Money is moving into emerging sports markets faster than the legal work that should precede it, and the gap between those two speeds is where deals quietly fall apart. A media company buys rights it does not fully own. A brand launches under a name that means something unfortunate in the local language. A data partnership turns out to be funded by a firm barred from operating in the very territory the deal was built around. Peter Steckelman, a senior legal executive in the sports and entertainment media world, argues that such failures are rarely legal surprises. They are diligence failures dressed up as bad luck, and the discipline that prevents them starts long before anyone drafts a term sheet.
Know Your Why Before You Know Your Market
Steckelman’s first question for any company eyeing a new territory is not about the territory at all. It is about the company. “Understand what your business is and where you fit in that sports markets ecosystem,” he says. “Are you a data provider? Are you an equipment seller? Are you a ticketing agent?” Each of those identities triggers a different regulatory profile, and the rules attached to them vary by country. What a firm does reflexively in the United States may be heavily supervised elsewhere. “Your business DNA will dictate some of those legal considerations that you have to figure out,” he says, which is another way of saying that market selection should follow self-knowledge, not the other way around.
Then come the cross-border mechanics that get skipped in the excitement of a new opportunity. Does the business need to employ someone locally, and if so, what corporate structure does that require? Steckelman singles out the question most expansion plans treat as an afterthought: “How do you get your money out of the territory?” Currency controls, financial regulation, and local reporting obligations can reshape the economics of an otherwise attractive market. These are not footnotes to a strategy. They are inputs that determine which market a company should enter first.
Intellectual Property Does Not Travel Unchanged
Brand equity is not portable by default, and Steckelman treats that as a first-order planning problem rather than a trademark filing detail. A name with value in one market may carry no weight in another, or worse, may carry the wrong weight once translated. “Culturally, does the brand that I have and how it’s identified have a different meaning when translated into that market’s language? Or does it carry a sense of cultural propriety or impropriety that has nothing to do with your business?” He offers a case from one of his own media companies. A children’s programming slate built around characters with playful, invented English names cleared trademark searches everywhere except in one English-speaking territory, where the same terms were associated with a line of adult toys. The company renamed half a dozen animated characters rather than risk market confusion, a decision that mattered enormously because the characters were headed for playsets and action figures.
The second half of the intellectual property (IP) question is positional. Steckelman asks whether a company is the licensee taking content in or the licensor that owns the underlying rights, because the answer determines how much exposure it carries. The same logic applies to patents, particularly in data. A patented method of aggregating information may be both valuable and enforceable in one jurisdiction and neither in another. Companies can choose to move first and sort out protection afterward, and sometimes that works. Sometimes it does not. “Sometimes you’ll get halfway through a business strategy and someone will raise their hand and say, wait a second, that’s my patent, that’s my trademark, I made the same piece of content in my foreign language, I already have brand identity here.”
The Governing Body Holds Rights You Think You Own
The structural exposure in emerging sports markets sits in the sport’s own governance. Most sports are administered by governing bodies that vary country by country, and those bodies frequently control rights that a commercial partner assumes come bundled with an event deal. Steckelman points to match footage as the clearest example: a media company may acquire certain rights from an event organizer while a governing body retains others, leaving a blended set of permissions that has to be assembled execution by execution. A pan-territory marketing campaign or a sports channel build can collapse on exactly this point. The rights holder in one market is not the rights holder in the next.
Local partners are not always a safeguard here, because an emerging market is often as new to them as it is to the entrant. Steckelman’s answer is to surface the regulatory picture jointly and early, using the partner’s local expertise to confirm and navigate what the incoming company has already researched. That upfront work, he argues, makes the commercial negotiation smoother rather than slower, because both sides are pricing the same reality. It also leaves room to adapt. A plan that runs A, B, C on paper may end up running A, B, B1, C2, and then an opportunity D that nobody anticipated, structured as an exclusivity in one country and something different in another. Governing bodies change. So do market conditions. Year one arrangements should be examined again in year two, with flexibility built in from the start, so that both parties keep earning as the ground shifts beneath the deal.
Follow Peter Steckelman on LinkedIn for more insights on sports media rights, IP strategy, and cross-border commercial law.
