The sports universe thrives on a framework of stable, reliable operation. One team wins, one team loses. A season begins at a specific, scheduled point and ends with the crowning of a champion. The league you watched last year is the league youll watch this year and next. The variance stays between the lines.
The tech universe, by contrast, thrives on innovation and disruption. If youre not improving, youre dying, and if youre standing still, youre losing ground. What worked yesterday is history tomorrow.
Project B, an ambitious, working-title initiative created by Grady Burnett, a former Facebook and Google executive, and Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice, aims to employ tech strategy to a sports framework, with the goal of developing a globally-played, globally-distributed array of sports that allocates time-tested assets i.e. games and players in a modern, technology- and media-enhanced context.
Starting with a six-team womens basketball league, with the potential and expectation of expanding to mens basketball and other sports, Project B will be what Burnett terms a Formula 1-style circuit played on a global stage, physically in a location where the fans exist, and digitally available to everybody. The pitch has been promising enough to attract the interest and the investment of some of sports most notable figures, and tip-off is still a year away.
Geoff and I were talking a couple years ago, and said, What is the next area where there is an opportunity? Burnett said recently in an interview with Yahoo Sports. We think that the next multi-hundred-billion-dollar company is going to be built around sports and entertainment. The combination of growth potential and streaming opportunity proved appealing enough to Burnett and Prentice to begin developing the basics of an entirely new sports endeavor, and they decided to start with basketball.
Basketball is the second-biggest sport in the world, Burnett says. Its culturally probably Number One in terms of influence on fashion, on music. You look within that, and mens basketball is growing really well, and womens basketball is growing right now as fast as AI.
The opportunity, as Burnett and Prentice saw it, is that elite-level basketball is too deeply embedded in the United States, while a significant, perhaps even overwhelming, portion of the fanbase lives outside Americas borders. Theres a supply-demand mismatch, just like weve seen in other industries, Burnett says. Physically and digitally, lets move [the sport] to a place where people can interact with that, and then we can share the economics of that industry with the key participant, which is the players.
Its easy to cast a skeptical eye at such aspirations; the old Facebook move fast and break things mantra tends to result in more chaos than progress. But Project Bs womens basketball league has attracted former Duke and WNBA star Alana Beard as chief basketball officer; Candace Parker, Sloane Stephens, Steve Young and Novak Djokovic as investors; and WNBA champion and MVP Nneka Ogwumike as its first signee.
Weve signed multiple All-WNBA players already, Burnett says. Weve signed multiple young stars. Weve signed people from four different continents. There are many more announcements coming, Burnett says. We are starting with, This will be the best basketball played. So signing the top womens players, having that on six teams, allows us to concentrate that talent, which then equates to games that are equivalent to a WNBA Finals game in every single game were playing.
Womens basketball represents a particularly compelling opportunity for, in tech terms, disruption. Ratings for the WNBA and womens college basketball have significantly improved in recent years. WNBA players are underpaid relative to the leagues skyrocketing franchise values. And labor strife between the league and the players union threatens to undo all the progress the league has made in the last few seasons.
As you look at the numbers, in terms of arenas being filled, viewership, men and women watching the sport, that has totally transformed and really elevated in the last couple of years, Burnett says. We can take that and help elevate that even further, helping to make [the players] global icons with this platform.
With global awareness should come global revenue, and as a result, Project B plans to offer generous compensation terms to its players equity in the league plus paychecks significantly higher than WNBA salaries. That, Burnett believes, will help diversify the top female earners in sports.
Eight of the top 10 highest-paid womens athletes are tennis players, Burnett says. And its not just because of the prize money, its mostly because of the global opportunity to grow their brand and build associations with fans and brands and other people in a variety of regions.
But where will the money come from?
You cant build a global company without access to global capital and globally-minded strategy. Project B is working with Sela, an entertainment corporation owned by Saudi Arabias Public Investment Fund, to bring the womens basketball league to life. That connection has led to the erroneous assumption that Project B is a Saudi-funded endeavor, but Burnett specifically notes that there is no sovereign wealth fund investment in the league.
Burnett and Prentice provided the initial funding for Project B, and then began developing a globally distributed investment network tech investors and leaders, institutional investors including Quiet Capital and Mangrove Capital, and a series of other investors from all over the world.
Not only do we need the best players on the court, Burnett says. When you’re doing something this audacious, you need the best investors and partners and others that can help you clear roadblocks in various regions of the world as we’re setting this up.
Project Bs tech investors will be bringing a different mindset than, say, a sports owner with a civic or self-aggrandizing interest in owning a team. [Project Bs investors] look for companies that really have the underpinnings to drive a platform shift and lean into how supply and demand has changed in a particular industry, or lean into how technology has changed a particular industry, Burnett says. What our investors have bought into here is that sports is a durable and significant asset class on its own, and that there is opportunity to shift how its consumed, how its played, and how its done on a global stage.
Sports history is rife with attempts to build rival, insurgent leagues, from the American Basketball Association to the USFL to LIV Golf. Some thrived briefly, some were successful enough to be absorbed into the established league, some vanished and left behind only logos and forgotten team names.
Theres precedent for what Project B is attempting. In contrast to the NBA, where player salaries represent a larger share of the overall revenue pie (and where players are forbidden from playing in outside leagues), WNBA players have a long history of playing overseas or in other organizations to supplement their earnings.
Burnett points at, of all things, the Indian Premier League of cricket. I was traveling to India particularly through the 2008-to-13 window when that was starting, he says. They brought the best athletes in that sport to a single stage in a tight window with a scarcity of games. And then they brought Bollywood energy to that. They brought the new format to the game, and hundreds of millions of people now watch the final.
Started in 2008, with a tight March-to-May window, the IPL now stands as one of the most valuable sports leagues on Earth. The league began broadcasting matches on YouTube, and two years ago signed a four-year, $6.4 billion media rights distribution deal.
Traditional thinking in the sports world holds that a media rights deal with a major network ESPN, Fox, NBC, CBS and so on is the foundation from which the sport can grow. LIV Golf, for instance, struggled to find viewers when it was a new, streaming-only property. But to Burnett, that media-rights dynamic might not apply to every sport.
I come from a tech lens, Burnett says. I was at Google when we bought YouTube. I was at Facebook when we bought Instagram. If you think about the growth of those platforms, it was about distribution and engagement before monetization. It really is focusing on eyeballs. We live in a world where streaming, where social (media), where Web3 are prominent. You have to think about all of those as pieces of oxygen that help grow the platform.
The key, Burnett believes, is a focus on eyeballs. Distribution and engagement [are] really the core, he says. Theres lots of ways to drive that by making frictionless availability to watch these games in various regions, playing in time zones that are friendly to other people around the world, making sure highlights are seen across platforms.
Beyond in-game highlights, Project B hopes to develop the individual players brands off the court as well, in a manner similar to Drive to Survive or exploding TikTok-style short-form content.
We have an opportunity to discover culture and interaction through the eyes of basketball and the eyes of sports, similar to what Anthony Bourdain did with food, Burnett says. You could see these players going to a tournament in Japan and doing a deep discovery on anime or something like that, and bringing that to the world.
The womens basketball league the first of what Project B plans as multiple sports endeavors, including a mens league is slated to debut in the fourth quarter of 2026. Featuring six teams of 11 players, the series will consist of seven two-week tournaments held all over the globe.
We want to bring the best basketball in the world, played five on five on a global stage in front of a global audience, Burnett says. There is lots of opportunity to expand basketball globally and grow the global market share. And we think this is the right platform and right approach to doing that.
Project Bs current proposed schedule, running from Q4 of 2026 to roughly Q2 of 2027, would put it in direct conflict with the third season of Unrivaled, the Miami-based womens basketball league. Unrivaled runs from January through March, although its focus is entirely domestic.
Still, the fact that there are now three potential womens basketball leagues in play speaks, in Burnetts eyes, to the potential for the sport and justifies the order in which Project B is rolling out its planned sports.
Too many things have started with men, Burnett says. Lets start with the women as an announcement. But our first tournament will have mens and womens basketball. Well have more to say on the mens side later, but for right now, we wanted to announce and have the attention focused on the women. And well grow from there.
Its an ambitious idea, a worldwide sports framework, but one that Burnett believes is both feasible and profitable. And if Project B grows at the rate he and his investors expect, basketball wont be the only sport to get this treatment.
Our vision is broad, Burnett says. Lets start with five-on-five, the highest level of basketball in the world, played on a global stage, frictionlessly distributed to people all over the world. But these principles apply to other sports, and [well] absolutely look beyond that. But weve got plenty to do right now.