Sports Illustrated’s Strange Merger

The Arena Group Holdings Inc. is a small publicly traded media company that owns titles including TheStreet, Parade and Men’s Journal. Since 2019, it has also published Sports Illustrated, though it doesn’t own it: The Sports Illustrated brand is owned by a thing called Authentic Brands Group, which acquired it in 2019 and then licensed it to Arena for 10 years.1 So Arena “owns” the magazine; it employs the people who write and publish it and runs its website. But Authentic owns the “Sports Illustrated” brand and its intellectual property, and Arena pays Authentic some rent for the rights to use the name. The rent is $15 million per year.2

As of last summer, Arena had an equity market capitalization of around $100 million. Its chief executive officer was Ross Levinsohn, a longtime media executive, and about 40% of its stock was owned by affiliates of B. Riley Financial Inc., a financial services firm that has come up around here before. B. Riley also owned most of Arena’s debt, in the form of $110 million of bonds.