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Having made the transition from star athlete to sports business executive, Paul Rabil is continuing to widen the aperture. The co-founder and commissioner of the Premier Lacrosse League is hosting a new ESPN+ series, Rabil’s Places, whose producers include Omaha Productions, Words + Pictures and Rabil’s own Two Point Productions. He is the author of The Way of the Champion, a memoir/inspirational book published in 2024 by Penguin Press imprint Portfolio. Its jacket features blurbs from the likes of Sony Pictures film boss Tom Rothman, Pivot podcast co-host Scott Galloway and Arianna Huffington.
Rabil spoke with Deadline as the PLL was getting set to kick off its 2025 season with a doubleheader this evening and another on Saturday. The games will stream on ESPN+ and Saturday’s opener will air on ABC. He talked about the state of the PLL’s talks with potential media rights partners as its four-year deal with Disney/ESPN nears its end, as well as the global spotlight of the 2028 Summer Olympics in L.A.
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The CAA-repped Rabil also discussed his production company’s big-screen ambitions and his ties to film industry figures like Glen Powell and Oscar-nominated documentarian Matthew Heineman, both of whom played lacrosse. With lines blurring between show business and sports, Rabil envisions the PLL yielding hybrid personalities along the lines of Travis Kelce or Steph Curry hybrids. “That’s what David Stern got right,” he said. “He positioned the NBA in the ’80s around the players. He knew that if the players got bigger, the league would benefit.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
DEADLINE: As you head into your seventh season, what are the main priorities for the PLL?
PAUL RABIL: One of them is, for the first time with our network partner ESPN we are rolling out a new brand called Saturday Night Lacrosse. It creates appointment watching throughout the entire summer. We have 17 on-air combinations with linear exposure between ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, and then all of the games are on ESPN+.
DEADLINE: Your season starts right on the heels of the NCAA tournament and also overlaps with college baseball and softball, whose playoffs air across ESPN over the next month. Is there a high overlap between those viewers and yours?
RABIL: The College World Series draws a big number, so we try to get clever with our talent. If an ACC school is featured and their fans are coming in to the PLL after the College World Series, we can tie them into a couple of our players. There are these moments throughout the calendar.
DEADLINE: Do you see Rabil’s Places also helping more viewers find the PLL?
RABIL: It’s another example of what I would call “third-door” growth opportunities, where it’s not just about the experience of watching a professional lacrosse game. It’s about how you can bring in other fans to try the pro product. As [NBA Commissioner] Adam Silver would say, there are a lot of fans of only college basketball in America, so the league is constantly trying to convert more basketball fans. Other third doors would include getting into the Olympics and lobbying to try to turn the additional 24 U.S. states that don’t sanction lacrosse at the high school boys and girls level.
DEADLINE: What’s in the works at Two Point Productions, your new company?
RABIL: There’s a project pretty far into development now, which would be a major motion picture with a significant director and a significant writer.
DEADLINE: So you want to move beyond unscripted sports?
RABIL: I believe the scales have tipped into the realm of saturation for unscripted sports follow docs. You can initiate and greenlight production and turn through post far more quickly in the unscripted space than you can in scripted. And I don’t think very many sports executives or sports organizations have experience with film, either, and understand the nuances in today’s environment of how difficult it is to make Remember the Titans or The Mighty Ducks or Rudy, or something as clever as The Queen’s Gambit. So, we have Marty Supreme coming out, and Smashing Machine and the F1 movie. When you take a sport that is less relevant, the disproportionate opportunity to benefit from a hit movie or television series is extraordinary. But these things take time.
DEADLINE: From your book to the way you built the PLL after playing both at the pro level and at Johns Hopkins in college, it’s clear you’ve always set your sights well beyond lacrosse. Who has made an impression on you and shaped your thinking about business or life in general?
RABIL: Among athletes that I look up to that have crossed over, you start with Dwayne Johnson. You stay with wrestling with Paul Levesque and John Cena and then I would say in action sports you look at Tony Hawk and Travis Pastrana and Sean White. Some of my most favorite courageous leaders in sports would be Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird and Serena Williams. And Adam Silver has been a friend and a guiding light since we were forming the PLL. We have a really great board, with members like Joe Tsai. I also spend a lot of time with artists, whether that’s Jeffrey Wright or someone like Glen Powell, who grew up playing lacrosse. I spend time with them to learn about their craft and how they think about everything from acting to producing to directing. Someone like Matt Heineman, who’s a world-renowned director (Cartel Land) who played lacrosse at Dartmouth. It’s about being a sponge and the beauty in sport, what’s so attractive about it is it really touches every industry. There’s never been more crossover appeal than there is today, even if you look at fashion or culinary or look at the Met Gala – three of the four hosts were athletes.
DEADLINE: It’s pretty impressive that he delivered on his promise to more than triple the value of the NBA’s rights deals, with NBCU and Amazon joining Disney-ESPN.
RABIL: He’s got Kevlar skin. He’s also really clever. He’s forward-thinking and he’s risk-aggressive and he’s the consummate professional. I have talked with him frequently, including throughout the process he was going through and learning for when our rights were coming up. If you’re the NFL or the NBA, everyone is showing up with a proposal. For the rest of us, we have to create compelling cases, through a combination of our ratings, our year-over-year growth, our plans to grow, we have to talk about our audience. In our case, our audience is really young. They’re native streamers. They have crossover appeal to other sports and entertainment.
DEADLINE: Speaking of rights, your current 4-year deal with Disney/ESPN is ending next year. Have you been talking with them or others for the next agreement?
RABIL: We’ve been in negotiations for the last several months. We’re really close at arriving at our next network deal. That announcement will come in the coming weeks and we’re really excited about it. Since the last agreement with ESPN, we created our “Olympic 6s” championship series and the Women’s Lacrosse League. As good partners, we tucked these into our current deal and we think they helped to grow the sport. This next round, we’re looking to strike a longer-term deal. Our first one was with NBCUniversal, and that was for three years, the current one was four.
DEADLINE: Could the various pieces, with 6-on-6 and WLL, be broken out separately? And are you talking with multiple potential partners?
RABIL: Correct on both. We are so thrilled with our partnership with ESPN. It’s everything we had hoped for. What you get with ESPN, in addition to the great live coverage, is a flywheel effect of everything they do. It ranges from television shows to having the largest social media flow of any network in the world to onsite opportunities or even laddering up to Disney’s integrations team and potential crossover opportunities with Marvel and our younger audience.
DEADLINE: At the Olympics, the games will be 6-on-6 as opposed to the 10-on-10 played at the PLL and college levels. What are the advantages to adding 6s?
RABIL: It’s been a part of our pitch, first to Casey Wasserman at LA2028 and then with the IOC.
DEADLINE: I pictured Olympic lacrosse being played outdoors, as you do at your current PLL sites.
RABIL: With 6s, you can play indoors. It’s 50 yards goal to goal. So that’s another exciting thing. We continue to build plans around the future of a first professional lacrosse stadium, which in my eyes would have a roof for a number of reasons. For one thing, the world is not getting any cooler. And the production value skyrockets. We play at the Star in Frisco, TX. We always get feedback from fans and players that they can track the ball better because of indoor lighting, the theatrical acoustics. Scan rates for tickets goes up. You would also be able to build a 10-on-10 in that stadium.
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