It was roughly a year ago that the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” released the first episode of what would grow into a 17-part series examining alleged efforts by the Los Angeles Clippers to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap rules. Since then, the podcast team has won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Magazine Award and an Edward R. Murrow Award for its independent investigative reporting on the story.

On Sept. 2, 2026, the NBA released the findings of its own investigation into the scheme, concluding that the Clippers had helped star forward Kawhi Leonard secure endorsement deals with four companies that did business with the team — and had offered those companies business in return — in violation of the league’s salary cap rules. The cap — a league-set ceiling on the total player payroll each franchise may carry — is a mechanism designed to preserve competitive balance, and the punishment for circumventing it ranked among the largest in American sports history: the Clippers were fined US$30 million and stripped of five future first-round draft picks, while team owner Steve Ballmer received a one-year suspension.

Yet as “Pablo Torre Finds Out” began unwinding the Clippers’ efforts to circumvent the salary cap, legacy sports media outlets largely stood by and watched — when they did not dismiss the podcast’s work outright.

For Alex Volonte, a researcher who studies how sports is becoming increasingly intertwined with political and corporate power, the episode showcases the growing importance of independent journalism while also exposing the shortcomings of traditional sports media. The question he raises is blunt: is the sports media up to the task?

The ‘toy department’ gets serious

In the heyday of newspapers, the sports page helped sell subscriptions but was often disparaged as the “toy department,” since it featured less “hard” or serious reporting. Its bread and butter has long been game stories, injury reports, trade rumors and opinion columns. Sports radio perfected play-by-play commentary and talk shows built on debates with fans. Magazines ran in-depth profiles of individual players and long-form stories about epic playoff battles. Television centered on live game broadcasts, post highlights and weekly shows. Books went deeper still, from biographies of coaches and athletes to narratives of memorable seasons that detailed the construction of championship squads.

Over the years, these formats coexisted to create a relatively balanced media diet, and at times they produced noteworthy investigative stories: Boston College basketball’s point-shaving scandal in the 1980s; the pervasiveness of performance-enhancing drug use in MLB during the 1990s and 2000s; and what the NFL knew about long-term brain damage linked to repeated head injuries in the 2010s.

But because the intermingling of sports with politics and finance now runs so deep, holding power to account often requires investigations that transcend regular sports reporting. The Athletic’s Adam Crafton, for example, spent months digging through host-city contracts and public records to show how FIFA had shifted World Cup costs onto U.S. taxpayers.

Yet Crafton’s reporting for The Athletic remains an exception. Much of the watchdog journalism on the sports industry has to be carried out by outlets that are not sports-centric but already have investigative infrastructure in place. ProPublica, for instance, exposed the tax-evasion practices of wealthy sports team owners in 2021, and in April 2026 Wired revealed how Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, was secretly using facial recognition technology to identify people entering its venues and compile profiles of them.

The digital deluge

The changing media landscape of the digital age has created openings for podcasters like Torre, but it has also made it more difficult to distinguish journalistic rigor from public relations. Fans can now get their sports news from a motley crew of formats and personalities, ranging from social media personalities and podcasters to YouTube channels and streamers.

Meanwhile, the line between sports leagues and the media outlets that cover them has blurred. In January 2026, ESPN bought the NFL’s official TV network. Almost all major franchises now feature in-house media teams that run their own stories and social media accounts in competition with traditional outlets. John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, also happens to own the New England Sports Network and the Boston Globe, Boston’s primary newspaper of record. Athlete-owned media channels like PlayersTV might offer an interesting window into athletes’ lives and perspectives, but these formats will always have strong incentives to veer into self-promotion.

Vehicles for investment

The fragmentation of traditional sports media has occurred alongside the growing financialization of sports — the ways in which teams, leagues and athletes are increasingly seen as financial assets and vehicles for investment rather than cultural or sporting institutions.

Because U.S. professional sports leagues operate as tightly controlled, closed markets, they can determine who is allowed into team ownership and what size stakes they can hold. Private equity was only recently granted permission to invest in pro sports leagues, and even then, across the five major North American leagues, private equity firms’ involvement has been capped at a maximum of 30% noncontrolling ownership — stakes that give funds exposure to rising franchise valuations without control over team decisions.

That has not made investment any less attractive, as sports teams have tended to regularly outperform the stock market by several degrees of magnitude. Take the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers: in August 2026, Mark Walter sold the team for $12.5 billion, a record-breaking sum in the history of professional sports. The sale took place less than a year after he bought a controlling interest in the team at a then-record valuation of approximately $10 billion, meaning the team’s valuation had increased 25% in just nine months.

Going back further, Jerry Jones bought the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys for $150 million in 1989; as of September 2026, the franchise is worth $17 billion — an inflation-adjusted return of roughly 4,155%.

For these reasons, institutional investors such as RedBird Capital Partners and Arctos Partners have entered the sports market in recent years. On Aug. 11, 2026, MLB’s New York Yankees announced a $2.6 billion financing deal with Apollo Global Management that includes an eventual 16% stake in the team and values the Yankees at more than $12 billion.

Bloomberg reported on Apollo Global Management’s $2.6 billion deal with the New York Yankees — and what it means for future sports financing (watch the report).

Parking money in what’s popular

It is easy to see why investors are drawn to professional sports. Live sports remain one of the few areas of American life with genuine mass appeal that transcends politics, race and class, and virtually all of the top broadcasts and most-watched shows every year are sporting events.

Beyond a financial return, wealthy investors and entities see valuable teams and leagues as a way to purchase credibility in the eyes of the public through what is known as “sportswashing” — using the widespread popularity of sports to burnish their reputations.

But the new streams of capital have created opportunities for financial misconduct. The Miami-based investment firm 777 Partners built a portfolio of international soccer clubs as part of an ambitious expansion financed by its broader investment business. The firm unraveled in 2025 after prosecutors accused its founder and chief financial officer of concealing hundreds of millions of dollars in financial problems from lenders and investors — a case bolstered by the CFO’s guilty plea.

Meanwhile, the rise of sports betting, fantasy leagues and prediction markets — platforms where investors trade contracts pegged to real-world outcomes, game results among them — has further turned sports into a vehicle for financial speculation, and billions of taxpayer dollars continue to subsidize massive stadium projects despite limited economic benefits and weak public support.

Reforming the approach

Volonte believes the unlikely success of an independent reporter like Torre can serve as a teachable moment for sports journalism. In a forthcoming article for the International Journal of Sport Communication, he and sports media scholar Roxane Coche argue that sports journalists could embrace more of a watchdog, investigative role in their coverage.

They suggest that sports journalists could receive basic economics training, putting them in a better position to report on financial schemes, analyze U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings — the public documents that lay out how companies and major investors handle their money — or understand cryptocurrencies. Basic watchdog journalism methods could also be integrated into everyday reporting: surveying public records, mining documents and fact-checking statements.

Sports has never simply been about which team wins and which team loses on a given day. But it is becoming impossible to ignore the ways in which politics, finance, fanbases and athletes are increasingly reshaping the sports landscape. In just the past 12 months, Josh Kushner — whose brother is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump — bought a stake in the Los Angeles Lakers; NBA and MLB players have been caught up in gambling investigations; and FIFA has explored selling a stake in its commercial rights to private investors. Each of these developments turns on financial structures — ownership stakes, gambling inquiries, commercial-rights sales — the kind of money flows Volonte says reporters should be trained to trace.

These, Volonte argues, are all sports stories that warrant closer scrutiny.

Alex Volonte is a Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant in Journalism Studies at the University of Florida This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license and was originally featured on Fortune.com. Read the original article or the Fortune version.