What Isn’t Changing: The Enduring Power of Live Sports in an Age of Acceleration

Introduction: The Illusion of Total Flux

Today, on July 3rd 2025, we have tipped over and are closer to 2050 than we are to the year 2000. I think this is a good time to take stock.

We are living through a compounding inflection — a stack of discontinuities that, in prior eras, might each have defined a generation, but which today are unfolding in parallel. AI is moving from narrow to general applications faster than policy can respond. Bioengineering has leapt from theoretical to actionable, not only decoding life but rewriting it. And the long-overdue shift to clean energy is now coupled with breakthroughs in storage, thermal efficiency, and distributed grid logic — promising to decouple progress from planetary degradation.

At the same time, the geopolitical foundations that underpinned seven decades of relative predictability — globalization, American hegemony, free trade orthodoxy — are eroding. The global order is fragmenting into competing blocs, resource nationalism is rising, and liberal democracy is, in many parts of the world, retreating.

The result is a pervasive ambient uncertainty. The dominant narrative in boardrooms, newsrooms, and policy circles is that everything is changing. But that is only half the truth. In moments like this, it is precisely the right time to ask: What isn’t changing?

I. The Accelerants of Change: A Quick Survey of the Frontlines

Artificial Intelligence

The progression from predictive algorithms to generative models marks a discontinuity in human-machine symbiosis. GPT-4-class systems are not just tools; they are collaborators. AI is not merely automating processes — it is refactoring cognition across knowledge work, creative industries, legal frameworks, and code itself. This is not iterative; it is architectural.

Bioengineering

CRISPR was the breach. What follows is the flood. Advances in gene editing, synthetic biology, and precision medicine are moving the locus of control over biology from diagnosis to design. The impact is not confined to healthcare — it will redefine food systems, labor economics (via longevity), and ecological stewardship.

Clean Energy

What’s accelerating now isn’t just solar panels and wind turbines — it’s the entire stack:

  • Solid-state batteries
  • AI-optimized energy transmission
  • Lower thermal loss in industrial processes

The most underappreciated tech story today is the silent revolution in energy storage and transmission. Solid-state batteries, supercapacitors, and thermophotovoltaic materials are poised to collapse the intermittency problem in renewables. Meanwhile, gains in materials science and AI-optimized load balancing are reducing thermodynamic losses across the grid. We’re approaching a tipping point where energy abundance — clean, storable, distributable — becomes not utopian but inevitable.

These domains are not isolated; they are entangled. AI accelerates drug discovery. Clean energy reshapes the geopolitical map. Bioengineering may challenge long-standing ethical, legal, and economic norms. The result is an accelerating stack — a phase shift in the global system.

II. The Fracturing Geopolitical Order

The era that began at Bretton Woods — anchored by U.S. military and monetary dominance, and extended through institutions like NATO, the WTO, and the World Bank — is giving way to a far more contested world. The war in Ukraine was not an aberration; it was an overture. What followed — a realignment of global supply chains, weaponization of trade, sanctions regimes, and open defiance of Western norms by rising powers — signals a system reconfiguring under stress.

Key markers of the shift:

  • Multi-polarity is real. The BRICS+ bloc, once a notional counterweight, is increasingly cohesive in financial and diplomatic terms. China’s Belt and Road is no longer just infrastructure — it’s leverage.
  • Resource nationalism is ascendant. Lithium, rare earths, grain, water — nations are rediscovering the logic of economic self-sufficiency, often at the expense of global coordination.
  • Political volatility is chronic. Liberal democracies are experiencing polarization and gridlock. Authoritarian models, once niche, are exporting themselves with confidence.

This isn’t merely a geopolitical story. It’s also a market story. Supply chains are being rebuilt for resilience, not just efficiency. Strategic sectors — semiconductors, pharma, energy — are becoming arenas of state intervention. And investors, for the first time in decades, must price in political risk in core markets, not just frontier ones.

In a world where neither alliances nor assumptions hold steady, the global economic system feels increasingly like a VUCA model (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) turned inside out. Amid this turbulence, cultural and commercial anchors are scarce — and therefore more valuable.

III. Constancy in Chaos: A Psychological and Market Imperative

When everything else becomes unpredictable, the human brain leans harder on the familiar. Behavioral economics and social psychology both affirm this: in environments of high entropy, we seek meaning, coherence, ritual, and community. During WWII, cinema ticket sales surged. During COVID lockdowns, old sitcoms topped streaming charts. In a fragmented, anxious world, ritual consumption becomes not just entertainment, but a kind of psychological self-defense.

In high-entropy environments, ritual and familiarity act as psychological stabilizers. This creates economic premiums around forms of content that offer:

  • Ritualized time-slotting (e.g., Sunday football, primetime Olympics)
  • Cultural persistence (fandom passed down generationally)
  • Shared attention (events with synchronous global viewership)

Brands, broadcasters, and platforms recognize this. The value of predictability — in audience, sentiment, and cadence — is a premium currency in the chaos economy. In this context, live sports doesn’t just survive. It becomes indispensable.

From an investor or platform POV, live sports delivers something rare: predictable, synchronized, mass attention.

IV. The Staying Power of Live Sports

Live sports sits at the nexus of scarcity, identity, and ritual — a rare combination that resists disruption. And it is one of the last remaining fragments of true mass culture. In a media ecosystem atomized by algorithmic feeds, live events provide the rarest of commodities: shared time.

Why Live Sports Persist

  • Scarcity and Ritual = Resilience: Sports are not infinitely available. There’s a schedule, a climax, a narrative. You miss it, you miss it. This urgency creates appointment viewing — something Netflix still can’t replicate.
  • Identity and Belonging: Teams become proxies for cities, nations, and tribes. Clubs, franchises, nations — they offer not just affiliation but tribal belonging. In a post-religious, post-industrial world, the jersey replaces the parish.
  • Platform Agnosticism: Sports content moves fluidly — broadcast, cable, OTT, mobile, social. And it’s monetizable at every layer: linear ad sales, digital impressions, sponsorships, betting integrations, NFT-based ticketing, and even second-screen commerce.
  • Resistant to Generative AI: You can fake a voice, not a 90-minute match outcome. AI can generate a song, a movie script, even a synthetic actor. But a live athletic contest — unscripted, physical, emotional — remains stubbornly human. This gives it staying power in a world where synthetic media will soon dominate.

Economic Gravity

  • Global live sports rights are projected to cross $60B+ annually by 2027, up from $43B in 2022 (PwC, Deloitte estimates).
  • Sports betting tied to live events is generating billions in tax revenue and creating a parallel monetization layer.
  • In a streaming universe struggling with churn, sports is retention glue. Look at the NFL’s impact on Amazon Prime or La Liga on Viacom18.

Even platform-native companies — Amazon, Apple, YouTube — have conceded that sports is the gateway drug to ecosystem engagement. It’s not just content. It’s infrastructure for engagement.

V. Media Fragmentation vs Shared Experience, or What Isn’t Changing, and Why It Matters

The Problem: Everything Else Is Fragmenting

With hundreds of entertainment platforms, feeds, and niche creators, shared culture is collapsing.

When the pace of change becomes the change itself, our ability to make sense of the world collapses into constant recalibration. AI will eat white-collar workflows. Clean energy will restructure global trade. Bioengineering will raise ethical questions we haven’t yet conceived of. Amid that, we need something that stays the same — not out of nostalgia, but for coherence.

Live sports delivers what fragmented media and synthetic content cannot. It is that coherence:

  • Chronological fixed
  • Emotionally resonant
  • Culturally unifying
  • Economic resilient

It is a global operating system that transcends platforms, politics, and even generational shifts. The tools of engagement may evolve — from VR arenas to AI-powered personalized commentary — but the core loop of anticipation, performance, and catharsis remains intact.

Live sports isn’t resisting change. It is absorbing it and growing stronger because of it. Betting, digital collectibles, second-screen apps, and AI-generated analysis are additive layers. But the core — competition, identity, ritual — remains untouched.

This makes live sports more than a diversion. It’s a stabilizer. A hedge against cultural entropy.

VII. Conclusion: Betting on the Constant in an Age of Change

In a world dominated by power laws, runaway feedback loops, and unpredictable vectors of change, the institutions and rituals that persist are not just curiosities. They are infrastructure — both psychological and economic.

Live sports is not immune to transformation. But it is uniquely equipped to absorb change without fracturing. That makes it one of the most undervalued constants in our future-facing portfolios — whether as investors, platform builders, brand stewards, or policymakers.

The future will be built on innovation. But it will be lived through continuity.

And live sports — live, tribal, communal, human — will be there, unchanged where it matters most.

Which is why we are betting on Victory+.