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🚪 OutKicked. Clay Travis is leaving OutKick as the conservative sports site fully folds into Fox News Digital, five years after selling it to the company. He'll stay on as a Fox News contributor and keep hosting his weekly FS1 show, and says details on a new company are coming soon.

⏳ Still waiting. Two months after Page Six published the photos that set off the Dianna Russini-Mike Vrabel news cycle and ultimately led to Russini resigning from The Athletic, the New York Times investigation into her reporting is still "weeks" from finishing. Athletic editor Steven Ginsberg reportedly told staffers at a routine all-hands last week that there's "just a lot to go through," and said the findings will be shared when complete, along with any corrections that need to be made along the way.

📰 Lost in translation. A.J. Brown told NBC's Maria Taylor that he used to publicly criticize the Eagles to motivate his teammates, and outlets including the New York Post, Barstool, and former ESPNer Trey Wingo all reported that he was leaking stories to the media behind the scenes. He never said that. What Brown actually described was going on the record, in front of reporters, with his name attached, which is about as far from anonymous leaking as you can get. The distinction got lost somewhere between the original interview and the aggregation machine, and now plenty of people believe something that didn't happen.

💸 FanDuel cuts. FanDuel laid off several hundred employees amid broader shifts in the sports betting industry, with one source telling Awful Announcing the company is "losing good employees who can truly help their future." FanDuel's parent company, Flutter, has been under pressure as the U.S. sports betting market matures and customer acquisition costs stay stubbornly high.

🥊 Dana's math. Dana White is predicting "Super Bowl-type numbers" for UFC Freedom 250, which will stream exclusively on Paramount+ this weekend despite early reports that it would air on CBS. The event is happening the same weekend the World Cup kicks off, which seems like a tough spot for any combat sports card to be competing against, let alone one asking fans to find it on a streaming service.

⚖️ Ticket revived. The NFL Sunday Ticket antitrust lawsuit has been revived on appeal, keeping alive the possibility that the league faces another massive damages verdict after the original $4.7 billion judgment was thrown out last year. Puck legal analyst Eriq Gardner told Puck sports correspondent John Ourand the appeals court's decision to send the case back puts the NFL in a position where it will likely have to relitigate damages, which is not a conversation the league wants to be having while it's simultaneously trying to negotiate new media deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Whenever the World Cup rolls around, the conversation in American sports media inevitably turns to what the tournament will mean for soccer's long-term future in this country. Will this be the moment the sport finally breaks through? Will the casual fans who tune in for a few weeks become permanent converts? It's a version of the same debate we've had for decades, and it tends to feel more legitimate every four years, because the numbers genuinely keep getting better.

This year, the conversation feels different for obvious reasons. The tournament is being played here, in NFL stadiums, in the middle of summer, when there's essentially nothing else going on. Fox is airing 70 matches on broadcast television and streaming many more free on Tubi. Telemundo, which reported record advertiser demand, is delivering more than 700 hours of coverage across all 104 games. The 2022 World Cup final between Argentina and France drew 25.8 million combined English and Spanish viewers despite being played in Qatar in December, directly competing with the NFL. Doing those numbers in the U.S. in June, with marquee matchups in prime time, seems like a low bar to clear.

All of which raises a question that doesn't have a comfortable answer: if tens of millions of Americans fall in love with soccer over the next five weeks, where do they go to watch more of it once the tournament ends? Because the most logical answer — MLS, the domestic professional league specifically designed and marketed as the long-term home of American soccer — is on Apple TV, which, per Nielsen's The Gauge data, gets about as much total viewing time as AMC+. It's not where casual sports fans go on a Saturday afternoon. It's not where a newly converted World Cup viewer is going to stumble across an Inter Miami or LAFC game.

This was always going to be the awkward part of MLS's Apple deal, which the league signed in 2022 for 10 years and $2.5 billion, giving Apple exclusive global rights to every match. The pitch at the time was that this was a visionary leap into the future of sports media, and that the World Cup would supercharge interest in the league right as it was becoming more accessible than ever on a global platform. What actually happened is that MLS spent its first three years under Apple charging fans $99 a year for MLS Season Pass, limiting its linear TV presence to just 34 matches on Fox and FS1, and watching the viewership data come back consistently underwhelming, all while Lionel Messi was being Lionel Messi. Not a single other major American sports league has followed MLS's lead and moved all of its games to a single streaming platform since the deal was announced. As has been previously noted, MLS served less as a trendsetter and more as a cautionary tale.

Don Garber has now more or less said as much publicly, telling Andrew Marchand that the league was "way early" on the streaming-exclusive model. That admission came alongside a renegotiated deal last fall that scrapped the Season Pass and shortened the agreement from 10 years to seven, expiring after 2029 instead of 2032. Games are now free for any Apple TV subscriber, which is a genuine improvement, and opening weekend this season saw a 59% year-over-year increase in viewership. But as Landon Donovan pointed out in an appearance last week, removing the paywall only helps people who are already inside the Apple ecosystem, but does nothing for the much larger group of Americans who don't subscribe to Apple TV and aren't going to go find it because they watched a great USMNT game on Fox.

"I don't think MLS is mature enough yet to go away from the NBCs and the Foxes and ABCs and the linear television," Donovan said. "I think we still need that exposure. Even the NFL still does it — they're smart enough to know they need the big media engines to help keep promoting their sport."

The frustrating part is that the infrastructure problems aren't new information to anyone inside the league. In an anonymous survey of MLS executives conducted by The Athletic last year, one GM said the league needed to "end the deal with Apple" because it was "bad for fans." Another GM said, "The reason why people don't watch now is as simple as you can watch anything all over the world. If you want basketball, no offense to MLS, but are you going to turn on the Serbian league? You're not. You're going to watch the best product."

When the Premier League is on NBC, Liga MX is on Univision, and Champions League is on CBS, MLS asking people to seek out a separate streaming app was always going to be a difficult sell. Doing it during the three years leading up to the biggest soccer event in American history only made it worse.

None of this means MLS is in trouble, exactly. The Apple deal ends in 2029, which gives the league another shot at the market under much better circumstances than the first time around. The league is also transitioning to a European-style summer-to-spring calendar, which should make its playoff schedule more competitive with other leagues and stop forcing MLS Cup to compete with NFL Sunday. And the World Cup will almost certainly drive genuine interest in the sport, benefiting everyone who broadcasts soccer in this country, including Apple.

But the specific question — whether the momentum from this summer can actually translate into durable MLS growth — is harder to answer optimistically when the league's games are on a platform that most of the people watching the World Cup right now don't use and aren't going to start using because of a tournament on Fox. The mechanism for converting World Cup enthusiasm into MLS viewership basically doesn't exist in 2026, and that's going to be a lot more obvious over the next five weeks than it's been at any point in the last four years.

ESPN's NBA Finals coverage has been miles better than last year, though having Wemby and the Knicks certainly doesn't hurt. Sam Neumann and Brendon Kleen break down the series so far from a broadcast perspective, then discuss Clay Travis leaving OutKick with plans to launch a new company.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify

"There was a Harry Caray-like effect he had on the listenership. We ain't had a lot to cheer about the last five, six years. I turned on to watch Stacey." — ESPN's Michael Wilbon on First Take, remembering Bulls broadcaster Stacey King, who died unexpectedly this week at 59. King won three championships alongside Michael Jordan as a player before spending nearly two decades as one of the most beloved local voices in basketball.

"If it causes the New York Knicks to lose tonight, I'm blaming him. I'm blaming the president of the United States! And damnit, I hope the GOP loses votes because of it if we lose tonight!" — Stephen A. Smith on First Take, responding to news that President Trump would be attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden.

"They put people out there who obviously don't know if it's blown up or has feathers. You gotta do better." — Mike Francesa on his podcast, going after local New York news stations for deploying reporters who couldn't name two Knicks to cover the NBA Finals. Francesa said he watched one network botch the final score and halftime score of Game 1 while rolling highlights. His larger point — that local stations are stretching their sports coverage thin as newsrooms shrink — is fair, even if nobody delivers it quite like Francesa.

"We understand how lucky we are to be in there to do this. This isn't us being a**holes here. We are trying to be an asset to society." — Pat McAfee, getting ahead of the inevitable criticism before ESPN's All Access with The Pat McAfee Show altcast of Game 3 at MSG. McAfee has done these for college football and the NFL, but this is his first crack at the NBA Finals, and the preemptive humility is a well-worn bit at this point.

The World Cup kicks off Thursday, and we still don't know who the USMNT's starting goalkeeper is. Taylor Twellman — who left ESPN when MLS left ESPN, and now watches Ian Darke call World Cup games without him while texting him good luck before kickoff — thinks that's the most baffling thing happening in American soccer right now. Awful Announcing spoke with him ahead of the tournament to discuss what a successful run actually looks like, what this World Cup can do for the sport's credibility in America, and why the goalkeeper situation leaves him more confused than anything else on the roster.

On what a successful tournament looks like:

"Quarterfinal. I've said that for a while now. If you win your group, you play a third-place team. Home-field advantage, I think you could sense it a little bit in the Senegal game. I just think it's got to be quarterfinal."

On still not knowing the starting goalkeeper less than two weeks out:

"It's the first time since 1990 that we are less than 12 days from a World Cup, and we don't know who our number one goalkeeper is. That's as baffling as it comes."

Read the full Q&A here.