Creasetheory.com

Season Eight Scorecard: The Product Is Winning. The Business Is Still on the Clock.

The Philadelphia Waterdogs beat the Denver Outlaws 14-4 on Sunday in Harrison, New Jersey, and CJ Kirst put seven points on the board in a championship game two days after being named MVP. Two years ago the Waterdogs went 2-8. That’s the kind of turnaround that makes a league worth following.

Season eight is done. LA28 is less than two years out. The league raised $100 million in June to get there. So this is a fair time to grade the whole operation, not just the final: what happened on the field, in the stands, on the screen, on the women’s side, and on the books.

On the field: A-

This was the longest season the PLL has played. Twelve games per team instead of ten, a May 8 start that overlapped the first round of the NCAA tournament, two bye weeks in June and a championship in the third week of the NFL season. The league wanted more inventory and it built more inventory.

The product held up. Kirst broke the single-season goals record with 34, passing Marcus Holman’s 30 from 2023. Michael Sowers led the league with 51 points and won Attackman of the Year. Joey Spallina put up 36 points as a rookie for Maryland. Bill Tierney, at 74, won Coach of the Year with the youngest contending roster in the league, and Philadelphia’s rookie class scored seven of its 13 goals in the semifinal.

In the stands: Incomplete

The league doesn’t publish attendance during the season, so the stands have to be read from the venues and from what management says.

Look at where the tour went. Boston’s homecoming was at Harvard Stadium, which holds 25,000. Philadelphia’s was at Subaru Park, 18,500. The All-Star Game was at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, 34,000. Then look at the other end. Denver’s homecoming was at Peter Barton Stadium, a college field that holds 2,000. Columbus was 2,100. Fairfield was 3,500. A league that says non-traditional markets “crush it” put its Denver team in a stadium smaller than most high school football fields.

On the screen: Incomplete, with a flag

Last year was the record year on television. A Week 3 game on ABC drew 833,000 viewers, the biggest audience in the league’s history. ABC averages were up 24 percent, ESPN averages up 46 percent, and the All-Star Game was the most-watched PLL game ever on ESPN.

This year ESPN carried every game, with 19 on ABC, ESPN or ESPN2, a “Saturday Night Lacrosse” window, and a Jeffrey Wright promo for the championship on ABC. That’s a real commitment from a network that also owns a piece of the league.

Here’s the flag. Last year the PLL put out its regular-season viewership release on August 23, a week after the last regular-season game, and it was full of records. The 2026 regular season ended August 16. As of the championship, I can’t find a 2026 release. That may be timing. It may also be that the numbers didn’t make a press release. A league that reports its records loudly and its misses quietly is normal. It’s also worth noticing.

The WLL: B for execution, Incomplete for business

The Women’s Lacrosse League played two seasons in one calendar year. In March it ran its second Sixes Championship Series alongside the men at The St. James in Virginia. Then, from May 16 to August 15, it played its first 10-on-10 season: four teams, riding the PLL tour weekends, with a championship at Subaru Park on ESPN. Maryland beat California 16-13 for the title.

Call it what it is. The published standings show each team playing two or three regular-season games. That’s a showcase with a trophy at the end, not yet a league. The players deserve better than that, and the league knows it.

The books: On the clock

The PLL is a private company. It doesn’t publish revenue or losses, and nobody outside the cap table has seen an audited statement. That’s its right. It’s also the normal starting point for a forensic accountant, whose job is figuring out what a business earns when the business would rather not say.

One thing up front. Nothing here alleges wrongdoing. Venture-backed companies lose money on purpose, and the PLL has been open about choosing growth over profit. The question is how much it loses, because that number tells you how long the runway is and who ends up paying for it.

When the books aren’t available, forensic accountants use indirect methods. Courts have accepted them for decades in tax, divorce and fraud cases. Two of them work well here.

Method one: follow the cash

The first is called source and application of funds. If you know how much cash came into a company and roughly where it went, the gap is the operating loss.

The sources are public. PitchBook puts total capital raised at $218 million. The league announced a $100 million Series E on June 30, led by Ares and Joe Tsai, at a valuation a Bloomberg source put above $500 million. Back that round out and about $118 million went into the company between the 2018 seed round and the end of last season.

Now the applications. The league merged with MLL, bought The Lacrosse Network and acquired Summit Lacrosse Ventures. Terms weren’t disclosed, so allow $10 million to $20 million for deals plus whatever cash was still in the bank when the new money arrived. That leaves roughly $95 million to $105 million spent on operations across seven seasons.

That’s about $14 million a year, and it’s an average. The 2019 league had no women’s league, no youth division and a much smaller staff. The 2026 version plays a longer schedule, pays players more and carries all of that. The current number is almost certainly higher than the average.

Method two: build the costs from units

The second method is unit and volume. Count the units, price them and add them up.

Start with players, because that’s the line everyone argues about. The league set its salary cap at $735,000 per team ahead of the 2022 season, with a rule that teams spend at least 98% of it. Eight teams makes $5.9 million. The cap went up 11% for 2026, so call it $6.4 million, and about $7.4 million once you add payroll taxes, workers’ comp and health coverage. Move them around the country (12 games per team, sixteen stops from Salt Lake City to San Diego to Minneapolis, three playoff weekends), pay eight coaching staffs, and the entire on-field product costs about $12 million.

Then price everything else the same way: sixteen rented stadiums, the February Championship Series, a broadcast operation that pre-buys all its own ad inventory, a women’s league, a youth tournament business, and a staff PitchBook has listed at more than 240 people. Revenue is the softer side of the ledger. The league has ranked its streams (sponsorship first, then media, youth, ticketing and merchandise) but never sized them, so those lines are set to what a $500 million valuation and the cash burn will bear.

Sort the whole statement by size and this is what comes out.

Read it from the top. The largest line in the company isn’t the players. It’s the front office, at more than double what the athletes are paid. The players are the product, and they’re 15 cents of every dollar spent. Treat all 240 people PitchBook lists as full time, with revenue at the low end, and the loss passes $30 million. Cut the staff to 150 and stack every other favorable assumption on top, and it still doesn’t fall below $11 million.

What the two methods say together

The cash method says the league burned about $14 million a year on average over seven seasons, with the early years lighter and the recent ones heavier. The unit method says 2026 comes in around $20 million. Those agree. This year has a longer schedule, a 15% raise for players, a second league and a bigger staff than any year before it, so it should run well above the average.

The revenue line deserves one more look. A $500 million valuation on roughly $31 million of revenue is about 16 times sales. That’s a rich multiple. It’s also what emerging leagues have been getting from investors who are buying the 2028 Olympics as much as the income statement.

What management has said

Forensic accountants also read what executives say over time, because a pattern of statements is evidence.

In May 2020, Mike Rabil told Front Office Sports the tour model was capital efficient and that within a few years the league could “turn on the profitability spigot pretty quickly.” In June 2021, Sportico reported the league was hoping to be profitable by 2024. This July, after sitting down with Rabil, JohnWallStreet reported that the goal for the next two years is to begin narrowing losses. It also reported that future funding is more likely to come from selling individual franchises, probably after LA28.

Read those six years together. A company that plans to begin narrowing its losses hasn’t started yet. And the route to paying investors back has moved from operating profit to selling teams.

The opinion

On the evidence available, the PLL is losing about $20 million a year, most likely between $15 million and $25 million. The full range in the table runs wider, but the low end doesn’t survive the cash math. The Series E buys four or five years at that rate, which lines up with a franchise sale process after the Olympics.

The estimate moves if headcount is far below what PitchBook lists, if ESPN is absorbing production, or if sponsorship is much bigger than anyone outside the building thinks. The league could settle it with one page of numbers. Until then, the people most likely to see the real books are the ones who’ll be asked to buy a franchise after 2028. They’ll bring forensic accountants of their own.