A portly man with a buzz cut and a snug white gi-like jumpsuit sidled into the passenger seat of the Toyota Scion. Seconds later, an older, but, at first glance, fitter man with one eye slightly askew plopped behind the wheel, dressed in black.
Both gazed forward, huffing, filling the video frame. They bumped fists.
A signal was given. The man on the left wrangled his lighter opponent from behind the wheel and into the back seat, facilitating the move with a deft flip of the recliner handle.
In another Scion, on another livestream, combatants interlaced as three officials in striped jerseys circled, occasionally adjusting potentially injurious knobs and handles in the interior. A few fans in chairs along the nearby wall gazed at the spectacle, close enough to take in the new car smell and sweat. This, as one of the combatants forced his opponent to submit by wrapping a seat belt around his neck.
Music blared, body parts flailed.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the livestream announcer in a ringside announcer growl, “this is what a murder in progress looks like.”
This is what CarJitsu looks like. And this is what Pro League Network looks like.
A studio and game lab
Founded in 2022 by Mike Salvaris and Bill Yucatonis, PLN is a media production company with a sports studio in Branson, Missouri, that stages, broadcasts, and creates content — including betting lines for sale to sportsbooks — around bespoke events targeted at a young male audience. It currently features 15 competitions, most centered around combat sports like Slap Fight, CarJitsu, Ultimate Tire Wrestling, Coffin Wars, and Chest Chop, but also includes mini-golf and a 3-on-3 basketball series called “Str33t,” in collaboration with former NBA player Kevin Garnett.
Salvaris — a former senior external adviser at McKinsey & Company — and Yucatonis — who like Salvaris is a former Revolutionary Racing executive — consider PLN, foremost, an entertainment medium. Sports is the grist.
“It’s all produced with a sort of fun, irreverent, casual style,” Salvaris told InGame. “There’s a lot of humor in the broadcast. Even though the sport itself is properly regulated, we’ve got great integrity, we tend to enthuse it as a sports entertainment product first, rather than trying to play it as a straight sporting product.”
PLN is the Savannah Bananas of body blows, billing itself as “basically what would happen if Ozark bushcraft experts, NYC ad gurus, and your cousin who can balance a lawn chair on his chin started a sports empire. We’re part league commissioners, part storytellers, part stand-up comedians — cranking out live digital sports every week like it’s our weird family talent show … and somehow, it works.”
PLN has built out its menu by inventing some sports and deconstructing others. Add some random clowns to a golf competition, add a DJ to halfcourt basketball game in a city park. And move a jiu-jitsu match inside a sensible car so nonsense can ensue.
“We look for either stylistic or deconstructive formats to go in, and then we also look for ways that we can add a little bit of what I like to call a facade, or the entertainment layer,” Yucatonis said. “It’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu rules. It’s sanctioned, with the veneer of the car around it being that ‘Oh my god, what is this?’”
PLN has a stable of about 60 scholarship or salaried athletes, with some competing in various competitions. There’s a list of hopefuls too long to address. The combat sports lineup includes multiple former UFC fighters, including two-time heavyweight champion Tim Sylvia.
The deconstruction and spitballing has led to letdowns, like carrom — a Southeast Asian board game that failed to translate — and to surprise successes like Chest Chop.
“The old Ric Flair chop and turning it into a sport … there was some thinking internally about whether it was going come across as just another slap fight,” Yucatonis said, “but through our creative director we were able to form a great partnership with a regional wrestling circuit, and what we’ve seen pop is that showmanship of a professional wrestler and the skills that they bring, between rounds and the walkouts and so on. That was a missing ingredient that we didn’t have in some of our other sports. We’re pleasantly surprised.”
PLN is a multi-platform onslaught
Using its own social channels, broadcast partners like Stadium, and a web of influencers, PLN, Salvaris said, generates upward of 30 million social impressions per week with no ad buys. Revenue is derived primarily through sponsorships and advertising, with rights fees, wagering revenue, and merchandising adding to the till.
“We give out the content to the creator, creator puts their face in front of it and they watch it with their audience, which is fantastic for the creator. It creates a lot of value for them, it creates a lot of value for us,” Salvaris explained.
Then there’s creator “nested events,” where PLN athletes visit internet powerhouses for livestreams, such as the on-site Coffin War with Kai Cenat, or another Chest Chop with rapper T-Pain.
“We’re also working with creators about setting up new IPs, partnering with them to create new sports, which we will then sort of co-invest in terms of that production know-how and that marketing promotion,” Salvaris added. “And then they’ll lean in on that, on the marketing and the participation, and I think that’s going to create a lot of value.”
On a typical Friday night, viewers can watch an event live on the Stadium television network or on PLN’s YouTube channel, and concurrently with a content creator like Joe Bartolozzi — who has 2.3 million followers — on Twitch.
“For that same event, it’s distributed quite widely,” Salvaris said. “And there’s different viewing. There’s different audiences associated with those different channels, and different viewings as well.”
Betting on PLN sports is available in 16 states
Putt Tour is PLN’s most widely approved game for wagering — allowed in 16 states — while SlapFIGHT Championship, CarJitsu Championship, and Str33t are less widely available.
Currently, DraftKings is the only sportsbook purchasing PLN markets for wagering. Bet365, BetMGM, Betfred, and Tipico are former customers. Salvaris said PLN is re-emphasizing the wagering aspect of the business and expects more operators in the next six months.
“To be honest, when we first started, we rushed toward wagering and getting up on wagering operators, and we did. We’re up on DraftKings, but there are a lot of issues around being able to seamlessly deliver them integration of our data into the sportsbook,” Salvaris explained. “If we do it individually, it’s quite hard. But we’re now working with a couple of third-party providers that we basically send our data to and then integrate it into the sportsbook, so it’s a much more seamless process for us to actually get data into the books.”
Most wagering is pre-game because of the varying latency lags of numerous platforms, but PLN hopes to add more microbetting for its putting contests.
“The ultimate experience for our sports is the watch-and-wager in-play,” Yucatonis said, “We intentionally construct the broadcast to be hole-by-hole, easily-entertained, you can jump in at any time.
“So, technically speaking, we’ve built this to both have an entertainment experience and a technical experience, to support in-play [betting]. Even for slap fighting, we’re adding some of the on-screen analytics around impact and other computer vision predictors that will help support in-play there, too.”
PLN audience = coveted sports betting demo
PLN’s core audience is overwhelmingly aged 22-34 and 65% male, aligning with the key demographic of sports bettors in the United States. The golf audience skews older, the combat sports younger, Salvaris said.
PLN is too new to know if its audience will age out of its content, but the company intends to try to hold on to it as if it had a seatbelt wrapped around its collective neck.
“We’re a sports entertainment company, so we’ve got to entertain, and we’ve got to think about how our content grows with our fans as we get bigger, wiser, older, and new fans come in,” Yucatonis said. “We kind of meet you where you are.”
