Why the Smartest Money in the World Wants a Piece of Your Local Team

As someone who has spent more than three decades in this industry, I have watched sports ownership go from a rich person’s indulgence to one of the most fought over asset classes on the planet, and it did not happen by accident. It happened because the leagues themselves spent the last six years quietly re-engineering the rules to make it happen. The record prices you are reading about this week are the result of that decision, not the cause of it.

The numbers say it plainly

Start with what just hit the wire. The Los Angeles Lakers agreed to sell this week for a reported $12.5 billion to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, a record for a North American sports franchise, less than a year after Mark Walter bought the team from the Buss family at a $10 billion valuation. Zoom out and the pattern holds across the board: the Seattle Seahawks, bought by Paul Allen for $194 million in 1997, are now being sold to the Khosla family at a reported $9.6 billion, roughly 49 times in 29 years. The Boston Celtics sold for $6.1 billion last year. The Baltimore Orioles went for $1.725 billion in 2024 to a group led by Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein. The Pittsburgh Penguins changed hands for $1.7 billion just this summer.

It is not only teams. The machinery built to invest in teams is changing hands too. Arctos Sports Partners, the biggest name in dedicated sports private equity, agreed this year to sell itself to KKR for $1.4 billion by KKR’s own figure (Bloomberg reported a $1 billion valuation on the same deal). When the leading shop in a category sells itself, that tells you something real about how this money actually thinks, and I will come back to that.

Leagues built this on purpose

None of this was possible ten years ago, because institutional capital simply was not allowed in. MLB opened the door first, in 2019. The NHL followed in 2021, the NBA in 2020 and again in 2022, and the NFL, the most conservative and most valuable league of all, went last, in August 2024, voting 31-1 to let approved funds buy passive, non-voting stakes capped around 10 percent with a six-year minimum hold. The approved list reads like a who’s who of the space: Arctos, Ares Management, Sixth Street, and a consortium including Blackstone, Carlyle and CVC.

Underneath that rule change sits a media rights machine that keeps growing. The NFL’s current national television deals run eleven years and are worth roughly $110 billion combined. The NBA signed its own eleven-year deal, worth in the range of $76 billion, last year. That revenue gets shared close to equally across every team regardless of how any single one performs on the field, which brings me to the sharpest line in this whole story.

A US franchise cannot be relegated out of existence. A Premier League club can be relegated into the Championship and lose the better part of its broadcast revenue in a single season, sometimes more than €100 million. An NFL team’s share of national media, licensing and sponsorship money arrives at roughly the same size whether it wins four games or fourteen, because that revenue is split almost equally across all thirty two clubs. Look at what the record price has done in eight years regardless of who was winning: $2.275 billion for the Panthers in 2018, $4.65 billion for the Broncos in 2022, $6.05 billion for the Commanders in 2023, and now $9.6 billion for the Seahawks. Investors are not chasing wins. They are chasing certainty, and American sports leagues, unlike their European counterparts, are structurally built to provide it.

Three kinds of money, three different goals

Not everyone writing these checks wants the same thing, and knowing the difference matters if you are ever on the other side of the table.

Private equity wants a return and eventually an exit, however patient the marketing sounds. Arctos proved that by selling itself. Family offices tend to want something closer to permanent ownership: Kwanza Jones and José Feliciano in the San Diego Padres, the Walton Penner family taking roughly 40 percent of the Colorado Rockies as its largest minority partner, and Mark Cuban’s Harbinger Sports Partners taking a stake in the Athletics ahead of their Las Vegas move. All personal capital, and no fund clock running. Billionaire owner-operators, meanwhile, are often after something that does not show up on a spreadsheet at all: the room, the access, the trophy.

Apollo is the clearest example of all three instincts living under one roof. In March, Apollo Sports Capital completed the acquisition of majority control of Atlético de Madrid, an outright ownership position of the kind US leagues will not permit. Apollo disclosed neither a price nor a percentage for it, and the trade press has put the club anywhere between €2.2 billion and €2.5 billion, so I will not pick a number for you. Days ago it agreed to something structurally different: a $2.6 billion arrangement with the New York Yankees mixing credit and equity, with Hal Steinbrenner retaining control. Bloomberg called it Apollo’s largest US sports investment. Around those sit a 10 percent stake in AC Milan, 10 percent of New York City FC, the YES Network and Legends Hospitality.

Look at that list again, because the shape of it is the point. Apollo is not picking teams. It is buying the whole value chain: the clubs, the network that broadcasts them, and the company that runs the hospitality inside the buildings. On Apollo’s own published numbers it has deployed roughly $17 billion across sport since 2025, split about $5 billion into leagues and media rights, $4 billion into stadiums and infrastructure, $3.5 billion into clubs and franchises, $2.5 billion into sports-adjacent entertainment and $2 billion into sports technology and analytics. Only a fifth of that went into owning teams. The firm sizes the total opportunity at a $2.5 trillion investable ecosystem and projects the addressable slice growing from $97 billion this year to $185.9 billion by 2035. Those are Apollo’s figures, published by Apollo, and you should read them the way you read any house projection. But the deployment split is the tell, and it says the smart money thinks the team is the least interesting thing you can buy.

Regulation is quietly helping. The UK’s new Independent Football Regulator is the kind of governance framework that reads as interference from inside the game and as downside protection from outside it. Investors price enforced financial sustainability as a reason to pay more, not less.

What it means

For team and league operators, capital is now available for stadiums, technology and expansion in a way it simply was not a decade ago. For anyone selling into sport, suppliers, technology vendors, media companies, the money increasingly follows the layer of the business that throws off steady cash flow: ticketing infrastructure, media rights, data, not just the logo on the jersey.

And for our own client-partners, this convergence is showing up closer to home than it might appear. Sportradar and Genius Sports both flagged prediction market partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket as real growth drivers in their most recent results, and both of those platforms have raised nine and ten figure rounds of their own in just the past few months. Sports, media and betting are becoming one capital story, not three.

That category is also growing up faster than most people realise. There are now nine prediction market operators shipping responsible trading and gaming tools inside their own mobile apps: Kalshi, DraftKings Predictions, FanDuel Predicts, Fanatics Markets, PrizePicks, Underdog, Novig, Sleeper and Prophet X. Operators do not build that infrastructure for fun. They build it when they expect to be held to an operator’s standard, and capital notices the difference between a venue that is preparing to be regulated and one that is hoping not to be.

None of this reads to me like a bubble. It reads like a market finding its natural owners, each type of capital settling into the role it is actually built for. If your organization is weighing where it fits in this shift, whether as a target, a co-investor, or a partner to one of the funds above, that is exactly the conversation SCCG has every week. Let’s set up a call.

By Stephen A. Crystal, Founder & CEO, SCCG Management. The Gambling Industry’s Global Connector.