A Well-Balanced Cap Table
Recent sports investing activity offered a little of everything, with capital showing up across the ownership spectrum – control, minority exposure, and new vehicles built to make sports easier to underwrite.
This edition tracks athlete investments as well, including Giannis Antetokounmpo taking a direct stake in Kalshi and Drew Brees backing a(nother) racket-sport concept, alongside the latest in participation and rec sports. We close with a busy “on deck” board – with NBA Europe, LIV Golf team stakes, and potential Golden State Warriors liquidity being just a few of the just a few of the pending storylines.
Large Checks, Real Control
Peter Mallouk’s acquired a 71% stake in Sporting Kansas City at a $700M valuation, one of the highest-profile MLS majority transactions in recent memory, while Cannae Holdings–backed Black Knight Football Club completed full ownership of FC Lorient, folding the club deeper into its multi-club structure.
Capital Platforms Keep Forming
Otro Capital’s $1.2B inaugural close stood out on size alone, but it wasn’t alone. Ariel Investments’ women’s sports fund, Project Level, announced a $250M first close, and Athvance Capital also launched with a €500M target focused on under-commercialized European sports. Meanwhile firms like OGC and OBE expanded dedicated sports, media, and advisory practices to meet growing demand for sector-specific expertise.
Ownership Without Control
Sportsology Capital Partners made a strategic minority investment in the Texas Rangers, while LIV Golf prepared its first team-level minority stake sales and Golden State Group explored a partial sale at an $11B+ valuation.
Top 5 Deals
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Transaction
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Investors / Buyers
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What’s Notable
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62.3% stake in PrizePicks for $1.53B
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Allwyn (KKCG-backed)
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Gives Allwyn a scaled US foothold sports-adjacent gaming.
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Acquisition of Arctos for $1.4B+
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KKR
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Highlights the growing value of sports-specific capital platforms and franchise liquidity businesses as scalable alternatives assets.
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Acquisition of Legend for up to $1.2B
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Genius Sports
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Structured as $900M at close plus up to $300M in earnouts. Integrates Legend’s digital media network into Genius’ FanHub platform, tightening the link between data rights, media distribution, and fan monetization.
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71% stake in Sporting Kansas City at a ~$700M EV
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Peter Mallouk
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A headline MLS control deal with the Illig family retaining a minority position.
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Acquisition of LiveBarn for ~$400M
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GTCR
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Anchors the launch of Ascent Sports Group and signals continued consolidation across youth and amateur sports, particularly in streaming and content infrastructure.
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In Focus
A closer look at the forces shaping sports capital
Otro Capital’s $1.2B Debut
When Otro Capital closed its first fund at $1.2B, it was hard to ignore. Not because sports is some exotic corner of the market anymore – most allocators have at least had the conversation – but because first-time managers don’t commonly clear a billion with a narrow mandate, especially in a category that still comes with non-standard league governance and deal structures that don’t always behave like standard buyout.
So the number matters. But the more useful question is what that number is buying.
What Otro is actually selling
Otro is trying to sell an idea that plenty of investors say they want in sports, but don’t always get in practice: a strategy that looks like private equity once you take the logos off the deck. Less time spent narrating scarcity. Governance that isn’t decorative. A portfolio where the underwrite isn’t “rights go up forever,” but “here’s how you improve margins, distribution, pricing, sponsorship yield, and retention – and here’s what that does to exit paths.”
Operators first
Their origin story supports that posture. Founded in 2023, the firm’s founding group – Alec Scheiner and Brent Stehlik, alongside Niraj Shah and Isaac Halyard – leans on real operator credibility. That matters in sports for a simple reason: the distance between a spreadsheet and reality can be wide, and the model only gets you so far. League rules, stakeholder politics, and media economics are the constraints you actually operate inside.
There’s also a simpler version of the pitch that comes through in how Scheiner talks about it: they know one sector very well. For investors who’ve liked sports from a distance but haven’t wanted to underwrite a learning curve, that’s the point.
Scheiner brings the “inside the building” angle few sports investors can match. He ran the Cleveland Browns as president, spent years in senior roles with the Dallas Cowboys, and later helped lead RedBird’s sports investing push before co-founding Otro. Stehlik’s background tilts commercial: a long operating career across teams and leagues, including senior revenue leadership roles, plus hands-on experience scaling licensing and sponsorship economics through OneTeam in the RedBird orbit.
Shah spent close to a decade at RedBird, working across sports, media, and entertainment deals, and earlier did private equity at Apax after starting his career at Goldman. Halyard also comes out of RedBird, with an earlier start in Goldman’s TMT banking world.
Together, that gives the founding group a more balanced mix than “operators with a fund” or “financiers visiting sports.”
Where they’re fishing
That mix of operator and deal experience helps explain the lane they’re choosing. They’re not positioning as a team-stake aggregator. They’re also not presenting as a venture-style “sports tech” fund where half the portfolio is consumer software with a jersey in the pitch deck. The emphasis is on cash-flowing businesses and durable IP within the sports ecosystem – areas where operational change shows up in the numbers.
Scheiner has also been explicit about what they’re not doing: steering away from minority stakes in the four major US leagues. What gets them excited instead is a different layer of the market – small- to mid-sized businesses with real niches and hard-to-copy IP. That can show up in youth sports, college athletics, niche sports, spinoffs from pro sports, and the service businesses that support all of it.
The first three tells
The early portfolio gives you a sense of what they mean by that. Alpine Racing (Formula 1) is the “global platform + media flywheel” exposure, in a sport that has become a case study in modern sports commercialization. Two Circles is more infrastructure than glamour – data-driven fan engagement and marketing execution that sits close to the revenue engine. FlexWork Sports pushes into youth sports and events, which is fragmented at ground level but enormous in aggregate, and often more resilient than people expect when other discretionary categories soften.
Alpine, and the point of the celebrity cap table
Alpine is also the cleanest example of how the firm blends institutional structure with cultural distribution without making “celebrity” the investment thesis. In 2023, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney joined an investor group – including Otro and RedBird – taking a 24% stake in Alpine. Later that year, ESPN reported that Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce also invested in Alpine through the Otro-led group. Celebrity cap tables are easy to dismiss, but there’s a practical point: in a media-driven sport trying to keep building share in the US, recognizable owners can help open doors commercially. It’s not a substitute for operational work, but it can be a tailwind if the operational plan is real.
The LP detail you can actually point to
The LP signal is the other part worth lingering on – and this is where the story gets more concrete than the typical “diverse LP base” line. One public institution has shown its hand in a way private investors usually don’t: CalPERS. The pension has disclosed commitments totaling $250M across Otro Capital and related funds, including $50 million committed in 2025 to an Otro vehicle (Fund I-A) and another $200M committed to Otro-affiliated vehicle Cowtown LP.
Two caveats come with that, and they’re worth stating plainly. First: a disclosed commitment doesn’t tell you how dollars map to any specific deal. Second: you’re seeing CalPERS because it’s public. Most of the LP roster won’t show up in the same way.
The work starts after the close
None of this is a victory lap yet. A large debut fund raises the bar on deployment discipline, and sports is still a relationship business with constraints and bespoke structures. The pipeline can be noisy, exits can be narrower than they look from a distance, and it’s easy for a “sports mandate” to drift when the pipeline gets competitive.
Why this is worth tracking
Still, Fund I is an interesting marker. Not because it proves sports has become “safe,” and not because it announces some new golden age. It’s interesting because it suggests LPs are rewarding a specific evolution: sports as a sector where operational rigor and governance are increasingly priced.
Capital Roster
More than endorsements: athletes shaping the business of sports
From Endorsement to Ownership
Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo became the first active NBA player to directly invest in prediction market platform Kalshi. Antetokounmpo is prohibited from trading on NBA-related markets – a safeguard for when he insists, yet again, that he’s perfectly happy where he is.
Athlete ownership also surfaced in consumer platforms. Waiākea Hawaiian Volcanic Water added NFL rookie Tetairoa McMillan, MLB All-Star Devin Williams, and NBA veteran Jerami Grant as investor-partners, joining an existing athlete ownership group that includes Aaron Judge, Myles Garrett, and Klay Thompson.
Building the Game
Former NFL quarterback Drew Brees joined Tennis Channel founder Steve Bellamy as an investor and development partner in typti, a new racket sport designed to be played on pickleball courts and rolled out through existing facilities.
Former Brazilian soccer player Alexandre Pato surfaced as part of a consortium exploring the acquisition of Colchester United, continuing a familiar pattern of ex-players engaging in lower-league football ownership efforts.
Investing in the Athlete
Freddie Freeman and Mike Trout joined Ammortal as investors and ambassadors, backing recovery chambers already embedded across NFL and MLB facilities and gaining traction within major college programs.
Athlete-owned hydration brand Coco5, backed by owners including Devin Booker and Charles Barkley – who has never lacked follow-through – secured a $10M strategic investment led by Loop Capital to fund executive hiring, global expansion, and product innovation.
Beyond the Big Leagues
Where passion meets portfolio: investments in the sports you already play
From youth sports streaming and padel clubs to cricket startups and jai-alai franchises, capital kept finding its way into sports that operate just fine without a primetime TV window.
Deals to Know:
- GTCR acquired LiveBarn for approximately $400M, anchoring the launch of Ascent Sports Group and giving the firm control of one of the largest youth and amateur sports streaming platforms.
- Pixellot raised $35M in equity and venture debt to expand its AI-powered youth sports streaming platform, which automates game broadcasts for schools and clubs without upfront camera installation.
- Bluestone Equity Partners made a $30M strategic investment in Selkirk Sport, the leading pickleball equipment and apparel brand, to support product innovation, omnichannel distribution, and international expansion.
- AO Ventures invested in Padel Haus to support the US rollout of its premium padel club concept.
- Juggernaut Capital–backed 3Step Sports reportedly engaged Goldman Sachs to explore a potential sale or capital raise, following an aggressive consolidation strategy across youth club sports and event operators.
- The European T20 Premier League launched cricket franchises in Amsterdam, Edinburgh, and Belfast.
- A consortium led by IKON Capital and Bolt Ventures acquired the Red Bull KTM Tech3 MotoGP racing team.
- Rob Gough acquired the Fireballs jai-alai franchise under a perpetual ownership structure.
On Deck
Tracking the next moves in sports capital
- NBA Europe formation: The NBA and FIBA continue pitching investors on a new European league with reported franchise entry fees of $500M–$1B, as groups in cities like Manchester explore bids and operators such as RedBird evaluate participation.
- LIV franchise stake sales: LIV Golf is preparing its first minority stake sales in individual teams, reportedly targeting valuations of up to $300M per franchise, with Citi advising.
- WNBA equity structure: The WNBA is reportedly exploring a buyback of the 16% minority stake it sold in 2022 to a Nike-led investor group, a move that could reshape league governance and internal ownership ahead of planned expansion.
- PTPA capital raise: The Professional Tennis Players Association is reportedly exploring a raise of up to $1B to fund a proposed Holdco structure for tennis commercial rights.
- IPL ownership activity: Rajasthan Royals’ sale process has advanced following a reported $1.3B preliminary offer, while potential bidders are also circling Royal Challengers Bengaluru at a reported $2B valuation.
- Premier League ownership shift: Daniel Levy is reportedly in discussions to sell his roughly 30% stake in ENIC, the majority owner of Tottenham Hotspur, for about £1B.
- NFL franchise sale: The Paul G. Allen estate is reportedly preparing to auction the Seattle Seahawks, with valuation expectations in the $7B–$8B range.
- NBA minority liquidity: Golden State Group is reportedly seeking to sell a 5% minority stake at an $11B+ valuation, with Citigroup advising.
- EFL deal flow: Multiple English clubs remain in motion, including bids for Tranmere Rovers, a controlling-stake change at Hartlepool United, and a pending control shift at Lincoln City subject to league approval.
