, all these other brands. They're really athletic brands. They're born and bred and running. We want to become the content creator shoe brand. We want to back the YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, you know, Instagram stars, these people that have amassed amazing followings. They're selling everything from hats, shirts, shorts, hoodies, but never shoes. Um, and we want to give them the opportunity to do shoes and to do shoes in their own way. With the signature edition, they become the creative director on and then they.To build up with us. And so our approach here is really different in this space. It's a lifestyle non-athletic first approach. Like you mentioned, we're going to expand outside of slides. Slides have been the first category. We've really mastered this AI design process for there, and we're planning to go and develop sneakers and uh and have some in-person experiences to around 3D printed footwear so people can really understand, Joe, what it's like to to what it's like to really wear a 3D printed shoe and that experience.

All right, we've got to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more of my conversation with Ben Weiss and Joe Foster.Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Sports Report. I'm your host, Joe Pompliano. I'm here with Sinilla founder Ben Weiss and Reebok founder Joe Foster. And Joe, obviously, given your background as a co-founder of Reebok, you've sort of seen it all at this point. You know what it takes to have a successful brand and really build these things up. Why do you believe that Synthlay can be successful as a company and as a product?

Well, same with Reebok, uh, when my brother and myself, we set out, we, we were very small. We actually left the parentss company and so we didn't have any money, so we had to bootstrap, but what we had to do was to look for white space, and what I think Ben has found and what Ben is just working in at the moment is a white space.You know, we found a great white space which was uh aerobics. Aerobics took us from 9 million to 900 million in 4 years, and I'm not saying that uh since they could do that and may do it quicker, but there's something different here that we're looking at. And I think that is the answer to anything that, if you want to move in this world, find something different.There are opportunities we've just been saying about tariffs. These all these things provide opportunities, you know, we have to change our name, we have to change our silhouette, you know, we were hit by a lot of challenges, but that, that taught us one lesson. A challenge is an opportunity. And I think this is what Ben is realizing, and these opportunities, you've just got to explore them. Not everyone will work, but you just keep on exploring, you keep pushing, you keep doing this, and then.You just need to hit that magic button, something happens, and all of a sudden the scintillator becomes the word, the, the shoe, the product, and that's what we're looking for, and Ben is very good at that at pushing this out and finding some spaces. So that's what we're looking for, so that's the excitement.

Yeah, and Joe, I'd love to just get your, your opinion on sort of the overarching view of the shoe industry in general. We've seen some mergers and acquisitions recently, specifically with Sketchers being agreed to take private in a $9.4 billion dollar deal by 3G Capital. I guess it's a two part question. How do you think that impacts their ability to compete with competitors like a Reebok and Nike Adidas, but also, do you think that we'll see more mergers and acquisitions in the shoe industry in the future?

I think you're going to see mergers and acquisitions, yes, definitely. But you know, we started off in 1958 and from then on up till today, we never had a recession, because the sports industry and the sneaker industry, it's now street, it's expanding totally all the time expanding. There are a lot of players out there, and that's why.As we've been, we need to find some white spaces, something that just, uh, it's, it's someone's imagination. Yeah, that that's a great idea. There are so many people gaming these days, and to have your own avatar, wearing the same shoe. It's, you know, these these ideas and you have to keep doing this change. The shoe industry in general is, you know, people operate in those companies, they either get old and they decide the best thing they can do is to merge or sell because.Finding the right people to come in, and that's, that's the trick, who's going to take over at the top? There there's a, there's a big trick with that and uh keeping going. Nike have been good at that. Reebok were lousy at that. They they didn't find the right person to take over, but they're coming back now with with authentic, and, and, you know, the Reebok name is either that's great.Building the name, building the brand, that's the challenge, and that's the challenge that I.Yeah, when we were young and we started off where Ben is now, it's the challenge. And if you're up to the challenge and you're optimistic and you're really adventurous, you can make a success.

Ben, I'd love to just get your opinion. You're obviously bringing a completely different uh.Business to market than the traditional shoe is used to. But if you had to look down the road, you have this sort of divide between how things used to be done and how you're hoping to do them in the future. What do you think the future of the shoe business actually looks like? Is it closer to your model, the old model, or maybe a mixture of the two?

I see it being a mixture of the two show. Um, I think that there's going to be a lot that's done in this space around backing new types of talent. The way that culture has been and the way culture has been shaped for so long has just completely changed. I mean we've seen what happened in the world with signature basketball shoes. We've seen the shift into signature hip hop. People for a long time didn't think you could have a shoe. There was a signature shoe outside of the athletics and tied to the performance of an athlete. And I think the third wave is going to be.tank freighters, and it makes sense to have a method to design shoes with AI and 3D print them and produce them in, you know, in 3 months instead of 18 months to go and test which content creators can really do shoes, which ones will be successful in the space, and then to figure out which ones we want to actually scale to full on traditional production, which is where, you know, the biggest revenue opportunity is. Right now, it's been really hard for brands to take a bet on these types of individuals because the costs are so high and the time frame is so long. Um, and now we'reChanging that. So I think it's going to be a hybrid approach. 3D printing has a lot more potential to go. I'm excited to see where that space develops. But when you bring somebody on your team like Joe Foster, who took Reebok from an idea to at a point the best selling shoe brander in the world was involved in designing the iconic shoes that you may own make the classic in Club C and bring that type of influence to what we're doing today, I think it's putting, putting us in the best position to succeed in both these fronts and just succeed as a brand overall makesinlay a household name, which is whatwe're working on.

Yeah, very exciting to see how much technology has changed every industry and now even the footwear industry, but thank you guys so much for joining us today.The clock is running down here, but we have just enough time for some final buzz. So let's talk about Rory McIlroy's new investment fund. After winning his first Masters a few weeks ago, Rory McIlroy is also taking care of business off the course. The 5 time major champion and his venture capital firm Synthony Ventures are partnering with global alternative asset management firm TPG to launch a new sports investment fund called TPG Sports. The fund will focus on investment opportunities across the sports industry, including companies, teams.And leagues and will use a private equity approach to supply strategic primary capital for scale and growth. Plus McElroy and his business partner Sean O'Flattery will serve as operating partners on the fund for strategy and sourcing investments. TPG Sports also received an anchor commitment from Luit, an independent alternative investment manager located in Abu Dhabi. Now TPG, which has $246 billion of assets under management, has been an active media and entertainment investor since its founding in 1992. WithInvestments in CAA, DIRECTV, and Spotify. TPG has also partnered with McElroy and multiple other investments over the past 6 years, including Troon Golf, the world's largest professional golf club management company. The launch of TPG Sports though further cements Roy McIlroy is one of the most active athlete investors in sports. He recently co-founded the indoor tech-infused golf League, TGL with Tiger Woods through Tomorrow Sports, which just concluded a successful debut season with live broadcast all over ESPN.McIlroy also co-founded Golf Pass, a direct to consumer digital golf platform in partnership with NBC Sports. He is also an investor in pottery, an elevated mini golf company with multiple locations in the US. Additionally, the Irishman has made many investments outside of the golf world, such as Ticket Marketplace Tick Pic, the health company Whoop, which is valued at 3.6 billion.And the recovery tech brand Hyper Ice, which has a valuation of $850 million. And in 2023, McEroy was also part of a group with Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelsey that invested over $210 million in the Alpine Formula One team. We'll see how McElroy's portfolio performs in the coming years, but he is building an investment career that is becoming equally impressive as his legendary career on the golf course.We're all out of time, so it's officially game over for this week. Thank you so much to Banjoe and for all of you for joining us. Please make sure to scan the QR code below to follow Yahoo Finance podcast for more videos and expert insights, and catch us every Saturday wherever you get your podcast. I'm your host, Joe Pompeliano. See you next time.

This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.