How Winning Franchises Retain Sports Executive Talent

How Sports Franchises Actually Retain Sports Executive Talent Against Platform Competition

The traditional retention playbook was built for a market that no longer exists. Here’s what actually works — and where most franchises still get it wrong.

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The president of a top-ten NBA franchise called me last month.

He’d read the earlier piece I wrote about the sports talent export problem, the one about how Amazon, Apple, Netflix, YouTube, and the sports tech companies are systematically extracting the strongest commercial executives out of professional sports. He didn’t dispute the diagnosis. He said what most franchise leaders eventually say when this pattern shows up in their own building.

“I know we’re losing people. What I don’t know is how to stop it.” That’s the harder question.

Naming the problem is straightforward, the numbers are visible, the departures are traceable, the recruiting pipelines from platforms to franchises are documented. Solving it is where most franchises get stuck. Because the retention playbook most sports organizations still run — the counteroffer, the title upgrade, the deferred equity conversation, was built for a talent market that no longer exists.

Modern platform competition changed the physics.

Here’s what I see: retention in sports is no longer about matching a competing offer. It’s about designing an operating environment that makes the competing offer feel like a lateral move, not a step up.

That is a fundamentally different problem than the one franchise HR functions were built to solve. So here’s my take on how to retain sports executive talent.

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Why the Old Playbook Fails

The traditional sports retention playbook has three moves. Each one worked when the primary competitive threat was another franchise. Each one fails when the primary competitive threat is a $2 trillion technology company.

Counter with compensation. This is the reflexive move. Amazon offers your VP of Digital a 40 percent bump. You match it. Sometimes you match it plus a title change. The executive stays.

Except that the executive doesn’t stay. Not really.

She stays for six to twelve months, long enough to feel the counteroffer was appropriately valued, long enough to complete the vesting cycle on whatever retention grant she was given, long enough to leave with dignity when the next offer comes. Because the underlying question wasn’t compensation. It was scope. It was ownership. It was whether the organization would let her build something the size of what Amazon wanted her to build.

The counteroffer resolved the salary. It didn’t resolve the reason she took the meeting in the first place.

Promote to the next title. VP becomes SVP. SVP becomes Chief. The organization gets to publicly signal that it valued the executive. The executive gets to publicly signal that she was valued.

But the title doesn’t come with the authority. It doesn’t come with the budget. It doesn’t come with the mandate. In many franchises, the newly-minted Chief Digital Officer manages the same team, controls the same resources, and reports to the same person she reported to as VP of Digital — just with a bigger business card.

Platforms don’t do title inflation because they don’t have to. They give someone a Director role at Amazon with a team of 100 and a budget larger than the entire commercial function of a mid-market NBA franchise. The title says less. The scope says everything.

Talk about equity — someday. This is the conversation franchises have been trying to have for a decade without actually having it. Phantom equity. Long-term incentive plans tied to franchise valuation. Deferred compensation structures. “We’re working on something.”

Working on something for a decade is not equity. It is aspiration.

Meanwhile, the platform gave the executive an RSU grant that vested at a valuation that appreciated by 40 percent over her four-year cycle. That grant was not aspirational. It was cash that funded a house.

Every one of these traditional moves treats retention as an event, a moment of intervention when a specific person is at risk. Modern retention is not an event. It is an architecture.

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The Four Retention Architectures That Actually Work

Franchises that successfully retain sports executive talent against platform competition don’t win at the moment of the counteroffer. They win months or years earlier, by designing an operating environment that makes their best executives less recruitable in the first place.

Four architectures matter most. They are not mutually exclusive, the strongest franchises deploy all four in coordination. But even one done seriously changes the retention math.

Architecture 1: Scope Beats Salary

The single most predictive variable in whether a commercial executive stays or leaves is not compensation. It is scope.

By scope I mean: budget authority, team size, decision-making autonomy, and the size of the problem the executive is asked to solve. When platforms recruit sports executive talent, they are not primarily offering more money. They are offering a bigger canvas. The VP of Digital at a franchise managing a team of ten and a budget of $3 million is being asked to consider a Head of Sports Content role at Amazon managing a team of forty and a budget of $30 million.

That is a scope offer, not a compensation offer. The compensation is a byproduct.

The franchises that retain their best commercial executives figure out how to increase scope inside the organization before the platform gets to make the outside offer. This does not mean creating fake scope, inflating titles or manufacturing responsibilities. It means genuinely restructuring commercial roles so that the executive controls a P&L, owns a strategic initiative, has authority over cross-functional resources, and is trusted with decisions that were previously routed through the president’s office.

One NBA franchise I worked with restructured its digital function so that the Chief Digital Officer role now includes P&L responsibility for the direct-to-consumer business, oversight of the data infrastructure that spans ticketing and sponsorship, and a seat at the executive committee that had previously been reserved for legacy revenue functions. The executive who now holds that role had two offers from streaming platforms in the previous eighteen months. She turned both down. Not because the money got better. Because the scope did.

Scope is the retention tool no HR system tracks and no compensation benchmark measures.

Architecture 2: Ownership-Equivalent Compensation

Franchises cannot offer public equity. They can offer functionally equivalent structures.

The phantom equity conversation has been theoretical in sports for too long. The franchises that are winning the retention battle are moving it from theoretical to operational, building long-term incentive plans that tie senior executive compensation to franchise valuation growth, revenue growth, or major transaction outcomes.

The math matters. A franchise appreciating from $2 billion to $3 billion over a five-year period has created $1 billion of value. A commercial executive who materially contributed to that appreciation, through media rights work, sponsorship expansion, digital transformation, or brand development, captured exactly zero of it under most current structures. That is a structural problem, and the executives who understand it will not stay in an environment that solves it for the owner and no one else.

One MLS ownership group implemented a phantom equity program in 2023 covering its top twelve commercial executives. The plan is tied to franchise valuation growth over a five-year cycle with vesting triggers at valuation milestones. Two years in, voluntary departure among senior commercial leadership has dropped to zero. The plan wasn’t cheap. The alternative, losing a Chief Revenue Officer, a Chief Digital Officer, and a Chief Marketing Officer inside twenty-four months — was more expensive.

The equity conversation is no longer optional. It is the compensation architecture that separates the franchises building for a decade from the ones losing talent to platforms every eighteen months.

Architecture 3: Career Path Beyond the Franchise Ceiling

The most under-discussed executive retention lever in sports is what happens when the executive outgrows the role.

Platforms have global career paths. An executive who joins Amazon as Head of Sports Content in 2025 can plausibly move to General Manager of Prime Video in 2028 and Chief Business Officer of AWS in 2032. That trajectory is real. The executive can see it. It shapes how she evaluates every year of her tenure.

Franchises rarely have that. The Chief Revenue Officer of a franchise reports to a President who reports to an Owner. There is no next step inside the building. The executive who wants to grow beyond the franchise role either has to leave or has to invent a bigger role that doesn’t yet exist.

The franchises that solve this build career architectures that extend beyond the franchise itself. Multi-club ownership groups have an obvious advantage here, the executive who leads commercial for one property can move to a parent-company role overseeing multiple properties. But even single-franchise operations can build career paths through affiliated businesses (real estate, hospitality, media production), through investment vehicles (family office, LP roles in sponsor funds), and through sponsor and league partnerships that create genuine adjacent opportunities.

The retention question is not just “will she leave for the platform.” It is “what does she grow into if she stays for the next decade.”

Franchises that cannot answer that question honestly are giving their best executives no reason to build long-term.

Architecture 4: The Culture of Building

The subtlest and most important retention architecture is cultural.

Platforms are attractive to sports executives not primarily because they pay more, promote faster, and offer equity, though they do all of those things. They are attractive because they are still building. Amazon’s sports business is not a mature operation running steady state. It is a construction project. Every quarter reveals a new capability, a new territory, a new bet. Executives who join Amazon are not managing the machine. They are helping design it.

Compare that to the cultural experience of many sports commercial functions. The revenue playbook is set. The sponsorship categories are established. The marketing calendar is inherited. The digital strategy is executed against a plan approved somewhere above. The executive is not building. She is operating.

The franchises that retain their best commercial talent understand this cultural gravitational pull and design against it. They create genuine build-mode initiatives, new revenue lines, new market entries, new commercial partnerships, new fan experience investments, and they give those initiatives to their strongest executives. The executive who runs the launch of the franchise’s first international commercial partnership feels different about her role than the executive who runs the third year of an established ticketing operation.

That feeling is retention.

You cannot replicate this culturally without leadership investment. It requires the ownership group and executive team to actively identify and fund the build-mode initiatives that give commercial talent the challenge scale that platforms offer by default. Franchises that treat commercial roles as maintenance functions will continue to lose people. Franchises that treat commercial roles as building functions will keep them.

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The One Metric That Predicts Retention Success

Every retention architecture above matters. But if I had to pick one metric that predicts whether a franchise will retain its best commercial talent over the next five years, it would be this:

How many of your top ten commercial executives can articulate, in a specific sentence, what they are building over the next three years, and how does what they are building compound in value beyond their tenure?

Ask that question in your building. Not to HR. To the executives themselves.

If the answer is generic, “growing revenue,” “expanding partnerships,” “professionalizing the function”, the executive is operating a machine someone else designed. She will leave when the platform offers her a machine she gets to design.

If the answer is specific — “building a data infrastructure that will support the next media rights cycle in 2029,” “launching a direct-to-consumer commercial platform that will represent 30 percent of revenue by 2027,” “designing the international expansion strategy that positions the franchise for the 2032 media rights market” — the executive is building. She is much harder to recruit away, not because she is loyal, but because her project is real and her ownership of it is genuine.

The number of executives who can answer that question specifically is the number who are functionally unrecruit­able. Everyone else is on the market — whether they know it yet or not.

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What Franchises Get Wrong When They Try to Fix This

Even franchises that recognize the problem and commit to changing the retention architecture tend to make three predictable mistakes.

They try to fix compensation first. Compensation matters, but it is the least differentiating variable in this market. Fixing compensation without fixing scope, ownership, and building culture produces short-term stability at a permanently higher cost. The executive stays for eighteen months instead of twelve, until the next offer that combines scope, ownership, and building culture with the higher compensation the franchise just established.

They treat it as an HR problem. Retention architecture is not an HR project. It is a business design project that touches organizational structure, budget authority, capital allocation, and executive team composition. If the CEO or president does not own it personally, it will not get built. HR can implement it. They cannot design it.

They try to solve it inside the current org structure. The retention problem is often a symptom of an organizational structure that was designed for an era before platforms and sports tech were competing for the same executives. Fixing retention sometimes requires restructuring reporting lines, redistributing budget authority, and creating executive roles that did not previously exist. Franchises that try to solve retention without restructuring end up spending more money on the same architecture that produced the retention problem.

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TLDR / Retain Sports Executive Talent

The franchises that will still be retaining top commercial executives in 2030 are not the ones with the deepest pockets or the strongest recruiting relationships. They are the ones that have redesigned their operating environment so that the platforms are not offering something meaningfully bigger.

That redesign is not a one-year project. It is a five-year commitment. It requires ownership, capital, restructuring, cultural investment, and the willingness to build a franchise that operates more like a modern business and less like a legacy sports enterprise.

The alternative is running the traditional retention playbook against an opponent for whom that playbook was never designed. And losing every eighteen months.

Retention in sports is no longer an HR function. It is a business design function.

The franchises that understand that will keep their best people. The franchises that don’t will keep watching them leave.

Charlie Solórzano is a Managing Partner at Alder Koten, a boutique executive search firm specializing in C-suite and board placements across the U.S. and Mexico markets. He advises founders, investors, and boards on leadership transitions using The Race Conditions Model™, a proprietary diagnostic framework built on the thesis that leadership success is determined by conditions, not credentials. He also leads the Sports Practice at both Alder Koten and IMD International Search Group, a globally coordinated executive search network operating across 26 countries.