马修·汤森德撰文 迈克尔·鲁宾正向 DraftKings 和 FanDuel 发起挑战。
Rubin is coming for DraftKings and FanDuel.
这位亿万富翁、Fanatics 首席执行官认为，他的公司在美国体育博彩领域拥有明显优势，并打算进一步放大这一杠杆作用。
The billionaire chief executive officer of Fanatics sees his company as having clear advantages in US sports gambling, and he intends to ratchet up that leverage.
鲁宾在公司位于曼哈顿的办公室接受一次广泛采访时解释称，Fanatics 最大的优势之一在于它是一家私营企业，却在与上市龙头 DraftKings 和 FanDuel 竞争。这赋予了公司从盈利业务单元中调拨收益、投入尚处亏损状态的博彩业务（就 Fanatics 目前而言）的灵活性，并能更专注于长远发展。
One of the biggest edges Fanatics has is being a private entity competing against publicly held market leaders DraftKings and FanDuel, Rubin explained in a recent wide-ranging interview at the firm’s Manhattan office. That gives the company leeway to invest proceeds from its money-making units into an unprofitable business — which gambling is for Fanatics at this point — and focus more long term.
为此，Fanatics 计划到 2027 年将其博彩部门的广告投入增加一倍多，从今年的 3.5 亿美元增至高达 10 亿美元。鲁宾表示，公司在体育周边商品和收藏品领域的市场领先地位，将助力总收入今年增长 40%，达到约 140 亿美元。其中约 20 亿美元来自体育博彩业务，Fanatics 于 2023 年进军该领域，并声称已夺得 10% 的市场份额。自那时起，随着预测市场 Kalshi 和 Polymarket 的加入及其在广告上的大手笔投入，该行业竞争变得愈发激烈。
To that end, Fanatics plans to more than double advertising for its gambling unit to as much as $1 billion in 2027, from $350 million this year. Rubin said that the company’s market-leading success in sports merchandise and collectibles will help boost total revenue 40% to about $14 billion this year. Roughly $2 billion of that is from sports gambling, which Fanatics entered in 2023, and where it says has gained 10% of the market. Since then, the sector has become much more competitive with the arrival of prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket and their willingness to spend on advertising.
但鲁宾毫不退缩，表示他对博彩业务的目标与其他 Fanatics 业务一样：成为行业第一。在采访中，他多次强调拥有实现这一目标的财力，预计今年将产生 20 亿美元的自由现金流，拥有约 10 亿美元净现金且零负债。
But Rubin is undeterred, saying that his goal for gambling is the same as for the other Fanatics businesses: become number one. And during the interview, he said multiple times how he has the financial resources to get there, with $2 billion in free cash flow to be generated this year, about $1 billion in net cash and no debt.
博彩与博弈业务是我们目前所处最具竞争力的领域。目前正发生三个非常不利的动态，我们要对此保持高度透明。第一，在宾夕法尼亚州、新泽西州、纽约州等完全受监管的州，单州收入已触及天花板。第二，新州推进监管的速度比预期慢。第三，预测市场横空出世。
The betting and gaming business is the most competitive business we play in today. And there's three very negative dynamics happening right now. Let's be very transparent about that. One is that the revenue on a per-state basis has hit a wall in fully regulated states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey or New York. The second thing is new states are regulating at a slower pace than you would have thought, and the third thing is that prediction markets come out of nowhere.
如果一年前我们坐在这里讨论加利福尼亚州、德克萨斯州、佛罗里达州和佐治亚州合法化体育博彩的可能性，你会说毫无机会。而一年后的今天，我们已拥有了这些市场。显然，这对我们是巨大的机遇。
If we would have sat here a year ago and said what's the chance of sports betting in California, Texas, Florida and Georgia, you'd say no chance. And here we are a year later, and we have it. So obviously, that's a great opportunity for us.
未来对所有人来说都将是一条艰难的道路。对FanDuel、DraftKings和MGM等传统博彩公司而言将是艰难之路；对Kalshi和Polymarket而言同样艰难。我们认为监管环境不太可能维持现状。
It's going to be a very tough road ahead for everybody. It's going to be a tough road ahead for the traditional betting companies, like FanDuel, DraftKings and MGM. It's going to be tough roads ahead for Kalshi and Polymarket. We think the regulatory environment is unlikely to be as it is today.
我们非常专注于在所从事的每项业务中做到第一。要知道，目前有很多领域我们还不是第一。在博彩与博弈业务中，我们排名第三（仅次于DraftKings和FanDuel），且差距悬殊。那么我们该怎么办？明年我们在营销上的投入将远超原计划，因为我们在思考如何缩小差距、如何真正提升市场份额？
We're very focused on being number one in everything that we do. You know there's a lot of places we're not number one today. In the betting and gaming business, we're number three [after DraftKings and FanDuel]. A distant number three. Okay, so what do we do there? We're going to spend a lot more money in marketing next year than we had thought we were going to spend because we're saying how do we close the gap, and how do we really grow our market share?
2027年博彩与博弈业务将更加复杂，因为不仅有Kalshi和Polymarket的加入，现在Fanatics的投入水平也与FanDuel和DraftKings持平。今年我们在该业务上将投入3.5亿美元，明年可能投入8亿美元甚至10亿美元。
The betting and gaming business will be more complicated in 2027 because you not only have the addition of Kalshi and Polymarket, but now you have the addition of Fanatics spending at the same level as FanDuel and DraftKings. This year, we'll spend, in that business, $350 million, and we could spend $800 million or $1 billion next year.
我喜欢做逆向思考者。比如当人们说“嘿，博彩生意真烂”时，我反而很兴奋。猜怎么着？他们说得对。现在比一年前难得多吗？绝对是。
I like being a contrarian. Like I love when people are like: ‘Hey, the gambling business sucks.’Guess what? They're right. Is it much harder today than it was a year ago? Absolutely.
FanDuel和DraftKings两年前与自己竞争。现在他们有Fanatics、Kalshi和Polymarket。所有营销成本都上涨了。这个行业的一切都变得更加复杂。尽管如此，我们还是问自己：从长远来看，这是一个我们可以比竞争对手做得更好的行业吗？答案是肯定的。
FanDuel and DraftKings competed with themselves two years ago. Now they have Fanatics, Kalshi and Polymarket. All the marketing costs are up. Everything is more complicated in this business. All of that said, we ask ourselves: Is this a business that we can be better than the competition long term? The answer is yes.
我们做的第一件事就是开发了这个FanCash。您可以在我们生态系统中的任何地方使用它。您可以用它来购买体育商品。您可以用它来对体育赛事进行投注。您可以用它来购买交易卡。您可以使用它在我们的市场中交易交易卡。您可以用它来买票。您可以在Lids（其拥有的运动帽零售商）使用它。因此您可以真正在我们生态系统中的任何地方使用它。
The first thing we did was we developed this FanCash. You can use it anywhere in our ecosystem. You can use it to buy sports merchandise. You can use it to make bets on sports. You can use it to buy trading cards. You can use it to trade trading cards in our marketplace. You can use it to get tickets. You can use it at Lids [a sports hat retailer it owns]. So you can really use it anywhere in our ecosystem.
如果您在体育比赛上下注，如果您不使用Fanatics下注，您的交易会更糟糕，因为每次您下注，无论输赢，我们都会给您FanCash。仅今年博彩业务就将产生超过10亿美元的FanCash。好吧，所以它就被放回生态系统中了。粉丝们喜欢这个。因此，这是我们为了更好地提高价值主张而做的第一件事。
If you bet on sports, you're kind of getting a worse deal if you don't bet with Fanatics because every time you bet, win or lose, we give you FanCash. The betting business alone this year will generate more than a billion dollars of FanCash. Okay, and so that gets put right back in the ecosystem. Fans love that. So that was the first thing we did to make the value proposition better.
我们做的第二件事是我们开发了这个叫做公平竞争的东西。因此，如果你的球员在第一节受伤--就像贾克森·达特（本赛季早些时候膝盖受伤的纽约巨人队四分卫）发生的事情--我们会把他从球员道具中剔除。所以在每个人的赌注都失败之前，现在我们迫使整个行业确保这一点。我们一直在思考如何让事情变得更好。
The second thing we did is we developed this thing called fair play. So if your player gets hurt in the first quarter — like what happened to Jaxson Dart [the New York Giants quarterback who injured his knee earlier this season] — we take him out of player props. So before everyone's bets were losing, and now we forced the whole industry to you know ensure it. We're always thinking about how to make things better.
三年内，我们从无关紧要到在博彩业务中拥有超过10%的份额。所以我们做得比其他公司做得更好。我们让它比DraftKings更好，比FanDuel更好。
We've gone from irrelevant to having more than 10% share in the betting business in three years. So we did it better than what other companies were doing. We made it better than DraftKings, better than FanDuel.
我们拥有整个博彩和游戏行业中最忠诚的客户群体，也正是因此，我们的市场份额从0%提升至10%。我们认为，没有其他公司会着手为全球数亿、甚至未来数十亿体育迷打造数字体育平台。我们是世界上唯一对此近乎偏执专注的公司。
We have the most loyal customers of anyone in the betting and gaming space, and that's why we've gone from 0% share to 10% We don't think there's another company thinking about building a digital sports platform for hundreds of millions — or over time billions — of sports fans globally. We're the only company in the world that's maniacally focused on it.
我们做的一切，都希望能为球迷做得更好，而我们并非一开始就有这种想法。创办一项业务时，你会思考如何推动业务增长？四五年前，我们制定了一项品牌使命：不断改善球迷体验。如今，如果我们认为某项业务无法显著惠及球迷，就不会进入。我们涉足的每项业务，都会找到方法，将其价值主张提升到远高于原有水平的程度。
Everything we do, we want to do better for fans, and we weren't necessarily born that way. When you start a business, you think about how do you grow the business? Then four or five years ago, we developed a brand purpose, which is to relentlessly enhance the fan experience. And we won't get into a business now if we think we can't make it significantly better for fans. Each business we've got into, we found ways to make the value proposition of that business much better than what it had been.
当我们进入对当时而言全新的球星卡收藏业务时，我们问：“该如何创新产品？”于是，我们打造了这些球员首秀纪念卡。我们采取了许多措施来创新产品、推广收藏文化，并与热衷收藏的运动员合作，让他们更深入地参与这项业务。这带来了一个重大突破。
When we got into the trading card business, which was a new business for us, we said: ‘Okay, how do we innovate the products?’We created these debut patches. We did so many things to innovate the product; to market the hobby; to work with athletes that were really into collecting to get them more involved in the business. That's been a major unlock.
我们每年约有2200万至2300万名客户，其中约3%是跨业务客户。这些客户的消费额是单一业务客户的五倍，复购频率则达到其1.5至3倍。我们确实看到了网络效应开始显现。
We have about 22 to 23 million customers a year, and about 3% of those are multi-business customers. Those customers spend five times as much as a single business customer, and they repeat anywhere from one-and-a-half to three times as much. We're really seeing the network effects kick in.
目前这一比例仅为3%，因此仍有很大的提升空间。不过，从我们成功转化的跨业务客户数量来看，增长曲线实际上正在变得 steeper。我们推动这种多业务消费行为才刚刚开始。
That's early days only at 3%, so we have a lot more to go. But the slope of the line is actually increasing in terms of how many multi-business customers we're converting. We're just getting started in terms of pushing that kind of behavior.
Fanatics 应用。这对我们来说是一个新项目，我们会在接下来一年里把这款产品做好，届时你们会看到我们投入数亿美元为其营销，因为我们的目标是让 Fanatics 应用成为体育领域最重要的应用。
The Fanatics app. That’s a new thing for us, and we’re going to get the product great over the next year, and then you're going to see us spend hundreds of millions of dollars marketing that because we want to make the Fanatics app the most important app in sports.
这款应用将提供最佳的手持商品购物体验、最好的球星卡交易平台、进行直播开包和即时开包的最佳体验，还会提供赛果、免费游玩游戏、门票和梦幻体育服务——所有功能都集中在一个应用中。它将成为我们所有业务的统一入口，但博彩和游戏业务除外，因为我们不会把它做成一款仅限年满21周岁人士使用的应用。没人会逼我做任何我们不想做的事。
This app will have the best commerce experience to buy merchandise, the best marketplace for trading cards, the best experience to do live breaks, instant rips, scores, free-to-play games, tickets and fantasy — all in one app. It’s the front door for all the things we do, other than betting and gaming because it’s not going to be an over-21 app. No one's gonna push me to do anything we don't want. I own 31% of the business. I have a super majority.
我持有公司31%的股份，并拥有绝对多数表决权。我们不会做任何不符合公司最佳利益的事。无论在近期还是中期，我都没有兴趣让公司上市。我们将来有可能上市吗？当然有可能。未来几年上市会给我带来任何顾虑吗？不会。零。我的意思是，低于零。
We're not doing anything that's not in the business's best interest. I have no interest in going public in the near- and mid-term. Could we ever go public? Absolutely. Do I have any issues with going public over the next several years? I do not. I want to be number one in everything that I'm doing. So I'm working on how to close the gaps in everything. And we have the cash flow generation from other businesses to fund any of these new things we're doing. Zero. I mean, less than zero.