Nearly a generation of uncertainty surrounding the Rays and their status in the Tampa Bay market is now definitively ending as the St. Petersburg, Fla., city council on Thursday approved the club’s proposed $1.3 billion stadium and mixed-use development.

By the same 5–3 margin as a preliminary vote last month, the council gave the green light to a new, domed Rays stadium near the club’s current and much-maligned facility, Tropicana Field. The Rays’ plan for the new ballpark calls for the club to pay $700 million plus cost overruns, with the public sector contributing the remaining $600 million. 

Most meaningfully, the stadium deal finally ends years of relocation rumors and talk centered on the team’s low attendance at Tropicana Field.

“It is my belief that we are in an incredibly unique moment in our city’s history that is unlikely to be replicated in any other way that will be meaningful to our community,” said city council member Brandi Gabbard, one of the “yes” votes.

The city council vote was to approve a dozen legally binding agreements overseeing the funding and construction of the stadium and surrounding development in St. Petersburg’s Historic Gas Plant District. The matter now moves to the Pinellas County Commission to approve $312.5 million in tourist tax dollars, but the vote in St. Petersburg represented the key hurdle in the process.

Keeping the Faith

Despite the long period of doubt surrounding the Rays’ situation, both the club and MLB remained stalwart advocates of the market. 

“We’ve made a number of missteps over the years. We dust ourselves off. We come back again,” said Rays owner Stu Sternberg. “Things change in life, things change around in markets, and they change around in baseball. But as we’ve always been clear: We wanted to be here, and we want to be here to stay.”

Among those missteps was a prior, widely criticized plan by the club to split its season with home games in St. Petersburg and Montreal, an effort the club ultimately abandoned. The Rays released updated renderings (above) late last month on the planned St. Petersburg stadium, and they hope to break ground early next year in advance of a projected 2028 facility opening.

With or without NBA rights, Warner Bros. Discovery likely needs some type of catalytic event to help prop up its sagging stock, and discussion is quickly rising around that very notion, both internally and externally. 

The Financial Times reported that the TNT Sports parent company is considering a split of its streaming and movie studio business from its linear TV networks to help lift its shares. That effort could take on multiple forms, including selling off certain assets or separating pieces of the company from WBD’s current debt load of $39 billion. 

That report closely follows another from Bank of America entitled “Is Unbundling the Answer?” in which a group of financial analysts there argue that major shifts are indeed required at WBD.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that the company, as it is currently constructed, is not working as a publicly traded entity, and transformative changes are likely required to unlock the considerable value embedded within those assets,” wrote the Bank of America analysts, led by Jessica Reif Ehrlich. 

Such discussion is happening in large part because WBD shares, despite rising nearly 2.4% on Thursday to $8.52 per share, remain down by 27% since the start of the year and by two-thirds since April 2022, soon after the current company was formed from WarnerMedia’s spin-off by AT&T and a merger with Discovery, Inc. By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up by 8% this year and by 17% since April ’22.

The WBD discussion also arrives as the NBA seeks to finalize an 11-year, $76 billion set of media rights with Disney, NBC Sports, and Amazon, a process that remains shrouded in uncertainty and hurt feelings. 

About Those NBA Rights …

WBD, meanwhile, is now formally on the clock to make its response to the league, and it has until the end of Monday to decide whether to use its matching rights. The network intends to exercise those rights, likely focusing on Amazon’s streaming deal. The agreement, worth an estimated $1.8 billion per year, is the league’s “C” package and includes a conference final every other year, early-round playoffs in line with what is currently on NBA TV, weekly regular-season broadcasts, the Emirates NBA Cup, and WNBA rights, among other assets.

A TNT Sports spokesperson confirmed to Front Office Sports receipt of the documents and said “they are receiving them and preparing a response in view of matching rights.”

But at this point, can WBD truly match Amazon’s offer? Should they? In November, when WBD CEO David Zaslav famously said, “We don’t need the NBA”—a comment he would later walk back—he was speaking in large part about a perceived need for fiscal discipline, particularly in the face of a weak advertising market. The company’s shares at that point traded around $11. 

Now, the entirety of WBD carries a market capitalization of about $21 billion. The Amazon deal, the smallest of the three NBA media-rights deals, is worth $19.8 billion. That proximity of the two figures raises new questions as to whether WBD truly has the financial wherewithal to stay in business with the NBA after the 2024–25 season, the last of the current pact. 

Even before a conclusion to the NBA rights process, TNT Sports has made numerous changes to its sports portfolio in recent months, and is increasingly leaning on sister property truTV. 

The final men’s golf major of the year is underway at Royal Troon Golf Club in Scotland. But before the Open Championship began Thursday, the outgoing CEO of the tournament’s governing body, the R&A, expressed concern about the sport’s financial sustainability.

This year, prize money at the four men’s majors totaled $77 million, marking the first time the collective sum surpassed $75 million.

• U.S. Open: $21.5 million
• The Masters: $20 million
• PGA Championship: $18.5 million
• The Open Championship: $17 million

The Open annually offers the smallest purse of the four, though. It is also lower than the $20 million offered at PGA Tour signature events, as well as the $25 million purses at the Players Championship and in LIV Golf tournaments.

“While we will always offer a very competitive prize fund for the Open, our wider focus is on increasing participation and improving pathways in golf,” said Martin Slumbers, who will be succeeded at the R&A by English rugby executive Mark Darbon later this year. “We have to make choices about how we allocate resources and make the resources we have go as far as they can.

“There has been a massive increase in prize money,” Slumbers added. “You can look at every sort of number of other sports and things, and you see this going in waves. Do I think it will continue? No, I don’t. I think that there is a natural balance that will be achieved.” Slumbers said it’s important for the R&A to “not lose sight of that overall pyramid and the importance of the bottom and the top and helping it all grow because without one or the other, it won’t.”

LIV Pathways

There are 17 LIV players competing at the Open—more than in any of the other three major fields this season. With LIV tournaments still not receiving world ranking points, tour members were forced to compete in the Open qualifying series, if not otherwise exempt. 

“Will that evolve in the coming years? I think that depends on how the game evolves,” Slumbers said. “But we will continue to want the best players in the world to be able to get into the Open in an appropriate way.”

Last summer, Slumbers wouldn’t rule out striking a financial deal with LIV’s backers at the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. But there haven’t been significant developments on that front, and Slumbers wasn’t asked about the PIF this week.