Ben Horney
Ben Horney focuses on the money, deals, and legal pressures that determine who owns teams, how capital moves into sports, and what that means for leagues, brands, and bettors.
Asset Class and the Mechanics of Sports Finance
Ben is the deals reporter at Front Office Sports, covering finance, private equity, and ownership across the sports industry. He leads Asset Class, a dedicated franchise and newsletter that tracks sports finance, investment, and transaction activity at every level of the market. His reporting within Asset Class follows major transactions such as team stake sales, league expansion fees, and changes to private equity ownership limits in leagues like MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL.
Stories on topics like the NFL declining to relax its private equity rules, MLB raising its private equity ownership cap to 20%, and a soaring NHL expansion fee show him zeroing in on governance decisions and the price of league entry rather than on-field results. When he covers deals such as the Dolphins owner nearing the sale of a 20% stake in the Miami F1 race or investors questioning Isiah Thomas’s new role with the Knicks, he brings together valuation, investor sentiment, and league politics in one frame.
Ben also extends this focus to live events and on-camera work, using Asset Class programming and appearances to explain why franchise values are rising and how new money is reshaping ownership structures.
Legal and Regulatory Battles in Sports
Legal conflict is a central strand in Ben’s coverage, and he consistently treats lawsuits and investigations as business stories with direct financial stakes. His work includes reporting on an Ohio court’s reversal of grandfathered NCAA athlete eligibility, highlighting how litigation can reset the economic landscape for college sports. In pieces on figures like Steve Ballmer dropping a lawyer who criticized an NBA probe as a “witch hunt,” or on federal scrutiny in the Kawhi Leonard saga, he connects reputational risk, league discipline, and broader governance issues. He tracks high-value litigation, including New York’s multibillion-dollar suit targeting Polymarket and a class action against Dodgers owner Mark Walter’s insurance empire, emphasizing how regulatory action and civil claims can threaten or reshape fortunes built around sports. His reporting on Underdog’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander promotion and the company’s decision to stand by the campaign despite a cease-and-desist order fits the same pattern, treating promotional disputes as part of the legal and compliance environment that operators must navigate.
Sports Betting, Prediction Markets, and Emerging Platforms
Ben’s beat includes sustained coverage of sports betting and prediction markets, with an emphasis on the capital raising and regulatory scrutiny around these businesses. He has followed funding rounds for firms like Novig, detailing plans to dramatically increase valuations and what that implies for competition in the sports wagering space.
His pieces on the federal government preparing a crackdown on “risk-free” and similar prediction-market promos show him focusing on the regulatory language around incentives and the potential impact on growth strategies.
Coverage of the firms that power prediction-market trades and their role in “bridging demand across time and space” underlines his interest in the plumbing of these markets, not just their consumer-facing products. In interviews and stories featuring owners and executives, such as Ryan Smith’s call for moderation in betting’s influence on sports, he captures how stakeholders are weighing fan engagement, integrity concerns, and long-term brand health. Across this work, Ben treats betting and prediction platforms as financial and legal entities first, explaining how capital, compliance, and technology intersect.
Brands, Retail, and the Consumer Side of Sports Business
Beyond teams and leagues, Ben regularly reports on the performance and strategy of major sportswear and lifestyle brands, situating them within the broader sports economy. His stories on Nike’s repeated strategy revamps and revenue downturns focus on turnaround timelines, workforce plans, and analyst skepticism, reflecting a classic business-reporting approach applied to a sports-adjacent company. He examines market-signaling events like Nike’s removal from the S&P 100, spelling out why investors view the move as “embarrassing” and what it suggests about the brand’s current trajectory. In work such as his feature on how the baseball cap became a “behemoth,” he connects product history, cultural adoption, and sales performance to explain why certain sports-adjacent items become staples well beyond stadiums.
This retail and brand coverage complements his deals reporting by showing how corporate strategies, investor expectations, and consumer demand feed back into the financial health of the sports ecosystem.
Before joining Front Office Sports, Ben spent more than a decade at a legal and business publication covering sports betting, mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, and private equity, experience that informs the depth of his current reporting on transactions and regulation.
He has also written for major digital sports outlets, giving him grounding in both sports culture and the business side that now defines his beat. Across platforms, his work stands out for treating sports primarily as an industry structured by deals, law, and capital flows, and for explaining those dynamics in direct, accessible prose.
4 more sports journalists.
Adair Reid
Adair Reid is a sports columnist for The Cavalier Daily who covers Virginia men’s programs with a blunt, fan-aware voice that treats them as long-term projects rather than one-off games. He focuses on trajectory, legacy and risk, using opinion columns to question coaching decisions and program strategy while grounding his arguments in recent results, records, tournament performance and roster realities. Men’s lacrosse is a recurring subject, and his work on the program’s coaching change shows how he uses a single decision to examine overall health, standards and competitive standing. He frames games in terms of stakes, identity and institutional expectations, emphasizing postseason implications, recruiting, national perception and alignment with a championship standard. He writes mostly in the first person only when needed, keeps the spotlight on institutional choices and brings analysis-first, evidence-based judgment to Virginia’s flagship men’s teams.
Adam Stern
Adam Stern covers the business of motorsports and combat sports at Sports Business Journal, focusing on how sponsorships, media deals and new events reshape racing and fighting. His beat includes NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1, NHRA, rallycross, UFC and boxing. He tracks brands, broadcasters, manufacturers, promoters and streaming platforms, with reporting on sponsorship strategy, rights deals, original content, series growth, team projects and technical regulations. He examines how Cadillac’s Formula 1 entry supports broader marketing aims, how F1 Academy builds commercial momentum and whether new MMA promotions can challenge UFC. His work includes short speed reads on deals and longer features on multi-party investments. He reports on the money and strategy behind the action, treating motorsports and combat sports as connected marketplaces shaped by branding, dealmaking and media innovation.
Albert Burneko
Albert Burneko writes about how systems of power bear down on ordinary people, using sports, politics, technology, food, and domestic life as entry points. He is an assignment editor and writer at Defector and part of its founding ownership group. His politics and capital reporting examines how policy, policing, and public rhetoric turn into harm for specific people, centering victims and vulnerable people. He also covers artificial intelligence, media criticism, and technology’s effects, asking who benefits and who absorbs the costs. His domestic writing focuses on parenting, bodily discomfort, and everyday frustration. His recurring Chefector column turns cooking failures into comic studies of impatience, ego, and routine. He writes sharp reported essays, first-person dispatches, mock explainers, and sports-adjacent guides. His work combines moral seriousness, comic voice, close attention to ordinary life, and a focus on how people live under larger systems.
Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha is a sports investigative reporter who uses games to examine how power, money and culture shape players, workers, fans and communities. He works in The Washington Post sports section, covering global tournaments, migration, fan culture, sports betting, match-fixing, ownership, NIL money, football safety, participation gaps and the changing culture of women’s basketball. His reporting connects events on the field to decisions in boardrooms, betting markets, government offices and law enforcement. He previously reported for BuzzFeed News and wrote for the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly and the Riverfront Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He writes long, deeply reported stories that combine narrative scenes, data analysis, public records, medical records and other documents.