Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. (Want to get MoneyCall conveniently delivered to your email every Wednesday morning? Easy sign-up here.)
Name-dropped today: Caitlin Clark, Greg Sankey, Newcastle, Hailey Salvian, Justin Connolly, Tom Brady, Anne Hathaway, Shohei Ohtani, Lamine Yamal, Karlie Kloss, Jack Ma, Angie Long, Hailey Salvian and more. Let’s go:
Driving the Conversation
A window to quantify Caitlin Clark’s impact
If you were going to design an ideal experiment to measure the Caitlin Clark Effect — Clark’s individual impact on things like TV audience and ticket sales — you would:
Tonight, the Fever (now without Clark) play the Mystics in Baltimore, a game moved from Washington’s usual home arena (capacity: 4,200) to CFG Bank Arena (capacity: ~12,000).
The lowest get-in price has plummeted from the mid-$40s, per FOS/TickPick, to less than $20 this morning on StubHub. (Disclosure: StubHub is The Athletic’s ticketing partner.)
The bigger question comes at the tail end of Clark’s projected two-week injury break: Fever at Sky in Chicago on Saturday, June 7, a major event moved from the Sky’s usual Wintrust Arena (capacity: 10,400) to the Bulls’ United Center (capacity: 21,000). The game had been shifted to…
