Barstool's Telluride Bush Is Bleeding Seven Figures in CoD Challengers — and a Major IV Pass Fiasco Made It Worse

Running a professional Call of Duty development team costs real money. For Telluride Bush, the Barstool Sports-backed org competing in Activision's Challengers circuit, that cost runs into seven figures in player salaries — with nothing close to matching revenue on the other side of the ledger. That financial reality collided with a fresh logistical mess at Major IV Open in France, where Telluride Bush and several other top Challengers outfits were initially blocked from securing team passes to compete — raising uncomfortable questions about how the second-tier CDL ecosystem actually treats the organizations funding it.

Seven Figures Out, Profit Nowhere in Sight

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy put it plainly: there are seven figures of salaries tied up in the Telluride Bush roster, and he framed any further investment as conditional — the team would revisit scaling up once Bush itself starts netting seven figures in profit. For now, that profit isn't there. Co-owner Harry Settel stressed that the squeeze isn't unique to Telluride Bush, describing it as a problem facing other Challengers organizations too — and noting the team had burned through nearly every resource it could find while trying to lock down a spot at the Major. The org's income streams are narrow by design: player buyouts when Challengers talent gets promoted to the CDL proper, prize earnings, Twitch and YouTube subscriptions, and ad features. In 2026 alone, Telluride Bush sent six players up to CDL rosters — a development success story that nonetheless illustrates the core tension. Buyouts are one-time windfalls; salaries are recurring. The math doesn't close.

The Major IV Pass Lockout

Heading into the France Major IV Open, Telluride Bush found itself locked out of the competition alongside a group of top Challengers teams including FaZe Falcons, ROC, and Kabal. The initial pass allocation had left those 14 organizations without a route into the event unless they fought their way through to Grand Finals — a brutal ask for teams that had already invested in travel and preparation. The situation was resolved after CDL General Manager Daniel Tsay intervened, opening an additional 15 passes and agreeing to reimburse any teams that had overpaid in the scramble to secure spots. It was a fix, but the fact that it required a last-minute escalation underscored deeper structural concerns about how the Challengers infrastructure is managed. Telluride Bush's year had already been disrupted before France. A car crash involving the team during preparations for Major II in London added an unwelcome layer of adversity to what was already a financially grueling season.

A Development Pipeline With No Business Model

The tension at the heart of Telluride Bush's situation mirrors what several Challengers organizations have quietly acknowledged: the second tier of CDL is functioning as a talent pipeline for the league above it, but without the revenue infrastructure to sustain the orgs doing the development work. Activision's support for Challengers teams remains limited, and the economics rely on outcomes — buyouts, prize money — rather than stable operating income. For a media company like Barstool Sports, whose brand is built on attention and monetization, a team that produces promoted players but not profit is a hard sell internally, no matter how well the players perform. Telluride Bush's public accounting of its losses is one of the more direct admissions to come out of the Challengers scene. Whether Activision responds with structural changes to how development orgs are compensated — or whether the Major IV pass chaos is treated as a one-off administrative error — will say a lot about whether the CDL intends to keep organizations like Telluride Bush in the ecosystem long-term.