A few weeks ago a clip went viral of a strange new contact sport emerging from the antipodes. Two burly men, one of them holding a football, sprint at each other on a kind of catwalk, waiting for the bloop-bloop-bloop of an electronic countdown before they launch into their runs. Neither wears any kind of padding or protective gear. Surrounded by baying spectators, the men collide in the middle of the track, making impact through shoulders, knees, hips, stomachs: in most instances, one of the runners is knocked flat on his back or face from the force of the collision, and the other stands tall in triumph. “We are literally getting dumber as a civilization,” noted one of the many comments on the clip on X.
Run Nation Championship, as this new sport is known, launched in Australia last year, and is now holding combines ahead of RNC03, its third instalment. Many of the competing athletes seem, from the early video evidence, as wide as they are tall; the risk of injury – to their limbs, to their heads, to their brains – is obvious. But this is all part of the pitch. Like all new mixed martial arts and contact sports, RNC owes an obvious debt to UFC in the way it’s named, structured, and promoted; like UFC and UFC boss Dana White’s newer sport, Power Slap, in which two opponents face each other across a table and slap the side of each other’s faces as hard as they can until one collapses, Run Nation is not so much a sport as an exploration of the frontier of sporting violence, a macabre social experiment to see how far athletes will push their bodies in the pursuit of victory and money.
RNC is clearly designed to market the thrill of watching men the size of fridges smash into each other at full pace. But what seems to outsiders like a barbaric modern update of the medieval joust – with no armor, shields, or lances to cotton the blows – is in fact a familiar sight to those who know the sport that Run Nation is derived from. To followers of rugby league, the strangest thing about this shocking display of violence is that it’s not that strange at all: Run Nation is a spin-off of the rugby league “hit-up”, the collision that results when a player with the ball in hand confronts a tackler. “We are taking the best moment in contact sports and engineering it for absolute madness,” a promotional video on Instagram enthuses. Whether absolute madness or absolute stupidity is the result here is a matter for debate, but Run Nation is not some zany Australian outlier in the world of athletic innovation; it’s the most extreme iteration of a strange new era of parasitic sports that first emerged in the US and is now rippling across the globe.
In this alliance of sport, money and violence, no risk is too great, no idea too ridiculous. On every continent a flood of professional investment capital and the rise of sport as a discrete asset class are creating a bonanza of new competitions, new formats, and new sports, all those professional padel and volleyball and bull riding leagues struggling for visibility in a cluttered, impatient culture. Familiarity and fandom are the foundational challenges for anyone trying to get a sport or league off the ground. The passion for padel cannot emerge out of nothing; for the casual sports watcher, it probably takes years for the spectacle of small men locked in a glass box playing uncocked badminton to raise a pulse.
By contrast the spin-off sports, which seek to squeeze extra cash out of existing moneymakers by turning the defining moments and gestures of already-popular sports into standalone events, are a much easier sell. These ventures seem poised to prosper in a crowded landscape, despite their novelty, because the fanbases are already in place. It also helps that the sports are easy to follow and maximize adrenaline, drama, and violence – qualities that are all enhanced by the bloodthirsty, carnivalesque atmospheres in which they’re held. There’s no real knowledge barrier to overcome when you watch two middle-aged men slap the earplugs, blood, and gray matter out of each other; if nothing else, the sport’s underlying concept is at least intuitive.
Power Slap evolved out of UFC, from which it also draws much of its fanbase, and many of its competitors come from the world of MMA. Carjitsu, a wincingly uncomfortable form of car-bound jiu jitsu (“No mats. No space. No mercy.”), is a way for jiu jitsu fighters to amplify their careers and deepen their knowledge of the modern midsized family sedan at the same time. TGL, the upstart indoor simulator golf league started by Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods, gives hardcore golf fans – and golfers themselves – something to do in the moments when the PGA and LIV tours are in recess. (TGL stands for “Tomorrow’s Golf League”, which sounds exciting and futuristic, but the better way to understand the league is this: if there’s no “real” golf on tomorrow, it may be a good day for TGL.) The competition distills golf’s draggy materiality – the walking, the long fairways, the weather, the wind – down to its essence: a series of booming drives off the tee and precision putts.
Like Run Nation, TGL is essentially a repackaged skills competition. The NBA once dominated this area – the slam dunk contest was an authentic star-making vehicle in the 1980s and 1990s – but has now run out of juice, if the comically weak offerings at this year’s event were any indication. This perhaps leaves the door open for others: in years to come, could we see standalone leagues for somersault touchdowns, base slides and hockey brawls? Could MLS unite with the top football leagues in Europe to spin off and monetize the spectacle of players surrounding the ref and shouting at him to overturn a red card?
The extractiveness of the new sporting landscape is so intense that sports that did not exist 10 years ago already have their own satellites and breakaways; the exploiters have now become the exploited. Pickleball cannibalized tennis’s existing infrastructure, carving up its courts; in the face of blowback from tennis fans and nimby residents concerned about the noise generated by pickleball’s thwacking bats, a new venture has emerged called “typti”. Typti, the brainchild of Tennis Channel founder Steve Bellamy, squats on existing pickleball courts but aims, in high Silicon Valley style, to solve pickleball’s problems and “pain points” (ie, the fact that most people hate it). The sport has tennis-style string rackets and a softer ball than pickleball’s perforated plastic puck, which makes for quieter matches that should – in theory – avoid the noise complaints that have dogged pickleball’s rollout. (Never mind that in typti’s launch video, the demonstration players compensated for the quiet by producing tennis-style effort grunts on virtually every shot.) In trying to “fix” tennis, the sporting innovators shrank tennis but made it louder; now they have tinkered with the recipe, keeping the dimensions of the first attempt but returning to rackets and decibel levels closer to tennis itself. Could the future of tennis be … tennis?
The dramas of pickleball offer, perhaps, a cautionary tale about how far these spin-offs can be pushed; an indoor golf league or a competition that turns the rugby league hit-up into a discrete spectacle may keep existing fans onside, but a venture that attempts the wholesale replacement of a cherished sport risks overreach. The benefits of a more targeted strategy are apparent in every million-eyeball clip of a carjitsu strangle or brain-pulping victory slap. Already TGL is delivering hole-in-one celebration scenes vaguely reminiscent of the Windows 95 launch, which suggests a strong future of growth and social media virality ahead.
Going viral is, of course, the ultimate goal in the new age of derivative sports. Doing numbers on social media is the first and easiest way to prove a market, which helps build what investors rather sweatily call the “IP flywheel” – the network of sponsorships, merchandising partnerships, and media deals that helps build a new sport’s revenue base and attract further investment. TGL is played in a futuristic, purpose-built arena in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, but SoFi Center, as it’s called, is dominated by its Imax-sized simulator screen and has room for only 1,500 spectators; this is a sport that is designed to be clipped up and repackaged for social media. Such is the emphasis on virality that it can feel existentially draining when these sports don’t produce the head-draining hits and near-death quits they’re built for. The super-heavyweight battle in Power Slap 6, for instance, promised “700-plus pounds of slaps” but ended in a disqualification, which prompted the commentator to lament: “When you get two gigantic men like that, everyone had their phones out, they were all expecting some viral knockout moment.” When the viral moment doesn’t materialize, what exactly is the point of the power slap, the hit-up, the dweeby simulator game of golf?
The point, very plainly, is to make money for the sports’ investors, and the hunger for a financial return is the real force behind this. Though Run Nation and Power Slap appear mostly self-funded, for now at least, typti and TGL both announced a dazzling array of celebrity investments and partnerships at their respective launches. Typti’s backers include former NFL star Drew Brees and motivational speaker Tony Robbins, while Stephen Curry, Lewis Hamilton, Serena Williams and Justin Timberlake have bought into TGL.
As these ventures grow, they’ll inevitably draw interest from institutional investors; indeed, they’re engineered for precisely this purpose, as vehicles for capital attraction. Already you can picture the private equity and venture capital scavengers prowling the perimeter at the Run Nation try-outs and TGL nights, eyeing up the fan demos, testing the metrics. With team valuations across the major US leagues booming and realized exits in the world of niche sports juicy (UFC, for instance, sold to Endeavor for $4bn in 2016), the appeal of sports as an asset class is no longer a secret. By one measure, sports franchise investments in the US have outperformed the S&P 500 by more than two-to-one since the year 2000. Professional money managers are now financializing sports as they did, to mostly calamitous effect, to the auto, housing and banking sectors in previous decades.
Does this boom reflect a real appetite for sporting innovation among the public, or the oversaturation of the marketplace with private equity firms desperate for quick money? There are more private equity funds than McDonald’s restaurants in the US today. This proliferation, plus an unfavorable interest rate environment and prolonged softness in the IPO market (not to mention, now, the prospect of a drawn-out war in the Middle East), have made it difficult for private funds to raise finance, offload investments and generate cash. Sports are especially attractive in this environment as an easy route to liquidity, and it’s no accident that the boom in sports investment has come at a time when moves to “retailize” the private equity industry – long closed to ordinary investors – have finally begun to take shape.
It’s not hard to see how these dynamics may distort the sporting landscape in years to come. Professional investment in sports and retail participation in private equity could create extraction upon extraction, raising the specter of perfectly self-exploiting fanbases. Picture the world a few years from now. The spin-off sports squeeze the source sports, the fans, and the athletes, whose bodies are little more than collateral damage on the road to virality, and are squeezed in turn by private equity investors looking for a quick exit. Fans are granted the privilege of access into PE funds as retail investors, which offers them the choice of profiting off their own predation (should PE investments in sports succeed) or losing money on busted private market bets (should the investments fail) and getting milked twice over.
Either way, fans shoulder the burden: it’s their money and attention that give the new sports early momentum, and it’s their money that allows the PE funds to skim off the biggest gains should these ventures find durable success. The real violence in Run Nation, Power Slap and the rest is not in the spectacle of grown men risking their brains and lives for our entertainment, but in the flywheel of private equity-led exploitation propelling this new age of sporting parasitism forward.
