Tariffs Come for Your Jerseys, Gym Clothes, and Sports Team
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don’t forget to take your absolutely enormous bunny to a baseball game this season.
Apologies if you were looking for a safe space from worrying about tariffs and the stock markets, but that’s our lead story today—fans (or haters) of the A’s, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, Manchester United, and New York Knicks will be especially interested. We’ll also talk about hockey’s GOATS, Formula 1 regulations, and a kids baseball video game.
But first, a final update on the Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest. Many congratulations to the Florida Gators and Connecticut Huskies on their titles. In the men’s bracket pool, none other than John Stossel beat out the competition. Between 19 Emmy Awards, five awards from the National Press Club, and a Reason Friends and Family Bracket Contest championship, Stossel has accumulated quite the trophy cabinet. On the women’s side, Jimmy Kline won by continuing his aforementioned miracle run, missing just one team in the Elite Eight and predicting the tournament perfectly from then on.
Thank you to everyone who joined! We’ll be in touch with the winners by email.
Locker Room Links
- Ken Pomeroy says “NIL and the transfer portal has made college hoops better than ever.”
- Duke’s Khaman Maluach might be a top NBA draft pick—or he might get deported.
- Baltimore sues DraftKings and FanDuel for allegedly exploiting gamblers.
- Diana Taurasi will get the docuseries treatment from Amazon Prime Video.
- Like most businesses, Steph Curry’s Thirty Ink can’t figure out how to build in San Francisco.
- Rob Manfred interviewed about the future of baseball.
- Elsewhere in Reason: The new prohibitionists hijacking federal alcohol guidelines
- A Lamar Jackson legal filing caused Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s racing team to stop using a certain style of the number eight:
— Dale Earnhardt Jr. (@DaleJr) April 4, 2025
Tariffs Tank Sports
The sports world isn’t the most important victim of President Donald Trump’s trade war, but there’s a sports angle to everything, and this is a sports newsletter, so here we go. (For my colleagues’ excellent nonsports coverage of the tariffs’ harm, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
The clearest victim in the sports world are sporting goods companies: Nike, Adidas, and Puma stocks are all down 10-plus percent in the last five days of stock market trading, as of Monday’s close. The same is true of Amer Sports—headquartered in Finland but owned by a Chinese conglomerate, they own some well-known brands like Wilson, Louisville Slugger, and Arc’teryx. Golf brands have been hit too, with similar losses for Acushnet Company (Titleist, FootJoy) and Topgolf Callaway Brands. Those are all worse than the 9.4 percent drop in the Dow Jones over the last five days.
“When times get bad, people are going to spend their money on groceries and health care first [before] entertainment,” Brendan Coffey, a sports finance reporter at Sportico, tells me.
Sports teams are fortunate that so much of their revenue comes from TV rights deals. Vivid Seats, the secondary marketplace for tickets, is down 14 percent in the last five trading days. StubHub has indefinitely postponed plans for its stock to go public. Stock in Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, is down 8.5 percent—and Live Nation’s parent company, Liberty Media, is down 6.4 percent (Liberty Media also owns Formula 1).
But how will this affect professional sports teams? The Dodgers may import a lot of talent, but they’re not paying tariffs on their Japanese payroll (hopefully Shohei Ohtani’s White House visit didn’t give Trump any ideas). Publicly traded teams like the Atlanta Braves have fared relatively better, but they’re still down 8.4 percent in the last five days. Madison Square Garden Sports, owners of the New York Knicks, are also down 8.4 percent (although chairman James Dolan’s other big venture, Sphere Entertainment, is down 17 percent). Even foreign soccer teams are taking a hit: Manchester United is down 4 percent.
Then there are the teams whose owner’s business empires stand to lose the most. A’s
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