SVG Sit-Down: Pro League Network Co-Founder Mike Salvaris on the Potential for Bettable Niche Sports Content

Expanded content production is on the agenda with new studio in Branson

World Putting League. CarJitsu. SlapFIGHT Championship. Ultimate Tire Wrestling. Major League Paintball. These sports may not be household names, but, for anyone looking for bettable content that’s off the beaten path, Pro League Network is here to serve. PLN prepares and monitors each sport for wagering and produces, distributes, and monetizes each sport through wagering, sponsorship, and affiliates.

With an eye on sports fans and bettors looking for something a bit further off the beaten path, Pro League Network is ramping up its content-production operation with the launch of a studio in Branson, MO. Dubbed PLN Studios, the new facility will serve as home to coverage of PLN combat sports — SlapFIGHT Championship, CarJitsu Championship, Gorilla Games, Ultimate Tire Wrestling — and to weekly PLN-focused entertainment shows, such as BFC Extreme studio show, and entertainment programming.

Pro League Network’s Mike Salvaris: “We’ve got a good base for several of our sports, but there’s no shortage of interesting new developments coming down the pipe.”

SVG sat down with PLN co-founder Mike Salvaris to discuss the league’s strategy, how it has evolved since its launch in 2022, what the new studio means for its growth, potential increase in distribution this year, and how PLN creates stars out of its unique athletes.

Why did you decide to launch PLN, and how does the wagering element differentiate it from other niche sports?
Previously, my co-founder Bill Yucatonis and I worked in thoroughbred racing. Roughly $12 billion is spent on racing in the U.S. every year. When people think about thoroughbred racing in the U.S., they think, of course, of the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes, etc. But Kentucky Derby is only 1.5% of that $12 billion. What makes up 50%-55% are claiming races, allowance races, and races that aren’t necessarily of the highest quality but are what’s on on a Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday afternoon, or Saturday before the big races.

If you apply that thinking to the U.S. sports-wagering market — where you’ve got four major sports, three of which have heavily overlapped schedules in terms of both months of the year and days of the week — there’s a lot of gaps where there’s just not a lot of good content available for wagering.

In the middle of an average day, if we were to go on FanDuel or DraftKings, you might find European handball or something like that [to bet on] but nothing that is fairly well-produced and aimed at a domestic market. Our concept is to acquire sports and develop sports designed to fill those gaps in the market. We are looking for compelling content that’s highly bettable and engaging to a casual audience. If we schedule those sports during times when the market is underserved, we believe, there is real opportunity. And that is how Pro League Network was born.

How has PLN evolved and grown since it launched in 2022?
PLN has evolved into 12 sports that we own and operate and control primarily for a waging audience. We hope to grow that number to 15 or so by the end of the year. What’s going to accelerate is just the amount of content we produce, from half an hour or an hour a week to 30-40 hours by this time next year.

How do you monitor the integrity of betting on these sports?
That’s a strong reason for us to want to own our own sports and the entire PLN [ecosystem]. We employ the athletes, implement the doping policies, develop the wagering-integrity policies. We work with U.S. Integrity [which provides monitoring and analysis services] on everything that we operate to make sure that there’s live monitoring of all the bets. Particularly for sports like ours, we have to make sure that integrity is at the forefront of everything that we do.

We also have to get our sports approved by the different state jurisdictions in order to enable wagering. We spend a lot of time on that to make sure there is fair competition and sufficient integrity for every sport.

CarJitsu is one of Pro League Network’s established brands.

I think, because of our background [in thoroughbred racing], we go through the sports that we operate with a fine-tooth comb from an integrity point of view to make sure there’s clarity in the rules, and that gives confidence to both the commissions and the average bettor that this is a fair and free bet. At the end of the day, we’re just trying to be as open as we can with both the public and the commissions because that inspires confidence and will enable success.

How did you start working with SlapFIGHT Championship? Why did you acquire its studio?
When we started the company about 14 months ago, one of the first things we thought was how cool it would be if we could get slap fighting regulated for wagering. We managed to track down JT Tilley [founder/CEO, SlapFIGHT Championship] and flew out to Branson, MO, where he’s based. Over a series of conversations, we did a deal where we became the wagering agent, if you will, for SlapFIGHT. As part of that, we got SlapFIGHT regulated in a bunch of states and got it listed on DraftKings and [other online sportsbooks].

As we started to develop a relationship with JT and see him on camera, we realized he’s got some great comedic chops, and we really liked his on-camera presence. We started using him on some of our other sports productions, and, as we got to know each other more, it just made sense for us to acquire SlapFIGHT and have JT come aboard as creative director across all our sports. We felt that would allow us to accelerate the development of Pro League Network.

What new capabilities does the new studio provide for PLN?
First and foremost, we produce a lot of content — both live and tape-delayed. Having a single place to domicile the majority of our sports is extremely helpful for efficiency’s sake. We don’t have to rent a space or equipment now because we’ve got a pool of talent available to start shooting at a moment’s notice rather than requiring weeks or months of planning.

This is our first foray into a studio, but we also plan to open a second studio on the East Coast in 2024 that will house a bunch of our other sports.

New PLN Studios will produce behind-the-scenes content as well as sports coverage.

It’s all about becoming more efficient so that we can create more and more content. Right now, we’re producing about an hour of bettable content per week on average, and it’s very bunched together: we have five or six hours one week and then go dark for a few weeks. We are moving away from an event-focused [model] and toward more of an “always on” production that can churn out upwards of 30 or 40 hours of content a week by the end of 2024. To do that, we need our own space, and that’s what PLN Studios in Branson will give us.

How do you expect PLN Studios to help you develop new sports and increase your content output?
We’re still testing a lot of these sports in our lab and don’t know if they’re going to work yet. Branson has become our lab, and we have a close relationship with 20 or so athletes who appear across a number of our sports and can help us test and refine them.

And it just so happens that the actual act of testing and refining these sports is an interesting piece of content in and of itself. So, in addition to covering the actual sport, we will be creating a behind-the-scenes series to show how something becomes actual bettable sport.

For example, last month, we did the PLN Grappling Challenge over three days with a pool of athletes competing in three different disciplines: CarJitsu, an established brand that we have; Ultimate Tire Wrestling, a new sport that we’re launching; and Gorilla Games, an emerging sport that we’re working on. We can create lots of content around that Grappling Challenge in addition to covering the sport itself.

How are you looking to grow the availability and distribution of PLN content?
Although it would be wonderful, we don’t anticipate a rights fee from ESPN or [another linear broadcaster] anytime soon. It’s up to us to be creative in how we spread the word and make this content available to potential fans. We own the IP, so we’ve got a lot of freedom and flexibility.

We work with a lot of influencers in the sports-betting space and try to integrate them directly into our production. For example, we had Rob Pizzola, who runs Hammer Network, do a betting-preview guide for one of our events. Over time, it evolved to the point where he’s now the play-by-play announcer for our World Putting League. We’re able to do really deep integrations with the influencers who speak to the markets that we’re interested in, and that’s very important to us.

BrinxTV has also been a great partner in terms of the free-to-play market, and a couple of others that we’re about to announce will give us wider distribution.

What about partnering directly with sportsbooks? Is that something you’re exploring in terms of content distribution?
As sportsbooks come around to the watch-and-wager [model], which is already very popular in Europe and other [regions], I definitely see that as a big opportunity for us. We are a big, big believer in watch and wager, and we are having very active conversations with sportsbooks about how we can provide that experience on their platform.

On our owned-and-operated platform, we use Panda Interactive: the experience is essentially the video stream, and a panel on the side will show you all the available bets and the available sportsbooks where you can make those bets. We see very strong click-throughs – a 38% click-throughs rate – from watching the stream through to making a bet. The more tightly you integrate the viewing experience with the wagering experience, the better the engagement and the longer the watch time. Frankly, a lot of our people find out about our sport when it’s going on already, so prematch markets are closed. You have to have in-game markets so people can feel like there’s a way that they can participate that’s live and in the moment. That’s really, really key for us.

How are you trying to make stars out of the PLN athletes? What storytelling devices are you leveraging to do that?
I don’t think you can manufacture that; it just happens. For example, Joey Graybeal has won four of our last five World Putting League tournaments, and he’s amazingly charismatic. He’s a Southern guy with a full-time job as a gardener and is absolutely hilarious. We had the guys from Betr Media, Jake Paul’s company, come out, and they locked onto Joey. They put him all over their Handshake Bets Instagram that performed really well.

There are inherently a lot of characters in the sports that we deal with, and, over time, those characters come out and rise to the top. I think, if we were to manufacture it — say, “This guy is the star, so we’re going to promote him” — that probably would not have worked. We’ve got so many sports and so many people who have been applying themselves to these sports for so long that they’ve developed really interesting stories and personalities. This is their chance to have their stories told. We don’t have to manufacture them because there are already so many interesting characters. We’re fortunate that every one of these sports is rich with storytelling opportunities.

What can we expect from PLN in 2024?
Facilities-wise, we will be opening the new studio on the East Coast, and we’ll be significantly increasing our content output as I mentioned.

We are also working on Street, a street-ball series that we’re launching with Kevin Garnett in February and are very excited about. The story of streetball has been told a lot but not quite in the way that I think we’re going about it. We’re very excited to launch that brand.

Overall, we expect increased volume in terms of both our content and our audience. We’ve got a good base right now for several of our sports, but there’s no shortage of interesting new developments coming down the pipe.