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April 3, 2023

SlamBall Returns After 20-Year Hiatus With $11 Million in Venture Financing

SlamBall, a mix of football, basketball and trampolines, will return this summer after a ~20-year hiatus.

The resurgent professional league is bouncing back (pun intended) with a six-week regular season, a one-week playoff and $11 million in venture financing.

Roger Ehrenberg's IA Sports Ventures and Eberg Capital led the Series A round. David Blitzer, Michael Rubin and Gary Vaynerchuk also participated.

SlamBall converges on several investment themes the long-time venture capitalist is bullish on, including short-form content, casual social wagering and alt-sports properties that cater to next-gen fans first.

“It’s this vehicle for further engaging audiences that tend to skew younger, tend to be more sophisticated when it comes to sports betting and represents this new sports vertical, that up to this point has largely been untapped except for the UFC being the one shiny star,” Ehrenberg said.

“We think SlamBall can be one of the next major alternative sports [properties].”

SlamBall was invented in 1999. 

The initial concept was “fight-club basketball,” Mason Gordon (co-founder, SlamBall) said. The game was to be played on a spring floor that, in theory, would allow players to jump higher and compete harder without injury. 

But Gordon failed to account for physics. “The coefficient of restitution on a floor that gives underneath you [didn’t] allow [players] to explode,” he said. 

So, in December ’00, he went out and purchased high-performance trampolines to occupy a portion of the space inside the three-point arc on both ends of a basketball court constructed inside of a Los Angeles warehouse. The set-up would allow participants to “take off the spring floor with one foot, land on something else with two feet, and then attack the rim [as if they were in a video game],” Gordon said. 

Gordon and friends, including co-founder Mike Tollin, spent the next 10 days conjuring up SlamBall’s rules and practicing on the makeshift court before staging a few exhibitions in front of enthusiastic crowds. 

Tollin, an Emmy Award winning film producer, got a SpikeTV executive to attend one of the games and the cable network quickly signed the emerging sports property to a national television deal. 

The problem was SlamBall packaged as a television product as opposed to “a real, live, bet-able, engageable sport,” Gordon said, and fans got tired of watching games they already knew the outcome of.

The network and SlamBall went their separate ways after two seasons.

That was 2003. 

Over the last two and a half years, a grassroots movement has emerged to ‘Bring Back SlamBall’. “The hashtag has drawn upwards of 200 million views within the last 12 months [alone],” Gordon said. 

Seeing 20-year-old clips going viral on Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok helped to convince Gordon and Tollin to take another run at converting SlamBall into a viable North American professional sports league.

But the sport converges on several other macro trends that suggest the timing is right to relaunch the property.

There is a “red-hot alternative sports” market as “younger people [look] for sports they can call their own,” Gordon said (see: Premier Lacrosse League, Overtime Elite basketball league). 

SlamBall is “incredibly bet-able,” Roger Ehrenberg said. “With lots of pre-game buildup, together with countless micro moments during in-game play [that can be bet on], SlamBall is tailor made for today's highly engaged, highly social sports bettor.” Of course, IA Sports is an investor in both Betr and SimpleBet.

It’s packaged for the next-gen fan. Games can be played in 30 minutes.

And it is tailor made for today’s social-first environment. “In the NBA, there [might be] one poster by Ja [Morant] a game, maybe two. [Maybe] there’s one halfcourt shot made at a buzzer,” Ethan Ehrenberg (partner, Eberg Capital) said. “In SlamBall, [highlights] are an every play sort of thing.” 

While the expectation is the property will consistently over-index on social against more established leagues, Ethan Ehrenberg believes the sport has the potential to draw “a large number of eyeballs on linear over time” too.

The trick will be making people care about the teams and players participating. 

Gordon believes SlamBall will be able to accomplish that with exciting play on the court and elite storytelling off it. He spent the last nine years working for Tollin’s Mandalay Sports Media, the content house behind

The Last Dance

,

The Captain

and

The Redeem Team

.

The co-founder will bring what he’s learned about storytelling around sports leagues and organizations to try to stand up some stars. A Hard Knocks-style documentary about the league is in development. Tollin will be actively involved in the show’s production.

The league also plans to sign some former college football or basketball stars capable of spurring allegiance or fandom for a specific team at the outset. 

The SlamBall season was strategically scheduled to begin in July.

Ethan Ehrenberg said the league wanted to “sit in the white space on the sports [calendar] between the end of basketball season and the start of football season.” The thinking was outside of baseball and the occasional fight sport, there is little for sports bettors to engage with during the summer months.

The $11 million raised will give SlamBall two years of runway (assuming it hits business targets). Gordon said the eight-team league expects to be “close to profitability” by the end of Q1 ’25. 

It’s not clear if SlamBall will raise more money before it reaches that point.  

“In the event these teams have value, [selling one or more] might be an avenue to go instead of going back into the VC markets,” Gordon said. 

SlamBall chose to come out of the gate with a centralized ownership model to ensure talent is evenly distributed evenly and that quality of play is high across the league.

The league will have a national media package that contains linear, streaming and digital components. 

It remains to be seen if that deal will come with rights fee at the outset. 

“In the short-term, [in venue] branding partnerships will be the largest driver of revenue,” Andrew Ehrenberg (partner, Eberg Capital) said.

SlamBall should also be able to generate social media advertising revenues as its handles gain traction (think: one million plus followers) and there will be some live gate receipts. The league plans to sell upwards of 1,000 tickets to the games in Las Vegas, including some pegged to VIP packages.

The hope is over time SlamBall will be able to command a lucrative domestic media rights deal(s), generate revenue sharing income on sports betting partnerships and construct a robust merchandising business. 

Gordon and Co. have plans to grow the game internationally too. 

“In many ways, SlamBall was most massive in China [in the early 00s],” Roger Ehrenberg said.

The eight teams will be participating in a fall travel season that includes stops across Australia and Europe. 

SlamBall did not disclose a valuation.

“[But] given the sub-hundred-million-dollar [number], there is just tremendous upside if we’re able to build the social following we believe we can and then the monetization opportunities that fall from that,” Roger Ehrenberg said. 

SlamBall “can become a multi-billion-dollar franchise” if it executes on that vision, he added.