Hillary Mandel has been a senior member – for over 25 years – of the North American leadership team at heavyweight sports agency IMG.
She is currently an executive vice president and head of media for the Americas, with responsibility for driving overall growth, media partnerships, and advisory in that region.
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Overall, Mandel has been at IMG since 1999, taking charge of the North America region in 2008 and then having her role expanded on various occasions since (most recently in 2020). She originally began at IMG as vice-president of syndication and programming for then media arm TWI.
Over the last few years, she has been at the fore of many of the most significant media rights deals across North America, including – most recently – the lucrative, long-term domestic media rights agreements secured by the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) through 2027.
In terms of the sports business industry sector in the US over the last few decades, she's seen it all.
As 2024 draws to a close, and with IMG in the process of being sold by Endeavor to the TKO Group (which Endeavor majority-owns, but which operates as a separate publicly-traded firm), she sits down with Sportcal (GlobalData Sport) to assess various issues that are currently dominating the sports business agenda in that region.
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By GlobalDataMandel starts by giving her thoughts on the overall state of the US sports media rights market, which she describes as very much a “tale of two cities.”
From the one standpoint, she explains, “there is definitely still a demand for premium rights, with tenders securing sizeable interest and being competitive, and from a results standpoint rights holders are seeing bid increases.”
However, on the other side of the equation, she adds, “middle to niche properties are being squeezed, and that’s really significant …
“There are properties who are accustomed to receiving investment and rights holder dollars up front, and I think that will change, which will put pressure on properties to get more creative and take more control of their own destiny.
“They will need to figure out either other ways to make up for that lost revenue, or how to invest in themselves in ways that will make them more attractive to the outside.
In terms of why this is happening, Mandel points to several factors, with the general economic downturn, and the cost-of-living squeeze being applied to consumers (across all sectors of entertainment and experiences) involved.
However, in addition to these, she believes that the direct-to-consumer (DTC) sector is changing rapidly, and is now able to be considerably more discerning when it comes to selecting which rights it bids for.
As she puts it, that market is “maturing a little bit, and in a mature market there’s more data – that means [the platforms] can make better decisions on buying products in terms of seeing what’s already working and what isn’t working.
"That’s a change from the scenario early in that industry’s development, in which platforms grabbed everything because they didn’t know what would work and what wouldn’t – that created a sellers market.
“So overall, the sector has changed its buying criteria and habits."
She cites Peacock, the service owned by NBCUniversal, as one that IMG has close ties with and as an example of a platform that now has a larger pool of data on users’ viewing habits and trends with which to make decisions around which set of rights to go for next.
In terms of how rights-holders should look at the relationship between their media partners and potentially their own in-house service, she describes the latter as “a must-have for any sports, it’s no different to building new physical infrastructure and stadia – this is your media infrastructure.”
Mandel’s belief is that “being able to have a direct relationship with fans and collect data from them is [the rights-holder’s] responsibility because their network partner isn’t going to do it …
“Your media partner essentially has 20 children – the notion that they can devote time to developing your fanbase individually is preposterous.
“Just because they’re benefiting you financially, they’re also doing the same with multiple other leagues in a cluttered marketplace.
One of the ways in which sports properties and rights-holders are branching out in terms of providing different kinds of content for the market, and providing more value to partners than just live games, is by producing behind-the-scenes docuseries in the style of Formula 1’s Drive To Survive (which has helped elevate that series in the US in particular.
Mandel agrees that these can be hugely beneficial tools for leagues and sports, and as she puts it: “What something like DTS (Drive to Survive) does is expose your property’s storytelling, in another format and in a way that’s very open.
“It provides the widest funnel, you don’t need to be a fan to enjoy a docuseries, so it’s a learning and education tool as well.
“It’s also on a different platform, usually, to where a property’s live rights are sitting … It’s better to split up your product and make packages for multiple networks, because that way you’re meeting the fans where they are instead of trying to bring them over to one specific space.”
If a sports property has the volume, then “cutting up your property, creating smart packaging, and bringing multiple packages to the table is the only way to navigate a very distracted marketplace where marketing has never been harder,” Mandel explains.
Back on the subject of docuseries, she adds, returning to the idea that they are only worth doing if they fulfil a specific purpose, that series’ such as DTS are “only one piece of the answer … it’s another form of cultivating fandom but everybody’s trying to replicate it now.”
One of the streaming services that has made sports docuseries an integral part of its offering is Netflix, which has proven reliably that the genre can be highly popular.
Series covering a wide range of properties and sports – soccer, athletics, tennis, American football, motor racing, rugby union, and golf, to name but a few – have all been commissioned across multiple series.
Mandel calls Netflix “the fifth network,” and states that “They’ve disrupted TV, they’ve become a force and a consumer habit.
“It makes sense for them to be in sport – of the 70 million people who watch them, some will be into sports. Everybody’s trying to keep as many eyeballs on their network as possible.
“Netflix’s subscriber network in the US is greater than all the cable networks out there right now. Netflix is inevitable, and it’s staying here – it’s got a huge audience and you can’t avoid the fact that a large chunk of that audience will appreciate live sport.”
Referring back to her description of some properties as must-have, Mandel now puts a range of top-tier women’s sports leagues into that category.
Commenting on the significant surge in popularity of women’s basketball in particular in the US, she says that previously, it had been “caught in a trap previously where they were relegated to smaller media partners, which then led to lesser ratings, so that was a chicken and egg scenario.
“But now, one great rating [referring to the huge viewing figures seen across both women’s college basketball and the WNBA earlier this year] and people realize there is plenty of oil in the well, and that one match starts the fire with women’s sport.”
She is also now seeing, as are many industry observers, that “a growing number of brands and broadcasters have realized there is a value attached to being associated with women’s sports.
“The audiences are improving, so the brands are thinking they’ll get involved – I do think networks sometimes still think they’ll get a gold star through investing in women’s sports, that phenomenon still exists.”
Mandel and IMG were behind last year’s major rights deals between the NWSL and a quarter of domestic broadcasters – ESPN, CBS, Amazon, and Scripps – which run through the 2027 season and entail a combined $240 million being paid over the four seasons. The previous NWSL domestic rights tie-up, with CBS, was only worth around $1.5 million annually and required the league to pay for its own game production.
The new deal, as another contrast, sees production costs covered by the quartet of domestic partners.
The four-year nature of the deals is likely to represent a desire to sell rights again directly following the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil, for which the US will be – as usual – one of the favorites.
“Will women’s sports, from this point forward, continue to be invested in, and find shelf space, and be programmed on the most accessible platforms – the answer is yes,” is how Mandel sums it up.
Another talking point for the US sports broadcasting industry over the last year or so has been Venu Sports, the joint venture streaming service that would have housed the collective sports rights of the Fox Corp, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), and Disney media giants.
That service was initially scheduled to launch in 2024, but that has now been pushed back to 2025 at the earliest (if it is not canceled altogether), after internet TV service FuboTV won an injunction against it in mid-August.
A judge from the New York Southern District Court upheld Fubo’s assertions that the joint venture – which would have housed over 50% of all US sports rights on one service – would have lessened competition, limited consumer choice, enabled price gouging, and impinged on the ability of Venu’s rivals to do business in a competitive fashion.
Mandel, offering her opinion on the service and its potential impact, first states that “it wouldn’t have changed the world either way, nothing is going to change in their respective businesses whether this move does or does not happen,” but adds that it equated to “a good experiment … The idea of three media companies bringing their products together petrifies people clearly.”
The Fubo suit accused the media giants of leveraging their “iron grip on sports content to extract billions of dollars in supra-competitive profits,” leading consumers to pay more for popular sports content.
However, Mandel suggests that the original intent was to “capture disconnected people, it was really targeting cord-cutters – I don’t think it was about collusion."
“It would have been interesting to find out how many disconnected fans there were who were protesting against paying for three separate services.
The IMG North America executive also believes that “while Fubo has stopped them for the moment, I think there’s an easy fix available, in simply making sure that all their respective offerings are also available on Fubo.”
In terms of the major sporting events taking place across North America in the next few years, the most prominent – up until 2028 and the Los Angeles Olympics – is most likely the men’s FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in 2026.
The first such World Cup in North America since 1994 is often mentioned as an event that is set to revolutionize the way a US audience interacts with soccer and one that will grow interest in that sport in the market as nothing has before.
With around 18 months to go until the tournament gets underway, Mandel first points out that the World Cup “is something that the US has marveled at from afar … It’s going to be gigantic by any form of measurement.
“Anybody who follows soccer knows the European fan culture is unmatched – the World Cup is a chance for soccer to come here and show that same energy.”
She also feels that the beneficiaries will ultimately be the NWSL and men’s Major League Soccer (MLS).
“They [those leagues] are setting themselves up to capitalize on the general massive growth in interest, and make sure that the World Cup coming here will directly impact the teams and the leagues.
“There was massive success from the soccer at the Paris Olympics [in terms of US viewers], that’s seeding the ground for the World Cup – this is a well-seasoned audience now.”
