The PLAYER

The Barstool Sports brand is known for its bro-ish excess, but the company has a woman to thank for driving its $550 million sale: CEO Erika Ayers Badan

- Emily Jane Fox

ERIKA AYERS BADAN kicked off her heels and sank into the quiet of her Connecticut home. It was the run-up to the spring sprint for Barstool Sports, the company she’s run for seven years. There was the Super Bowl, March Madness. And then there was the deal with Penn Entertainment, a casino and racetrack company, to fully acquire Barstool, after buying a third of the business years earlier, with plans to take on the whole thing in 2023. She knew it was coming, but these last few weeks were filled with the minutiae of it. She paid visits to all of the cable business channels to field questions about what this would mean for the company, which, since its founding, revolutionized the way media companies build community and make actual money and step in shit by being unapologetically themselves. (Barstool being itself meant being relentlessly chaotic and behaviorally tricky.) She led town halls with hundreds of employees. She recorded episodes 260 and 261 of her podcast, Token CEO (on Barstool, of course). She bought David Portnoy a bottle of wine from 2003—the year he founded Barstool as a free hometown subway newspaper in Boston, backed by $25,000 from his parents, for other Red Sox bros commuting. “The people at Barstool Sports are a bunch of average Joes, who, like most guys, love sports, gambling, golfing,” he wrote in his first issue, “and chasing short skirts.”