For years, owning a professional sports team was, in some form or another, a very personal investment.
When a team was sold and ownership changed hands, the new owner was usually just one person.
Sometimes, that ownership would also include a few friends and family members.
Institutions, like hedge funds or private equity firms, were not allowed to participate in buying a team.
And those were still the rules in the National Football League when Apollo co -founder Josh Harris bought the Washington Commanders in 2023.
The NFL was quite restrictive as to they only would allow you a certain number of owners and then obviously their rules, in essence, vests all of the power, the control if you will, in one person because they want to make sure that someone can make decisions on behalf of the teams.
But these teams are a lot more expensive than they used to be.
And the NFL alone, valuations have tripled in just 10 years.
In 2014, the Buffalo Bill is traded for $1 .4 billion.
The Panthers traded for two and change.
And then in, I think, 2022, the Broncos traded for high fours.
And obviously we bought the Commanders at six, 18 months ago.
So buying or investing in a team now requires quite simply a lot more capital.
And over the past 15 years, the professional sports leagues in the U .S.
and Europe have slowly loosened ownership rules to allow private equity and other institutional money to provide this capital.
And some leagues, institutions can buy a minority stake, while in other leagues it allows for full ownership.
But when Josh Harris was preparing a bid for the Washington Commanders, the NFL was the holdout.
It was the only major league that didn't allow private equity and team ownership.
So Harris assembled a group of individual investors to raise and invest approximately $5 billion of equity for that deal.
I think that everyone realized that that was very hard to do and that they thought that it was time to allow for more capital going into the business.
And about one year after the commanders deal closed, the NFL finally embraced the trend and made it possible for a select group of institutions to invest in its teams.
When the NFL made that choice, it meant that private equity now had access to every major sports league across both the U .S.
and Europe. It marked a new era in the business of sports, one that is already changing how teams are run, how athletes are paid, how games are watched, and even the very nature of fandom.
This is Investing in Sports, a mini -series from the Goldman Sachs Exchanges podcast about the changing dynamics at the intersection of sports and finance.
I'm Nicole Pullen -Ross.
I lead the private wealth management business for the New York region at Goldman Sachs.
And I also head our sports and entertainment offering for Goldman Sachs private wealth management.
Over the next four episodes, I'll be speaking to my colleagues who work across the business of sports for Goldman Sachs.
We'll also have the opportunity to hear from team owners and leaders who are at the forefront of the transformation happening across the industry.
We'll cover the new ownership landscape and how streaming is changing the way we watch sports.
The disruption we're seeing, the whole business model has in effect been turned upside down.
The total addressable market for sports is the population of the world.
They're recognizing they've got to make the product interesting.
They have to make it vital to the user, to the viewer.
What it takes to build a fan experience of the future.
This was going to be a basketball maka.
It was going to be all about the game.
It's Arena on steroids.
The growth in women's sports, and what all of this means for investors.
I think it needs to be patient capital, but I think that capital will see a return.
The evolution of the sports ecosystem continues to expand.
What it's going to be in five years, just put your seatbelt on and get on for the ride.
Welcome to the revolution.
In our first episode, I'll be sitting down with Commander's owner, Josh Harris, to ask how his approach to sports is so much different than his other investments.
But before that, I'm pleased to be joined by two of my Goldman Sachs colleagues from our sports investment banking team.
Dave Dassey, who's the global co -head of Sports Investment Banking, and Ellis Jones, our head of sports advisory.
We'll talk about how sports became big business, the way institutional investors are thinking about sports as an investment opportunity, and what the scale of this opportunity could look like over the next few years.
Dave Ellis, we spend a lot of time together given our shared client base.
It is a pleasure to have you both here today.
It's great to be here, Nicole.
Thank you, Nicole. So, Ellis, we work with clients who explore a broad range of investment opportunities.
Sports can be different.
What is unique about sports as an investment?
I think that's absolutely right.
The reality is the sports market has an addressable market of just shy of 8 billion people.
It touches every corner of the world.
And over the last 15, 16 years, the penetration of that distribution network has grown immeasurably.
I mean, it's only 2007 that the iPhone was introduced.
If you think about our transition from 3G to 4G to 5G networks, and the ability to transfer data at much lower latencies, has meant that we can access more people.
We're able to touch all four corners of the world.
Sport touches almost everyone in some form or another.
It's a hugely important pillar to society.
And that was most evident through COVID, not only in the absence of not being able to watch, but also participate in sport.
And I think the spotlight was shown on the industry as a non -cyclical, high -revenue generating industry that people wanted more of.
And whether that was demonstrated with the non -scripted media that came through the streamers through that period, whether it was the all or nothing series with Amazon, or indeed Drive to Survive with Netflix, it shone a light on how important it was.
But in many instances, sport is not moved at the same pace of change of other industries, particularly tech.
And so the opportunity to grow and the opportunity to invest and the opportunity to increase value at different parts of the ecosystem has been very evident to people.
And that's why I think all of the capital has spent time and an increasing amount of time on the industry.
It's quite a lot that sets sports apart from other investments.
So Dave, what have you observed in the US in terms of institutional capital looking to get exposure to sports?
I think this in large part is very consistent with what we've seen in terms of this booming growth of the private capital markets and the evolution we've seen across other sectors as well.
But as you think about returns and what they're focused on, these returns historically have been very uncorrelated to other returns in the marketplace, which is attractive.
These are very long duration oriented type assets.
And so these are 25, 50, 75, 100 year assets.
And so a lot of this institutional capital or family office capital or quite frankly, sovereign wealth or insurance capital is very, very long dated.
So there's an alignment of interest there.
In North America, the leagues have very strong governance, which makes it restrictive in terms of how much capital can come in today, but it also sets these businesses up such that you actually know what you're buying.
You know the operating model, you understand what the costs can be, and you certainly understand the revenues which come in on a consistent basis.
You know, in large part, what those are going to be.
And historically, those revenues have grown very, very aggressively through cycles from a digital rights distribution perspective.
I think the scarcity element to it is still very, very appealing.
It's historically been a billionaires club in terms of who can buy these, but the number of decabillionaires around the world, the number of billionaires around the world is growing much faster than the number of North American franchises in the major sports.
We'll talk about women's sports in some of the adjacent areas as well, because there's a lot of capital that's moving into those areas.
And I think people have a fundamental sense that as capital comes in, there's going to continue to be this evolution in terms of how do you capitalize these entities.
Today, they capitalize very conservatively, very low loan to value rates, given the franchise value of these.
And over time, I suspect that will change.
There will be more creativity in terms of what you can put into how you finance the purchase of an asset or how you own an asset, which will drive down the cost of capital, which in theory should help drive up valuations.
And so there's definitely a lot to like from that perspective.
Yeah. Ellis, the picture outside of North America can be a little different.
Dave talked about governance, ability to capitalize as themes that are present in the North American markets for sure.
How would you characterize the rest of the world?
The irony of the egalitarian position of the major US leagues to ownership and distribution of revenues in a more equal fashion is frankly very different to the other leagues and propositions around the rest of the world.
And as a result of that, we've seen a far greater mix of capital come into European sports.
If we look at the soccer Premier League in the UK, you know, we have a real mix of equity owners and capital providers across the ecosystem already.
We have ultra high net worth and that has historically been the case.
We've seen the success of sovereign wealth coming into ownership of franchises, firstly with Man City, most notably and then latterly with the PIF in Newcastle to name but two.
But we've also seen institutional capital.
So when we look at the likes of, you know, Liverpool with their ownership by Fenway, this has been around for some time.
It's not new and most notably it's in a majority position.
And so that story has been there.
Unfortunately, the real difference is not all of those business generate free cash flow and have had the same success as the US.
And that has been demonstrated by the difference in valuation perspectives.
And so actually you get a far greater differentiation in values and a lot more uncertainty.
But it's right to say that there is an element of greater maturity of different forms of capital in non US sports than we've seen in US sports today, who've been far more thoughtful perhaps at times as to how they introduce that capital.
Okay, we've touched on a few of the major changes that have made sports an attractive investment opportunity.
So let me sum them up.
First scarcity, there are a limited number of professional teams yet the number of billionaires has increased.
Second, the growth in media rights revenue.
Take the NFL for example, the annual value of the NFL's media rights contract was 2 .2 billion in 2000.
Today, the annual value of its current contract is $10 billion.
Third, leagues have slowly opened up to private equity and institutional capital.
And four, as a result, there's been substantial growth in team valuations for major US men's leagues compound annual growth rates of between 10 and 14%.
That's the broad picture.
What's been most interesting to you?
Look, from my perspective, I think these assets were underappreciated in terms of them being true businesses and were thought of more as a sports franchise.
Today, and many of the owners who have bought in over the last 10, 15 years have thought of these as operating businesses, which not only are games and content, but also have all the ancillary elements to it.
So you talked about the sports rights and the significant growth and trajectory from that perspective.
The ability to aggregate audience, which has made the live programming that much more scarce, which has driven up the advertising in terms of really wanting to get exposure and get access to this live content.
We talk about social and these viral moments, the 24 seven nature of it.
The players is stars and personalities, not only in the sports realm, but increasingly crossing over into music, entertainment, et cetera.
We've gotten to a point where I think assets are plus or minus in that zone of being fairly valued today.
I think the returns will still continue to be very, very good.
But it's been incredible in terms of what these returns have looked like over the last decade or so.
I'd love to flip for a minute forward a page and look at the implications of the trends that we've seen and the changes that we've seen.
Dave, you talked a little bit about how some teams owners have really led the teams in various leagues and the leagues themselves to be operating businesses.
And I think some would argue that for many years, to your point, these assets have been looked at as generational assets.
And so we're starting to hear more and more of this concept of how sports is becoming more professionalized, if you will.
And so if we think about conversations you're having following the capital, where are clients focused right now?
Where are you seeing capital most deployed at this point?
I think increasingly, capital is looking for multiple paths to potentially make money, not inconsistent with how investors look or how private equity firms look at other businesses.
And so buying a team, but is there potentially a stadium alternative?
Building a city around the stadium or the arena, is there the ability to invest or is it a platform that could be multi -sport team ownership?
Probably seven out of 10 that are multi -team ownership.
And so having multiple teams owned, is that attractive?
Do you get diversification?
Do you get access to more fans, more data, more analytics, which allows you to build on these direct consumer models?
So I think there's certainly one theme.
And then I wouldn't call them secondary sports, but the smaller sports, the sports adjacent stuff, the gaming, the ticketing, the data and analytics, the healthcare businesses that are around sports.
There's a lot of really interesting capital that's going in.
Use sports as a big potential growth area or roll -up opportunity.
And so I think the capital is looking to go into, quite frankly, the entire ecosystem.
I'll add to that with regards to if you take Formula One, for example, Liberty Media took that business on in 2016.
Frankly speaking, have taken that to a whole new place with the entertainment factor, bringing effectively 24 races around the world on average watched by 70 million people per race.
When you compare that to the Super Bowl at 110 million, it's quite staggering.
When you think of the forms of capital coming into that, you have people looking at the teams, both in equity and credit.
But furthermore, what is quite interesting is the commercial opportunity.
So the commercial upside on sponsorship.
And whilst that isn't direct ownership, that is huge with regards to capital, helping the teams fund themselves and grow and outperform.
And of course, that's driven higher valuations.
When I talked about entertainment earlier, this is the case study 101.
We had COVID, we had Netflix, we had Drive to Survive.
Taking that sport to a completely different audience, lowering the age of the eyeball, which gives it a much bigger consumer opportunity for everyone, whether it's the teenager who's never watched it in North America, to those who followed it for decades, but are able to get more data and analytics
delivered to them through the content that is provided.
Yeah, it's a really great example of how leagues and teams have become media brands, and how in an era of direct to consumer content, storytelling by these brands will be really important.
We're going to cover that a lot more in our next episode.
For now, Ellis, from your perspective, what are some other areas for growth?
The key point here is about increasing revenues, managing costs, and finding different ways to deliver greater utility.
And of course, more than that comes at a cost to the consumer or at a price to the consumer.
So when we think about the ecosystem as a whole, whether you're at the league level, the franchise level, or otherwise, finding new ways to make money are going to be critical to that success.
And the sports adjacent market and the sports adjacent business market is going to be critical.
We've already seen it in many aspects.
When you look at the success of fanatics in its distribution of merchandise and otherwise, we've talked about the convergence with the entertainment industry, but the producers and how that's impacted by the influence of the streamers.
And so forth. And then of course, the big thing in America right now is the growth of the US sports betting market.
Now, interestingly, that is a mature market, particularly in the UK or elsewhere in the world.
There are some markets where it doesn't exist, and it's more about fantasy.
But if you think about the proliferation of betting in the US market over the last few years, it's been huge.
So given that, how should investors think about the scale of all of that if you put the various pieces altogether?
I mean, I've heard estimates ranging from $630 billion to a trillion.
Some recent reports put it at $3 trillion.
How do you get there?
Give us a little bit of perspective on how big this can be from your vantage point.
I think I touched upon it earlier when I said the total addressable market for sports is the population of the world in some form or another.
When I think you look at the US and you look at the average revenue per fan, per franchise within the NFL, it is already pretty high.
And if you then break down at where they're consuming and where they're spending their money at each point, it's pretty demonstrable in that effect.
When you look at that across other sports, they're still relatively nascent and still immature in many ways around how they monetize the average revenue per user.
If you look at the Premier League alone, it is said that over 3 billion of the world's population engage in the Premier League on a regular basis.
The Premier League runs for some between 38, 40 weeks of the year.
It sits on time zone zero, so it is watched actively in Asia, very actively across Europe, and now increasingly in America.
And that's demonstrated by the increase in valuation in media rights, particularly outside of the UK.
But those media rights are still less than half of the annual media rights of the NFL, a sport that has half the number of weeks in which it operates in.
And when you then dissect where the fan is actively consuming and paying to consume, you'll find that the average revenue per fan is much, much lower.
So as an investor, and you dissect the ecosystem, what you're really looking for are those opportunities that can really drive that revenue increase and where it can be done in a profitable way, as opposed to where in the past there's been a higher cost relative to the revenue earn.
You all have painted a very vivid picture around the entire ecosystem and the opportunity that exists.
Speak for a minute about some of the challenges that investors should be considering.
What do you worry about, given where valuations are?
What are some of the flashing yellow lights that investors should be considering?
Look, I think media rights have spiked dramatically, right?
So you've seen two, two and a half, three times step up each time we've gone through this.
The disruption that is taking place in these business models, the legacy media companies aren't in the position they used to be.
The technology companies, they've been coming into the sports ecosystem.
I think that dynamic sets up very, very well for those rights and those distribution rights to continue to grow at an accelerated pace.
But there may be a world where you don't get as much competition from that.
And so you get a more modest step up or increase in terms of those distribution rights.
I think to the extent you're going into a league or a team, governance is critically, critically important in terms of what's the decision making body?
How does it make decisions?
What is the growth plan for the league as well as for the teams?
Because that can really put guardrails around what could go poorly from that perspective.
One thing I spend a lot of time thinking about, and I always talked a lot about Formula One, but how many sports are really going to be able to punch through to this next level?
And we are living in a world today where the strongest from a sports perspective I think are getting stronger and the biggest brands in those leagues are getting bigger and stronger.
And so the days of a sports team being local, they didn't went to regional, then to national.
And the biggest and best brands now are global brands.
And there's probably 15 or 20 teams across all different sports around the globe that are truly global.
So how much shelf space is there really for some of these other sports to punch through?
And I think for them to get these dramatic step function increases and valuations, they're going to need to garner some of that 8 billion people.
But that doesn't mean many of the smaller emerging leagues, women's sports, et cetera, there's huge upside, huge opportunity, and huge runway before they have to worry about, in essence, punching through and taking on some of the big three.
Alice, anything you'd like to add in terms of challenges on the horizon to be on the lookout for?
The derivation of sports, whereas community assets, they belong to people, they belong to the fans.
You need capital to grow and you need capital to compete.
What really matters to the fans is they're performing on the pitch.
But the reality of that is there are legacy decisions and governance, particularly outside of the United States, that are more challenging to overcome.
So when people are looking at investing in a sport and where they're going to invest in a sport and the type of capital, they're investing, they've got to understand the sport, they've got to understand the asset they're buying, and they've got to understand the fans.
And ultimately, those who are investing need to be mindful of how quickly they can make a difference, how quickly they can implement the difference, and what is their real return.
People are not necessarily going to be overly happy if a team is underperforming, but there are returns being paid out in dividends to owners.
They want to see their teams perform, and you need those people to turn up to the stage in each week.
What I do think is important and will drive the continued thoughtfulness around investing is more and more people are getting greater utility from engaging in this sports ecosystem.
It brings the happy factor, and if there are people that can facilitate that growth and facilitate people's enjoyment of going to a game, watching a game, watching a game within a saturated weekend, those will be the winners because they'll have taken what actually makes the fan enjoy the opportunity
of watching sport. Great.
Dave Ellis, thank you for a very enlightening conversation.
We'll look forward to continuing the discussion.
Thank you, Nicole. Thank you, Nicole.
I'm a value investor.
I buy things at Seven Times Cash Flow, or I try to create mid -teens yields.
In sports, you're never going to do that.
I'm very excited about my next guest, who might be best known to our listeners as one of the most prominent private equity investors of our time.
Josh Harris co -founded Apollo Global Management and recently founded alternative investment firm 26 North.
And prior to that, in 2017, he and long -time business partner David Blitzer founded Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment.
Over the past 15 years, he's also assembled a very impressive portfolio of professional sports teams.
He's acquired an NBA team, an NHL team, a stake in an English Premier League team, and most recently, an NFL team with his record -setting purchase of the Washington commanders.
I started by asking him how important it was to have a personal connection to the teams he's invested in.
I think sports is a community endeavor.
Some of my greatest memories, you know, in Washington, truthfully, I remember literally being eight years old and watching the 1972 Super Bowl and then going up to Penn as a freshman and watching, you know, the Sixers win the NBA title with Dr.
J. M. Osmo and Amoris Cheeks and Andron and I witnessed all of that and I saw the community come together in Washington and Philly and so I share, I'm a fan.
So I understand the frustration when the team's not winning.
I understand, you know, what it means to be able to own the teams I grew up with.
It's a dream come true.
I'd love to go back to your first investment in sports back in 2011, when you did the deal for the Philadelphia 76ers.
Talk to us a little bit about the catalyst for that and kind of what spurred that initial investment.
Look, to go back to 2011, 2010, the Sixers were owned by Comcast Spectacore, which is obviously a huge, important company.
They were a cable business and I just literally called Comcast and, you know, started Dogg and then 18 months later, you know, I was able to acquire the Sixers.
We did it in a so -called corporate carve out and the NBA at that point was going into a lockout and the Sixers were losing 25 to 30 million dollars a year and they were low 20s out of 30 teams in the NBA at that point in terms of revenue.
But I just felt that this was something I wanted to do.
I wanted to bring the Sixers back to where I had witnessed them during their glory years.
I just said, look, we got to do this.
I put together a group, I enlisted David Blitzer, who's a, you know, now we own this company together and we bought Sixers and basically fast forward.
The Sixers are now like fifth in revenues in the league and we reconnect the city.
We're an elite team.
We're really hopeful, but I had so much fun doing that that we then went on to do other things in sports.
It was a life changer for me.
I love that. It's interesting to hear you share the perspective of where the revenues were when you started and how much they've grown over time.
It wasn't that long ago where a lot of investors thought about owning a sports team really as a trophy asset.
The price to own one was obviously much different than it is today.
I'd love to get your perspective as it relates to how you navigate the emotional side of investing in a sports team and the financial side.
I read an interview that you did with the Washington Post and it was about your first year as owner of the Washington commanders.
In that interview, you said, I'm typically unemotional about financial decisions, but here it was more emotional.
So I'm curious what made running a team more emotional than making other financial decisions and how did your experience help you approach that?
Yeah, so I mean, obviously people do things for different reasons.
For me personally, I was always emotional.
I started off emotionally in sports with the Sixers and I ended up emotionally involved with the Washington commanders.
But for me, when I get involved in these sports teams, and I have partners in all of them, I say to people, look, we're in this to win it.
The currency in private equity is EBITDA and stock price and value creation.
The currency in sports to me is creating memories and championships.
And that's about experience.
It's about having a great stadium and serving great food and all of it.
And then it's about engaging with the cities in a positive way.
And so all of those things are my currency in sports and year in and year out, it's not the same as a financial vessel.
You want to have EBITDA or no, you're going to do what you have to do to win.
And if the cities think that you're in it for them, they support you, right?
They think you're in it for money, they don't support you.
You got to be in this for the right reasons, which I think are, even though I own these assets, I be myself as a steward for the cities.
And you can't do this on the cheap.
You got to be all in and basically invest to grow and go play it for the players, for the fans, for everyone, so that you set yourself up to have the best chance of winning.
Okay, so how do you think of sports as an investment?
You can't worry about cash flow.
You have to invest and you have to be in it for the right reasons.
But the investment case for sports, particularly the major sports, is that depending on the sport, but I'll just use the NFL, 70 % of the team is media, right?
It's coming from the globalization, the fact that like international, everyone in the world wants to watch the best audiences.
So the audiences are globalizing.
The fact that media content can now be delivered everywhere in the world.
In many cases, more people watch the Sixers in China than watch them in Philly.
I mean, there's just a massive following around the world.
And that has propelled the revenues up and it's a correlated, right?
So if you look at the NFL, in 2014, the Buffalo Bills traded for 1 .4 billion, and then the Panthers traded for two and change.
And then 2022, the Broncos traded for high fours.
And obviously we bought the commanders at six, 18 months ago.
So it's tripled in 10 years.
The NFL has such massive media presence, but if you looked at the NBA, the NHL, and you look at the growth in Forbes or Sportico, whatever, you'll see that these have been good investments.
And other people might say, okay, well, I want to manage to the bottom line.
This is not how we do it.
I liked them as part of a portfolio, but I say to everyone, because we have partners, you know, look, not everyone feels the way that I do.
And I say, look, this is my investment case.
We might spend to win.
We're going to spend and invest and make everything.
But here's the story around global media and that element exists in sports.
I think it is quite a good investment.
Tell me a little bit as you talk about the commanders, you made the decision to accelerate capital deployment there.
What did you see? What sort of things does it make sense to invest in in that way versus areas where you'd be more cautious?
Yeah. So when we got there, obviously it had been a complicated situation.
We saw a lot of things that we should and could invest in.
And the way I look at it as I view the stadium as our house, right?
Like this is what I say to my partners and I view our fans as honored guests, right?
And so we've come in and tried to do a lot of different things at once to upgrade the fan experience.
I mean, obviously the best thing we can do is win football games.
But you know what? There's 31 other teams that also have that same goal.
So we're really hard at work at that.
But while we're doing that, what we're doing is hitting the stadium really hard right now.
Everything from fixing infrastructure and elevators and stairwells and concrete and bathrooms to creating better premium experiences to trying to get better at ingress and egress into the stadium.
So it's a broad program.
We're spending about $80 million on it.
And then the other thing we're doing is in the training ground, right?
In Virginia and Ashburn, there's a small fraternity of NFL players.
It's truly elite, right?
So what we want to be is a place where they say, wow, this ownership really cares.
It's a good place to play.
And so I want to make their life as easy as possible.
And so we're fixing the weight room in showers and setting up player areas.
And look, we have a ways to go.
We have a lot of work to do.
And it doesn't happen overnight.
And then obviously we're doing the best we can with our old stadium.
But the reality is it's an old stadium, right?
And everything has changed so much since it was built that the fan experience is just better in some of these newer stadiums, right?
And there's only so much you can do.
So we're looking we're working hard at that, obviously, but like, you know, that's what we're doing right now.
Okay, Josh, my final question for you, and I really think there are a few better position to answer this question.
I'd like to talk about private equity in sports, particularly in the NFL, of course, and after much anticipation, the NFL was ultimately the last league in the US to allow institutional capital.
And it happened not long after you completed the deal to buy the commanders.
What do you expect to see given this new introduction of capital?
And where do you expect to see the most significant impact?
Listen, the NFL was quite restrictive as to they only would allow you a certain number of owners, and then obviously their rules and all the sports leagues, you know, in essence, vest, all of the power the control, if you will, in one person, because they want to make sure that someone can make decisions
on behalf of the teams.
So that made it a harder investment case.
And I think them going through the process with us, when we bought the Washington commanders, they figured out that forget about the Forbes 400, that it was the Forbes 50, right?
Where the ability to write a $5 billion check wasn't there.
And what separated us was, you know, the fact that we had been good stewards, both financially to our partners, but also to the cities and also the strength of Washington, right?
And the strength of the NFL and that allowed us to raise a lot of money.
But I think that everyone realized that that was very hard to do and that they thought that it was time to allow for more capital going into the business.
Increasingly, these are big businesses, right?
They're big global media businesses.
And the purchase price on sports teams is accelerating.
And sports teams, because they don't make a lot of cash though, they make some in some cases, you can't put a lot of leverage on sports teams.
So they're really equity driven investments for us to do what we need to do, which is a stadium costs three to $5 billion now.
And you know, the purchase price of the commanders, we had to raise and invest $5 billion of equity.
So what private equity allows for is capital, right?
It's just capital. And then also, as you move towards the technological innovation, whether it be understanding how to serve your customers better, there's an arms race, if you will, in the front office.
So if you want to win, you got to be involved with analytics and investment and technology.
And you don't want anyone to get an edge on you there, right?
Sports is a very innovative place.
And so I look at it as capital for investment to allow for the continuation of the growth in sports and doing what we do best, which is creating memories.
Well, thank you, Josh, for what you do.
And thank you for taking the time.
My pleasure to be here and thank you for taking your time to do this interview.
The sports ownership landscape has changed considerably over the past 10 to 15 years, with private equity and other institutional capital now involved in every professional league across the US and Europe.
This larger pool of diversified capital is expected to play a significant role in the evolution of the sports industry.
And it's a theme we'll return to throughout this series.
Coming up on our next episode, sports is the best thing in the world in terms of content.
The competition for sports media rights heats up, and it's changing the way fans watch some of their favorite games.
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