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54 turns · 52 minIn July of 2020, George Berrios had a thick employment agreement sitting in front of him. He just left WWE after more than a decade, the back half of it as co-CEO. Private Equity bought Univision and they wanted him to run it. Someone close to him read the room better than he did. She told him, but then he's excited about something, you can hear it. And listening to him talk about this, he didn't sound excited. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. The next morning, he called and turned it down. Then he called Michelle Wilson, his co-CEO at WWE, and told her he wanted to build something with her instead. She told him of the best call she's gotten in a long time. And this episode is what came after that phone call. Taking Valero public through SPAC in 2021, in the middle of the frothest IPO market in decades, going back to WWE to architect the merger with UFC that created TKO. And this past April, closing on Global Sports Group with CBC, a holding company built around minority stakes in La Liga, League One, the WTA, FIBA, and rugby. Leagues and federations, no teams by design. George Barrios is back for round two, and this one goes where the first one didn't. Why public markets don't demand different skills, just brighter light. The three questions every management team should be able to answer to a six-year-old. I'm Bryce Clinton, and this is The Roar Podcast.
Welcome to The Roar Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Grossman. With me today again is George Berrios. George, welcome back to the podcast.
Adam, thanks for having me back. Appreciate it.
Well, I think we had to have you back. We got such good feedback on your first episode. It's one of the ones we get the most feedback on. So we pinpointed a few areas from the first podcast that we're going to jump into. So for those of you who haven't listened to the first one, definitely go back, listen to the first one. George had a book come out, which we're happy to plug again. I don't know if we can start from there and then we'll jump into the rest of the conversation.
Yeah, my publisher would kill me if you gave me an opening not to pull up the book and talk about it. But yeah, it came out in June. Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt. It's a business memoir. It covers my journey, including the transformation of WWE and closing the biggest deal in sports history. So yeah, it was a labor of love to write. And available where all books are sold. Amazon, Barnes & Noble. You can read the prologue on georgebarrios.com if you want to get a flavor for the book.
Yeah, George had several events, which I've been tracking on social media, and it looks like a good time. So hopefully if you haven't seen George at one of the events, you'll see George soon.
That would be great. So
in the first podcast and in your book, you mentioned obviously talking about your career, and we spent a lot of time on the WWE. We spent less time about your career post-WWE, and that's where we want to start. today's conversation. In particular, you had a, I don't want to say interregnum, but you had a time period after you left WWE, before you came back to WWE, where you launched ISOs and ISOs Capital. So probably a good place
Episode notes
George Barrios walked away from a signed offer to run Univision in July 2020, called his former WWE co-CEO Michelle Wilson the next morning, and told her he'd rather build something with her instead. In his second appearance on The ROAR Podcast, he walks Adam Grossman through everything that decision produced: taking Bowlero public via SPAC at the peak of the frothiest IPO market in decades, returning to WWE to architect the merger with UFC that created TKO, and closing this past April on Global Sports Group — a holding company built with CVC around minority stakes in LaLiga, Ligue 1, the WTA, FIVB, and three rugby properties. Leagues and federations only. No teams, by design.
Along the way, George unpacks the lesson a former boss gave him at thirty-one — that running a business for the short term is easy, running it for the long term is easy, and doing both at once is the actual job — and the three questions he believes any management team should be able to answer clearly enough for a six-year-old. Then the conversation turns to AI, and the two of them stop agreeing. George argues that a company's alpha lives in its workflow and its data, and that handing that to a vendor under an AI-as-a-service model is a mistake he wouldn't make: build the harness around the model yourself, own the code. Adam pushes back hard from a data governance and partnership angle. Neither one gives