Dear reader,

First up, a big thank you for being a loyal reader of The Signal and The Intersection.

Some of you, particularly in the last six months, have written to us asking if we are indeed taking that leap beyond our daily, free-to-read newsletter, The Signal.

I am super thrilled to announce The Playbook, a weekly newsletter that will offer a sharp and discerning perspective on the growing business of sports and gaming.

The Playbook will be authored by Jaideep Vaidya, who recently joined us from The Ken, where he wrote the highly-popular Moneyball newsletter. It will drop every Friday at 4 pm, starting this week. Save the date—October 14! The Playbook is, and for the foreseeable future will be, free to read.

Sport today has many protagonists, and they are not always those on the field. Billionaires are looking at sport as a “recession-proof” investment. It is a booming global industry pegged at $350 billion in 2021 and expected to more than double to $707 billion by 2027. Earlier this year, the Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights for the 2023-27 cycle were sold for a whopping $6 billion.

Ditto for gaming, which saw an unprecedented pandemic-time growth, with people switching to a more “active” form of entertainment. So much so that even the likes of Netflix have plunged into it. The biggest tech deal of the year involves a near $70-billion acquisition of a game studio.

This is where The Playbook comes in. Jaideep’s deep reporting and incisive analysis will give you all the necessary signals you need to understand this industry better as it evolves. The Playbook will chronicle the evolution of the sports and gaming business, connect the dots, and deliver only what you need to know.

You can write to Jaideep at jaideep@thesignal.co with tips, suggestions, praises and (hopefully) occasional brickbats. He can be reached at @jaideepjourno on Twitter. Also, do follow Jaideep on LinkedIn, where, every now and then, he will be writing a sharp take on the business of sports and gaming.

Oh, and one last (and important) thing. We respect the choice our readers make. Hence, as a policy, we will not send you our newsletters unless you choose to subscribe to them. All The Signal readers will receive the first four editions of The Playbook. It will become an opt-in newsletter thereafter, which means you’ll need to sign up separately to receive it.  

I look forward to having you on board as dedicated readers of The Playbook.

Also, I am happy to inform you that we are just 1,000-odd subscribers away from hitting that hallowed 50,000 mark. Our daily podcast, The Signal Daily (hit bell icon!), has also been growing, clocking a 3.5x growth last month.

Warm regards,

Venkat Ananth,
Co-founder and CEO, The Signal
@venkatananth