Summary

• The Player-as-Creator Thesis Just Went Mainstream: Bryson DeChambeau has 2.6M YouTube subscribers and just told reporters he’d rather grow that channel than return to the PGA Tour. He wants to play “tournaments that want him” and treat YouTube as the long game. Boxing has lived this way for 50 years, golf is catching up fast. So when a 32-year-old major champion publicly prices the platform ahead of the most prestigious league in his sport, who follows next?
• TikTok Has Stopped Pretending to Be Just a Platform: TikTok hired Issa Rae’s Hoorae Media to commission scripted Original Series, starting with Screen Time, a vertical drama with a Rap Sh!t / Queen Sugar cast. China’s micro-drama industry was worth $5.3BN in 2023. The US short-drama market quadrupled in a single year. The platform that was supposed to kill premium content is now buying it.
• Amazon Just Bought Itself a College Sports Brand: Duke signed Prime Video’s first-of-its-kind college sports rights deal, three marquee basketball games per season for three seasons. The Big Ten and Fox objected within 72 hours. Buried in the deal: NIL opportunities and a retail component baked straight into the Amazon ecosystem. Duke isn’t selling games, it’s selling a commerce relationship, and every conference just got a glimpse of its own future.
• Fencing Just Went Viral. The Sport Didn’t Change, The Way You See It Did: The World Fencing League debuted on 25 April with a 24-camera blade-tracking system that turns every sword tip into a lightsaber trail. One ESPN TikTok pulled 9M plays. A single Chinese-language X repost did 5M. Dizplai built the same kind of fan engagement layer for World Archery ahead of Paris 2024, same playbook, different sport. Niche sports don’t have a content problem. They have a comprehension problem.
• FIFA Just Took Back Its Collectibles Fan: FIFA signed a long-term exclusive deal with Fanatics through 2031, ending its 50-year Panini partnership. The global sports trading card market has tripled since 2019. Fanatics now holds exclusive trading card rights across MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and now FIFA. One company now sits between every major sports property and the collectibles fan. Is collecting officially infrastructure?
• Everyone is Routing Around the Middleman: DeChambeau is going around the PGA. TikTok is going around the studios. Duke is going around its conference. Fencing is going around traditional broadcast. FIFA is going around 50 years of habit. The pattern this week isn’t a coincidence, it’s the operating logic of sport in 2026. When the middleman stops adding value, somebody else builds the direct relationship.

Show Notes

• Bryson would rather grow his YouTube channel than play on the PGA.
• TikTok partners with Issa Rae to produce original content for the platform.
• Amazon x Duke first-of-its-kind college sports deal.
• Fencing tip tracing technology.
• FIFA signs deal with collectable business FANATICS.

Transcription

Ed (00:02.606)
Who’s starting off then?

Jo (00:06.702)
Bye, have a good one.

Dan Nagar (00:06.889)
I think it’s your turn, Ed.

Ed (00:08.026)
Well I’m doing the price in one honor so I’ll, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. Right, okay, let’s, bear with me. Don’t worry, Dan, we’re gonna get started in a sec.

Jo (00:19.884)
I want, cause I’m trying to have three windows open at the same time. Sorry, Go, go,

Ed (00:21.609)
I was just about to start, I was about to launch in.

Ed (00:29.614)
Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of the Attention Shift. She’s Joe Redfern.

Jo (00:33.902)
And he’s at Abbe’s. Go Ed!

Ed (00:36.622)
Right then, kicking straight off, so Bryson DeChambeau said he’d rather grow his YouTube channel than go back to the PGA Tour. Unpack that one.

Jo (00:46.382)
Do you think he’s burnt his bridges? I mean, part of the live golf saga, everybody’s looking at Bryson DeChambeau. He seems to me to be the athlete who is in the best position here. Looks like he’s more keen on keeping his audience ownership. Perhaps he sees that as more valuable potentially for his career in the long run than necessarily getting back into bed with the PGA. He’s effectively saying, I want to own the relationship with my fans and I want to guard that and that’s more important to me.

Ed (01:16.91)
Yeah, he said that he only wants to play in tournaments that want him. So I suppose that’s referencing the mages which he does play in, right? But, also referencing the fact that… God damn it, I ain’t paying any fans to come back on that tour.

Jo (01:23.832)
Mm.

Jo (01:32.302)
mean, yeah.

Look, if you think about it this way, he’s got his YouTube channel. He can publish when he wants. Nobody’s telling him what he can upload and when. He’s got sponsorship inventory. I mean, that gives him a resilience with his, I mean, it’s a direct to audience relationship. it feels like golf’s moving towards that kind of boxing culture, isn’t it? Where the…

The talent and the personalities are beginning to matter more than the institutions around them.

Ed (02:07.886)
Yeah, becoming almost becoming more fragmented like in boxing, yes you have the governing bodies with the belts but you know you’ve got individual promoters and yeah the governing bodies have some kind of sway over who fights who but really it’s the promoters that are making the fights. think what, look he’s interesting, obviously he’s done what he’s done, he’s done this Source Golf creator network with Grant Hover and the Bryan Brothers which you know when you put them all together, the size of them all and their own individual audiences, they are saying look we can, we’ve got a level of

Jo (02:26.926)
Yeah, with Grant Hover, yeah.

Ed (02:37.978)
creative control over what we do that allows us to be wherever we want to be and go wherever we want to go and perhaps winning PG, being on almost that hamster wheel, I think I’ve heard it described like that before, of golf event after golf event after golf event, if he can just turn up and just play in the majors, be in between, have fun and do his own commercial deals and play with his mates, there’s a lot to be said for having that sort of control in your life I guess.

Jo (02:45.976)
Yeah.

Jo (02:52.354)
Yeah!

Jo (03:02.324)
Exactly. wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you? And he’s got 2.6 million subscribers. I was looking at Social Blade and how many, how much, you know, he’s likely to make just from on platform revenue from those 2.6 million subscribers. It might not equal the big paychecks of the big tournaments, but it’s not to be sniffed at. The, the, the counterpoint to it when we were, I was thinking about this is,

can totally get why DeChambeau might choose his YouTube channel over going back to the PGA and the restrictions that come with it. But the tours exist precisely to do the opposite of what he’s talking about. mean, if everybody, good, good golf and all the golfers atomize out into their own audiences, the tours and the big events, they bring it all back together again. They create that center of gravity where you…

bring audiences, you bring fans, you create stakes, you package those moments that get circulated on TikTok, it’s putting on the green jacket, all of that. So you don’t really wanna get rid of those, because they can be quite compelling. And that’s what existing fans follow golf for. So how are they gonna build something that kind of sits in the middle? The thing is, it’s a pretty binary choice at the moment, isn’t it? You’re in one camp or you’re the other.

Ed (04:27.117)
Yeah, I think what was, I think something that a lot of people miss is in the same press briefing when he was talking about ultimately wants to play the tournaments he wants to play in, he talked about dubbing his own content in different languages as well. Obviously it’s new feature now on YouTube where it is easy to dub content. I think we saw as well MrBeast has actually deleted a lot of his local language YouTube page now because he doesn’t need to anymore because he can actually make the content in different languages themselves.

Jo (04:46.06)
Yeah.

Jo (04:53.326)
Yeah, you can, yeah.

Ed (04:54.593)
Yeah, Bryson’s thinking in terms of markets, not platforms.

and he’s trying to build a channel, he’s trying to build a global content IP and he thinks he’s probably the best place to do it because he’s in position right now. So, yes you can look at what’s going on with Liv as a negative and who’s to say that Liv doesn’t continue in another guy’s right and I think he’s keeping his mind open to that as well. But what he’s saying is I don’t have to stand still and I can continue to build this platform that I’ve already used this vehicle to do, essentially. And I don’t think, you know the funny thing is I’ve always tried to sort of unpack.

Jo (05:02.84)
Thank

Jo (05:13.955)
Yeah.

Jo (05:23.426)
Yeah, yeah.

Ed (05:28.311)
Dechambeau a little bit. I think he’s just being brutally honest, not necessarily arrogant with it as well. He’s just staying a clear fact. That’s where he is in his life.

Jo (05:36.121)
Yeah, why not? Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with that, I agree. And I don’t think Bryson Inc. is going anywhere soon. I think he’s a force to be reckoned with. yeah, watch this space. Are you into micro dramas, Ed? Is this your thing? So TikTok is getting into scripted micro dramas, which are very much on vogue in the media and streaming industry at the moment.

Ed (05:49.847)
honestly, that’s all I ever watch.

Jo (06:03.328)
any number of micro drama, vertical micro drama apps, if you go into the app store, bloody hundreds of them. But TikTok is actually commissioning its own. So they’ve got into bed with Issa Rae, who is a very well-respected producer, actress, writer. So she’s proper Hollywood and they’re looking at how they can create a studio that can feed scripted micro dramas onto TikTok.

What this is, I mean, yeah, there is a bit of a gold rush with short form kind of micro dramas and some of them are howlers, but I do think that there is something in it. It’s not just disposable content. There was a really, I mean, it wasn’t actually scripted, but there was a 50 part success on TikTok a couple of years ago with a lady who was talking about her horrendous marriage and her husband who’d got a secret second life.

And there were 50 parts to this story she was telling. And the number of people that went through the whole 50 was just crazy. So actually constructed in the right way. They can be really, really compelling. We’ve seen high school musical and Mean Girls, Hollywood movies chopped up into small segments and put in those segments on TikTok. So it can work.

What I’m really interested in is how it could start showing up or sports could start showing up in it. I think a lot of people think that sports is incompatible with this vertical storytelling. I think it’s absolutely compatible. Vertical, emotional, episodic, drama. It’s all there.

Ed (07:46.414)
There’s so many, I’ve always said this, there’s so many opportunities in a sporting week, in whatever sport it is.

And I remember when I used to work in sports and you’re just around a sporting facility, which to most people is their place of worship, their Mecca to go to. And as we’ve worked in sports, we see little things that now you would be thinking in micro drama terms, you could make little, however long, three minute things about this little thing that you would normally see yourself. I remember walking down tunnels.

Jo (08:14.286)
Mm.

Ed (08:23.963)
seeing that people are cleaning their kit and all those kind of things. You can make content out of that because it’s access and stories that no one ever sees. And I think there’s so many… Everyone always thinks, play a player, play a player. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the most important thing in terms of in sports that people want to know about. There’s so many other stories that are going on.

Jo (08:32.952)
Yeah.

Ed (08:46.329)
as well. And I think the other point I was going to make as well, Joe, as well, I think what’s interesting with this is he’s looking at, we were talking about this off camera, weren’t we, that, you know, so often you’ll open up a ticker on your phone and you’re just then accosted by a lot of random stuff because you accidentally watched something once that you didn’t intend to watch. And then you just, you know, your timeline’s just full of it. I think there’s a sense of, I think for TikTok to grow even further and transition. And I think maybe get start to really…

Jo (09:00.088)
All

Ed (09:12.397)
get the kind of growth it’s had in China. Because I think the estimates are is like US and Europe were about four years behind where they’re at with content. I think we need to start seeing more quality content. In a lot of ways, it is copying the model that YouTube started to do where you start seeing more quality content being made on the YouTube platform. I don’t think it’d be a massive surprise for TikTok to start mimicking that now.

Jo (09:18.829)
Yeah.

Jo (09:31.215)
I agree. think people are beginning to get a little bit tired of the mediocre stuff and it isn’t that compelling. It gets, like you said, disposable very quickly. But if you can nail something that feels native but it’s got a premium quality to it, yeah, you’d be in. One of the interesting things I think is it would be women’s sports because women’s sports tends to be, I mean, you can lean more into the personalities, the drama.

the locker room fits, you I think again about something I wrote about in that, when I was talking about Netflix and what’s popular in terms of sports content on Netflix, there was a gymnastics show on there and it was super, super popular. And it’s just like a scripted narrative drama about a gymnastics academy. Now you think about that in vertical. Yeah, and it was, I mean, you look at the hours viewed.

Ed (10:18.903)
Is that the one in New York?

Jo (10:24.67)
on Netflix and it was crazy successful and it only had one season but it’s punched far above its weight. So you could imagine that in vertical, 100%. The only thing is, and what I will caveat is if TikTok are gonna go in with premium partnerships with people like Hisaray, those other creators who were looking to get into this space, the economics get even more brutal. mean, the economics are brutal on YouTube as we know, they’re even more brutal on TikTok.

Ed (10:24.781)
Yeah, yeah.

Jo (10:53.42)
And once a platform starts making stuff themselves directly, you can more or less say goodbye to any meaningful monetization, which then is a disincentive to invest in making premium vertical drama. So I think, know, buyer beware. You’re not just going to go on there and create some quality content and clean up because there is a lot of vertical micro dramas out there at the moment and it’s going to be a big bloodbath.

But I am really interested to see what comes out in sport, particularly women’s sport. I think this could be some really good stuff coming out of it.

Ed (11:28.665)
Cool, okay, next story. So, a US college just signed its first Amazon Prime deal. So Duke College, they’ve done a deal with Amazon Prime that covers three of their marquee neutral site games, I’m assuming that means, not in their own stadium, per season for the next three seasons. So they’re gonna play UConn, Michigan, and Gonzaga. It’s Primes.

Pramvy does first of college sports right deal and only 72 hours pass between Duke’s announcement and the Big Ten of Fox Sports going public with their objection. So it’s already kicked off and again we were talking off camera about this as well about how US sports have no qualms whatsoever about fragmenting the hell out of the audience’s viewing experience. Kind of like we’re doing a deal you watch it if you you can find it.

Jo (12:12.386)
Hahaha.

Jo (12:19.598)
Well, yeah, to hell with collective bargaining. It feels like very often teams and in this case at college, you know, screw the others in the league. If they see a chance to go and make a buck with someone directly and particularly someone like Amazon who has got the checkbook, then yeah, they’ll climb over the other ones to get the deal, which, you know, it means that the others lose leverage, but Duke must be sitting pretty.

Ed (12:22.731)
Yeah.

Ed (12:41.58)
Well, yeah, I suppose.

Ed (12:46.84)
Well that’s the thing about it, I Big Ten was created for a reason, their argument is they’re not defending like scheduling, they’re defending the whole structure because if Duke can do it then Ohio State can do it and Alabama can do it and USC can do it and then the whole point of that conference doesn’t exist anymore so why even exist as Big Ten? So you can see why Fox have objected as well. I still do wonder as well though if Duke can go and do that.

How the hell were those contracts in the first place in terms of that conference to be able to just break away and decide they’re going to do it?

Jo (13:16.6)
Yeah. And bypass, yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. is, it’s a mystery and I don’t profess to know the mechanics of it, but.

Ed (13:25.642)
No, no, no, no. What is interesting is what they have done is the whole mechanic that’s buried within it around NIL opportunities for athletes and merchandise retail activations that Juke Sports are going to do inside the Amazon ecosystem. So in the same way we are here in Europe, we watch stuff on Amazon and you can press the button to not add it to your cart. I’m assuming they’re talking about doing a very similar thing there. Yeah.

Jo (13:47.775)
That’s it. Yeah, I think that’s the interesting thing that I picked up on is this content commerce that we’ve spoken about before. You do a deal and your merchandise, all of the stuff, the gear, it’s embedded within that ecosystem. So it reduces the friction between watching the game, seeing your favorite player, putting the jersey, the Funko Pop, whatever it is that you want to choose.

in your basket, seamless job, don’t check out, it arrives at your door a couple of days later. That is, I mean, I’m seeing it in entertainment, we’re seeing it in sport, that seamless purchase experience, whether you find it interruptive or not, it’s coming, it’s in, it’s right there, and you’re not gonna be able to avoid it. And it’s the same in sport as well. And it feels…

Ed (14:35.8)
I don’t mind it as long as it’s contextual and as long as it’s in an ideal world selling me things that are relevant to the content that I’m consuming I actually don’t mind, I don’t see the problem. It’s like it’s very convenient but maybe I’m a marketeer’s dream as my wife always says.

Jo (14:51.106)
Yeah. Yeah. yeah. No, I agree with you. Yeah. As a marketer. Yes. I too am a marketer’s dream. And the issue being it needs to be contextual and it needs to feel seamless. And I don’t know if we’re there yet. We’ve spoken about it before with the rugby. It came up when we were at stream TV Europe, how a lot of the CTV ads are not quite there yet in terms of giving you the right ad at the right time, you know.

If we see the Jude Law Uber Eats ad one more time, you know, we’re going to shoot Jude Law. Yeah. So, yeah. So I don’t know. I don’t know as we’re quite there yet, but then all of these are steps towards that being ironed out. So yeah, it’s coming. Sports, drama, you know, whatever. You’re going to be, you’ll be watching drama and you’ll see a little message saying, you want to buy Anne Hathaway’s dress?

Ed (15:24.94)
kill myself yeah yeah yeah or I’ll kill him no joking

Ed (15:41.868)
Well, absolutely.

Jo (15:51.01)
Here you go. I mean, I know you would. You look great. You look great in…

Ed (15:51.126)
Yes. Yes. I still need to go and buy those Adidas anime trainers that I’ve had in my basket for a few weeks. Until I realise how costly they were, I thought I’d never get away with that.

Jo (16:04.782)
So now you need to tell me about fencing because you sprung this one on me. I wasn’t sure we were going to talk about this one, but talk to me about fencing and blade tracking.

Ed (16:09.72)
Ed (16:13.826)
Sorry. So fencing is my every four year guilty pleasure at the Olympics. mean, it’s like, do know when you’re like, when it’s winter Olympics, whether it’s summer Olympics and there’s always a sport, like, for instance, you what we were talking about, like, the sports I love and the sports that, like, curling’s not one for me, and I’m gonna, that’s all I’m gonna say about curling. But fencing, I love it. But, so what fencing has done is, they’ve now turned,

Jo (16:33.038)
I like bacon.

Ed (16:41.128)
I was going to get this wrong here. They’re sword tips into their motion tracks essentially. obviously the people who are fencing against each other don’t see this when they’re playing but us as the viewing audience now look like they are waving around lightsabers. Now that sounds very entertaining obviously and lots of fun but there’s real context to this because they are so good at what they’re doing, they move at such speed. The only time really if you’re a layman like me that you know if someone scored a hit or not

Jo (16:55.498)
Hahaha

Jo (17:05.422)
Mm.

Ed (17:10.858)
is because you hear a buzzer go off and the referee stops it. Now you see the motion, you actually see how they are getting their shots in. So I think for me, it transforms the viewing experience and it turns a layman into someone who understands the sport better and it’s engaged me. Fan engagement at its best, well done.

Jo (17:17.102)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah. It’s a good use of text.

Jo (17:32.174)
And a good use of tech, not just tech for tech’s sake.

Ed (17:36.856)
Yeah, look, so I think it’s been developed by Rizomatix and Dentsu Lab Tokyo and they’re using advanced motion tracking to able to do it. I guess when you see what, I mean, how I described it to you earlier, Joe, kind like, do you know when you’re in the garden in the winter and it’s bonfire and all that, I mean, for anyone who’s not in Britain and doesn’t know what bonfire and all that is, Guy Fawkes, look it up. And we have sprinklers, which are essentially pieces of metal, sparklers, sorry, not sprinklers, that’s something else, sparklers.

Jo (17:55.639)
Ha ha ha ha

Jo (17:59.501)
Rock Liz!

Ed (18:04.5)
that you light and they sparkle and you move them around and everyone spells out the name. It’s a posh version of that. Yeah, basically.

Jo (18:10.06)
It’s like that. I love it. I’m gonna go and watch this clip that I, I, heard that there was a viral clip that had gone around this week that had done a few million views. I’m gonna watch it after this.

Ed (18:19.349)
Yeah, and I’ve seen some great ones of it as well, depending on the colour of the nation, that’s the colour of the tape as well. And when you see both tips going together, it just visually transforms it and makes it very different to what you would expect.

Jo (18:25.134)
Mm-hmm.

Jo (18:31.246)
I love it. And when you’re watching it, are you going vroom, vroom? Are you making the little, oh, it.

Ed (18:35.553)
you

No, unfortunately not. Can you imagine if they added the sound effects? Can we get someone on from World Fencing to tell us if they’re going to add in these lightsaber sound effects? Please get in touch. It’s a suggestion. You don’t have to do it.

Jo (18:45.637)
Hahaha

But you know what? Joking aside, if it makes something more understandable and accessible, and again, I come back to kind of kids and young audiences trying to find the thing that really chimes in there and the kind of sport that they like. And we know that niche sports are finding new audiences now, mainly because the more niche, the less likely you are to have a broadcast or a media partner, so you’re putting stuff on YouTube. And those niche sports are finding new fans. But if this…

you know, now makes it more accessible and understandable to a teenager who just happens to stumble upon it on YouTube, that’s a potential fan gain. So actually, it’s super positive.

Ed (19:33.526)
what I should have explained as well before I launched in and got very geeky about it was the whole point of them unveiling this was the World Fencing League debuted on the 26th of April. It was the first one that the Shrine All Tour in Los Angeles. So they had actually debuted this on the inaugural stage of the World Fencing League. It’s enabled them to get unbelievable traction for a new league and it just goes to show that…

Jo (19:53.166)
Hmm.

Jo (19:58.871)
for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Ed (20:00.086)
Like if someone ever asked the question, how do we suddenly make our sport stand out, make people want to take notice, like there you go. And if you think about it, yes look, there’s a lot of technology behind it, know, 24 cameras tracking, tracking every sort of angle of it to be able to do it.

Jo (20:12.748)
Jump down.

Ed (20:21.141)
but it feels like the investment in it has been far outweighed by the reach it’s got. I think he did nine million plays just one post on ESPN’s TikTok. Did another five million on the single Chinese language ex-repost. That’s just a few pieces of content. Fencing doesn’t get that kind of scale, it just doesn’t. Every four years it does in the Olympics, but then it’s stuck in with all the other sports too. So more of those kind of things, please.

Jo (20:36.846)
Mm.

Jo (20:41.25)
Yeah.

Jo (20:49.248)
Yes, good, sensible use of technology, just not ramming it down our throats for just the sake of it. And I think that’s a good thing. Right, do you remember, mean, daft question, did you have a Panini sticker album or several?

Ed (20:52.384)
Yeah!

Ed (21:03.905)
God yeah, I’ve had so many down the years. I’ve not done it for a while because it’s got very expensive, but yeah.

Jo (21:09.326)
So, but sad news kind of cray emoji. FIFA is ending their relationship with Panini after 50 years, more than 50 years actually. So yeah, unfortunately they have decided that in a couple of years they’re going to finish their partnership with Panini, their longtime partners and they’re going to move over to Fanatics. And Fanatics are doing well.

We know Fanatics for collectibles already, but their licensing deal or their new licensing deal will not just cover collectibles, but it will be those trading cards and the stickers and the sticker books, trading card games, all of that kind of stuff. Fanatics bought Tops, which was Panini’s main sticker book rival a few years ago. And so, I mean, Fanatics kind of owns end-to-end merch, fans, stuff, collectibles, everything from badges to jerseys.

It’s, I don’t know, I wonder, is Fanatic gonna get into streaming at some point? Anyway, I digress, but yeah, Panini, Panini, go. How do they, yeah. Yeah, so you gotta wonder what happens to Panini after this because Panini really is synonymous with FIFA.

Ed (22:14.965)
Yeah, they’re already doing quite lot of digital. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Ed (22:27.159)
Yeah, it’s a tough one. think, look, Panini have done a lot of digital stuff themselves and tried to do lot, but I think just the way that Fanatics have gone about this, I don’t know, the constant growth themselves, what the acquisitions have made, and I think, look, the Topps brand, Topps has got heritage too, they’ve been around for a number of years, not as long as Panini. I could be wrong here, but I think Panini are still family owned, Italian brand.

Jo (22:42.481)
yes. Yep.

Jo (22:47.566)
Yes, they are. Yes, they are. Yes.

Ed (22:49.815)
Which you know in a sense you go look that that’s tough right because you can only necessarily go so far without fanatics Have grown exponentially over the years But I guess what this is this is how they’re looking to innovate FIFA and they’ve gone down this path and I think because it I think the way that fanatics have also managed to do this because their deal is far wider ranging than just what what

Jo (23:11.15)
Mm.

Ed (23:12.907)
Penina themselves are doing and like I said I’ve not bought a sticker book or a collectible book for a trading car for some time now such is my age.

Jo (23:21.398)
I was looking at the cost of them the other day and I can see why. Second mortgage to buy the sticker book and the nice…

Ed (23:25.119)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well if I think back though, yeah, if I think back I used to spend a lot of money on them but well that’s all my grandad did. It wasn’t necessarily me. I would happily do chores around my grandad’s pub that he used to live in just because he’d then go and buy me more stickers. But yeah, sorry go on.

Jo (23:33.538)
Yeah.

Jo (23:41.871)
I mean, it’s a, mean, two things that came to mind when I was reading this story. One, I was reading something about licensing and merchandise. And actually the biggest growing sector in licensing and merchandise at the moment is the adult collectibles market. So kiddals, grownups treating themselves to toys and getting back into collecting is now

arguably growing faster than kids and collectibles. And the other thing is, you spoke about the digital content and I joked about fanatics perhaps getting into streaming. You look at all of the content, you a few years ago, you couldn’t move on YouTube without seeing a toy unboxing video, kids unboxing little plushies and plastic figurines. That has exploded. Now you have got sticker pack on, I mean,

Ed (24:12.843)
I’ll make that argument later.

Ed (24:20.555)
Yeah.

Ed (24:30.965)
Yeah, yeah.

Ed (24:38.252)
Yep.

Jo (24:39.95)
or whatever they call it, know, sticker pack opening. You’ve got this blind, blind boxes, labooboos, whatever these, you know, kind of crazy little creatures are. You’ve got creators opening boxes where they don’t know which one’s going to be inside and it’s the anticipation of it. I mean, this is big, big business and it’s pretty lucrative and fanatics have done pretty well off the back of it. So it’s no surprise that they’ve gone in big with FIFA.

Ed (25:05.622)
Yeah, like I said, it’s no surprise as well that yeah, FIFA’s joined now, but they’ve already got exclusive trading card rights to the MLB, the NBA from this season, NFL from 2026, so this season coming as well. And now, yeah, and via TOPS, so look, and they paid $500 million to TOPS, so it wasn’t a small acquisition, so they clearly had a plan that they were gonna make this work and get true scale. And it’s interesting that global trading card market,

Jo (25:16.364)
This is via Tops. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo (25:24.718)
You

Ed (25:34.483)
it’s roughly tripled since 2019 and with eBay single car sales topping one billion annually at its peak. So it’s had a real resurgence and I think you you think about you you always see these American films don’t you with baby with cards and like and you know where people are using them for leverage for things as well it’s it’s it feels like it’s one of those things that has

Jo (25:52.984)
Mm-hmm

Ed (26:01.47)
almost like there’s nothing safe, you know when people say there’s nothing safer than investing in gold, well trading cards see pretty good investments as well because they stick around for a number of years.

Jo (26:10.424)
with a shiny. I wish you’d me some of my shiny.

Ed (26:12.022)
Yeah, yeah, the shiny ones. I used to love the foil ones, Yeah, the foil ones. I used love the foil ones. Cool.

Jo (26:18.318)
I mean, fanatics bought tops at the height of NFTs and I genuinely think that actually there was a big motivation because they thought, I mean, sports NFTs were going to be the big thing. Of course, that’s kind of gone away now, out of the flames of that particular dumpster fire, collecting and memorabilia is still really lucrative.

Ed (26:25.483)
Yeah.

Ed (26:31.595)
Yeah.

Jo (26:44.59)
particularly amongst grownups. yeah, good, sad for Panini, lot of history there, but I can only see fanatics taking it to the next level when the deal kicks in.

Ed (26:56.79)
Absolutely.

Jo (26:58.286)
So there we are. This has been the Attention Shift. Thank you for joining us for this week’s episode. Don’t forget to like and subscribe if you want to feature as a guest or give us a question, drop us an email too. So we’re on hello at attentionshift.media. Have a good week.

Ed (27:13.494)
Bye.