Sports Business Journal

About Sports Business Journal

Sports Business Journal is the leading American trade publication covering the business of sports. Launched in April 1998 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, it is a national weekly magazine — the flagship publication of the Street & Smith's Sports Group — that reports on the money, deals, and power structures behind professional and collegiate athletics. Owned by American City Business Journals (ACBJ), the Charlotte-based publisher of dozens of regional business weeklies, Sports Business Journal has become required reading for team owners, league executives, sponsors, media companies, and the agencies and service providers that make up the sports industry. Its companion daily product, SportsBusiness Daily, delivers a morning briefing of the industry's top stories.

The Launch: Defining a New Category

Sports Business Journal was the brainchild of Whitney Shaw, the president and later CEO of American City Business Journals. In the fall of 1997, Shaw and his father, ACBJ chairman Ray Shaw, recruited veteran newsman John Genzale — then publisher of the Jacksonville Business Journal — to lead the new venture. Genzale later recalled that September 12, 1997, the day he accepted the assignment in Charlotte, was really the first day of SportsBusiness Journal. The concept was audacious: a national weekly magazine covering not sports themselves but the business around them — franchise valuations, sponsorship deals, media rights, stadium finance, labor relations, and marketing. As Genzale put it, the staff had to keep reminding themselves: "We're not doing sports. We don't care whether the Giants won last night. We have to think business."

Assembling the team was the first great challenge. Genzale deliberately avoided hiring career sports writers, reasoning that the publication needed journalists who thought like business reporters and could learn the sports industry from the inside. The team drew talent from ACBJ's existing business journals and from hundreds of applicants nationwide. In January 1998 the company announced its plans, and that April the inaugural issue of Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal came off the presses. An anniversary retrospective one year later noted that skeptics had insisted it would be impossible to break news on a weekly basis in so fragmented an industry — and that the Journal had proved them wrong, establishing itself within twelve months as what its publisher called the defining and unifying voice of the sports industry.

Ownership and the Street & Smith's Sports Group

Sports Business Journal is published by American City Business Journals, the Charlotte-based business publishing company founded by Ray Shaw that also publishes the SportsBusiness Daily briefing and, through the Street & Smith's Sports Group, a family of sports business products. ACBJ itself is a unit of Advance Publications, the privately held media conglomerate. The Street & Smith's name — borrowed from the historic sports publishing brand — signals the group's identity as the sports arm of the ACBJ empire. In 2002 the Shaws acquired The Daily, an existing sports business daily briefing founded four years earlier in Connecticut, and relocated its operations to Charlotte, linking the daily product with the weekly magazine's original reporting. The combination gave the group both a daily aggregation-and-briefing service and a weekly magazine built on enterprise journalism.

Editorial Coverage

Sports Business Journal's reporting spans every commercial segment of the sports industry. Its journalists cover team and franchise transactions — sales, valuations, and ownership changes across the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, and college athletics; media rights negotiations, from billion-dollar national television deals to streaming and regional sports network upheavals; sponsorship and naming-rights agreements; stadium and arena development and financing; sports betting and fantasy gaming; athlete marketing and agencies; and the business of women's sports, esports, and emerging properties. The magazine is known for breaking news on coaching and executive contracts, league office politics, and the financial projections behind expansion franchises. Its annual features — including lists of the most influential people in sports business and deep data dives on franchise economics — are widely cited across the sports media landscape.

SportsBusiness Daily

The group's daily product, SportsBusiness Daily, functions as the industry's morning newspaper. Published each weekday, it aggregates the top sports business stories from around the world with original reporting and analysis, delivering a briefing that executives read before the business day begins. The Daily's model — a concise, comprehensive scan of the industry's news — complements the weekly magazine's longer enterprise pieces. Together the two products give subscribers both the day's essential developments and the week's deeper context, a combination that has made the group's journalism the default information diet for sports business professionals.

Conferences and Events

Like other leading B2B publishers, Sports Business Journal has built a substantial events business. Its calendar includes the IMG World Congress of Sports, a gathering of the industry's top executives; the Sports Business Awards, which honor excellence across categories such as sports executive of the year, athletic director of the year, and best in sports media; the Game Changers conference celebrating women in sports business; and the New Voices Under 30 program recognizing rising talent. These events generate sponsorship and attendance revenue while reinforcing the brand's position at the center of the industry's professional community. The conferences also produce news, as executives frequently use the group's stages to announce deals and initiatives.

Awards and Recognition Programs

The Sports Business Awards are among the most coveted honors in the industry. Categories recognize the sports team of the year, the sports league of the year, breakthrough sports properties, facility and venue achievements, and individual honors for executives, dealmakers, and marketers. Winning — or even being nominated — carries significant prestige because the judging reflects the judgment of the industry's own trade press. The group's editorial awards also include the annual list of the most influential executives in sports business and the Forty Under 40-style recognition of emerging leaders through New Voices Under 30, programs that shape reputations and careers across the industry.

Audience and Influence

Sports Business Journal describes itself as a must-read for top executives in every segment of sports business — properties, sponsors, media, facilities, finance, and professional services — and its subscriber base reflects that claim. Team owners and presidents, league commissioners' offices, network sports divisions, major sponsors, and investment firms active in sports all count among its readers. The publication's reporting routinely drives the broader sports news cycle: a Journal scoop on a franchise sale price, a media rights figure, or a commissioner's contract becomes the story of the day on ESPN, in national newspapers, and across sports talk programming. In an industry where money increasingly drives every decision, the Journal's business-first lens has become the essential complement to the game coverage of mainstream sports media.

Business Model

Sports Business Journal operates on the classic B2B publishing model, adapted for a premium niche audience. Its high-priced subscriptions — sold primarily to companies and professionals rather than individual consumers — form the core of the business, supplemented by advertising from sponsors, agencies, venues, and service providers seeking to reach sports decision-makers, and by the growing events division. The controlled, executive-level audience allows the publication to command premium rates across all three revenue streams, a model that has sustained quality trade journalism even as consumer sports media has faced economic pressure.

Visit Sports Business Journal Online

Sports industry professionals can read the latest reporting, subscribe to the weekly magazine and the daily briefing, and find information about conferences and awards at the official website, sportsbusinessjournal.com. The site offers breaking sports business news, archives of the magazine's enterprise reporting, and registration details for the group's events throughout the year.