We had a great time last year documenting how the business of professional sports often operates at a cost to taxpayers, fans, gamblers and even the players themselves.

This year already looks as if it’s going to make last year look like a beginner’s course.

We don’t consider ourselves to be great prognosticators or soothsayers by any stretch, but we can already see where at least a few of this year’s sports business storylines are headed just based on the calendar. Some of the rest were the topic of heavy chatter in 2015 that have limped their way into the new year. There are a few more that we could get into, but here are just five you’ll want to keep an eye on as 2016 gains momentum.

1. The Al Jazeera sports doping investigation

The network ran its documentary on the use and procurement of performance-enhancing drugs in December and — with the exception of lawsuits from Philadelphia Phillies slugger Ryan Howard and Washington Nationals power hitter Ryan Zimmerman — the reaction has been muted.

That fact wasn’t lost on the folks at the Boston Globe and Boston’s WEEI sports radio station, who noted that Al Jazeera’s claim that Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning used human growth hormone to recover from a neck injury are receiving far less attention than New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s alleged role in deflating footballs in last year’s playoffs.

The Manning-Brady rivalry aside, there are a whole lot of dollars attached to the silence surrounding Manning. For one, he’s quite friendly with NFL commentator Jim Nantz, who’s called the allegations against Manning “a non-story.” Not only does Nantz share an agent with Manning, but Nantz’s employers at CBS are paying the NFL roughly $1 billion a year through 2022 for the right to broadcast weekend NFL games, playoff games and the occasional Super Bowl. (Nantz will be calling Super Bowl 50 on CBS in February.)

Oh, and Nantz and Manning are also pitchmen for the NFL’s official pizza sponsor, Papa John’s International Inc. PZZA, -1.54% . That’s the other dilemma: Manning is leading the top team in the AFC through the playoffs this year while official league sponsors including Papa John’s and Nationwide Insurance run ads featuring him front-and-center. The NFL has had no shortage of hits to its reputation in recent years, but linking Manning to HGH at playoff time could prove costly to its bottom line if the story gets too big.

Even if the NFL, Manning and their allies manage to keep a lid on things until after the Super Bowl, there are far broader implications to the Al Jazeera report for sports in general. A New York Times follow-up to the report tied retired New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter’s trainer to a supply of performance-enhancing drugs. Jeter is a potential first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee when he becomes eligible in 2019. A stain on the reputation of a player considered “clean” — especially in comparison to Jeter’s former teammate Alex Rodriguez, who was suspended for the entire 2014 season for his role in a performance-enhancing drug scandal — could have huge consequences for a sport with ever-diminishing popularity.

2. The NFL’s return to Los Angeles

The Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers and St. Louis Rams all filed applications earlier this month to move to Los Angeles.

The Chargers and Raiders have devised a plan to split a $2 billion stadium in Carson, Calif., but that would require one of them to switch conferences. The Rams, meanwhile, got an offer of nearly $400 million for a new stadium from St. Louis, but Rams management last week not only deemed that offer unacceptable, but salted the earth that stadium would be built on by telling the NFL that the city flat out can’t support a franchise. Rams owner Stan Kroenke has begun building his own $2 billion stadium in Inglewood, Calif., without NFL approval and has fueled speculation that he might invite the Chargers in as a second tenant, leaving the Raiders the odd man out. Keep in mind, a 17-team finance committee still needs to weigh in on the feasibility of any plan, and 24 teams need to vote for relocation before any team can make the jump.

In the eyes of the three franchises mentioned, playing football in Los Angeles in 2016 is not only possible, but essential to their survival. An NFL meeting in a couple of weeks should clarify who gets to move and when, but it’s almost a lock that some existing NFL market is going to lose a team this year.

3. The 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil

This is already having enormous implications for Brazil, and Olympic athletes are roughly eight months away from setting foot there.

The Summer Games in August will come just after a dam breach sent toxic mud streaming into the Atlantic, political upheaval slashed the nation’s gross domestic product and its debt was reduced to junk status. Think the protests and plunder of the 2014 World Cup were something to witness? Imagine the reaction to profligate Olympic spending, forced evictions and a corruption scandal featuring dozens of congressmen, an effort to impeach President Dilma Rousseff for allegedly manipulating budget figures for the better and a push to remove the speaker of the lower house of Congress for alleged corruption.

The sports themselves are just kind of ancillary to this year’s Summer Games. At best, the Rio Olympics will serve as yet another referendum on the merits of the games’ exorbitant cost and the price nations pay to host them.

4. The NBA collective-bargaining agreement

Wait, isn’t that in place until the end of June 2021? Kind of.

Either the players or management can opt out on June 30, 2017. However, to do so, they have to announce their intentions by Dec. 15 of this year. That means we’ll know if the NBA’s agreement is toast by the end of this year, and it’s already looking grim for Commissioner Adam Silver and the players.

The current CBA went into place in 2011 and knocked 16 games off the schedule that year as players and teams hammered out details. Still, that was before the NBA somehow managed to get Disney’s ABC and ESPN and Time Warner’s Turner Sports (and its TNT network, specifically) to agree to a nine-year deal that pays the league $24 billion. That triples what the companies were paying for NBA rights, from $930 million each year to roughly $2.7 billion. Oh, and that new deal takes effect for the 2016-17 season.

This creates a bit of a problem. Currently, the league salary cap sits at $67.1 million for the current season. It will grow to $89 million in 2016-17 and to $108 million in 2017-18. However, that’s based on the old $930 million television-revenue number. The players know that networks are paying three times that much now, and LeBron James (among others) is looking to maintain his percentage of the take. With NBA Finals broadcasts outdrawing the World Series and the $875 million in ad revenue generated by the 2014 NBA playoffs trailing only that year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament ($1.13 billion) and Super Bowl ($1.23 billion), both players and owners know how much is at stake. Now let’s see if they can divvy it up evenly without costing the fans any games.

5. Daily fantasy sports

The issue of whether daily fantasy sports is gambling remains up for legal debate. Despite the misdeeds of their employees, the loss of operations in Nevada, continued setbacks in New York and the outside chance that they might have to return all their profits in the latter state, daily fantasy sports sites including DraftKings and FanDuel trudge on.

It seems like a lifetime ago that the annoying, bro-laden ads for daily fantasy sports were inundating NFL viewers and just about anyone reading a sports site. At the end of the NFL season, daily fantasy prize money was well off its midseason highs and still clearly reeling from setbacks in various states. Daily fantasy’s story for the rest of 2016 is going to hinge largely on the outcome of its legal battle in New York, but also on the reaction of other states to that decision. As Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada and Washington have made clear, the federal loophole for daily fantasy has little bearing on whether it lives and dies on a state-to-state basis. Instead of one big fight with the feds, it looks as if daily fantasy is going to take a beating in dozens of local battles.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.