On Oct. 29, 2025, McGuireWoods hosted prominent team and league officials, sports investors, family offices, university leaders and other industry innovators at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City for the Sports Investing Symposium sponsored by Gen II Fund Services.
The symposium featured four timely panels exploring key trends shaping the future of investing in sports — a trillion-dollar asset class. Across these panels, common narratives emerged: (a) institutional capital is professionalizing the sports ecosystem; (b) value creation is evolving toward operations, infrastructure and intellectual property; and (c) universities and colleges are developing new governance and financing structures to sustain their programs in a revenue-sharing environment.
Investing in the Big Four
Panelists — including major league team owners and private equity investors — emphasized that North American franchises across the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL (the Big Four) evolved into a highly attractive, discrete, long-duration asset class characterized by consistent historical returns and conservative leverage. While the NFL and NBA continue to command the largest national media checks and sustain premium valuations, investors identified compelling relative value opportunities within the MLB and NHL franchises, citing operational upside and anticipated structural shifts, including league expansions and revisions to investment and spending constraints.
Across all leagues, national media rights remain the primary driver of franchise valuations. However, incremental value creation increasingly depends on operations, including stadium economics, premium fan experiences and integrated real estate development.
Across the Big Four, minority stakes are now mainstream. Expanded private equity participation rules and higher debt thresholds create new liquidity pathways for legacy owners and accessible entry options for sophisticated capital. Still, governance remains paramount: Panelists emphasized that decision rights, communications protocols and exit mechanics should be clearly defined and agreed upon early in conversations. Moreover, limited partner positions can serve as a strategic apprenticeship. Many top-tier owners first gained critical experience from the passenger seat before taking the wheel themselves.
Looking ahead, “platformization” is accelerating. Multi-asset ownership groups increasingly leverage shared insights, commercial synergies and talent advantages across teams, leagues and geographies. Meanwhile, alternative revenue streams (from sports betting integrations to digitally native content) increase the top line. The trajectory remains positive, and future returns are expected to concentrate among operators who combine capital with disciplined, hands-on execution.
Expanding the Playing Field — Other Established Leagues and New Power Players
Beyond the Big Four, panelists identified three major growth areas.
First, women’s sports are scaling in many ways. Leagues including the WNBA, NWSL and Europe’s Women’s Super League are reaching inflection points across venues, broadcasts and social media platforms. This momentum is driven by scarcity value, community-first brand building and improved media rights packaging. Panelists cited women’s volleyball as an especially compelling opportunity given its broad participation base and accelerating media momentum, which is consistent with deals McGuireWoods is seeing.
Next, tech-enabled and format-innovating properties are ready for investment — with the right governance. Investors are taking control positions in leagues including Tomorrow’s Golf League, SailGP and Professional Bull Riders, where they can influence operating cadence, talent composition and content strategy from inception. The winning playbook borrows the structural rigor of the Big Four but adapts it for a startup league’s flexibility — attracting world-class operators from established leagues with equity incentives for management and providing a core structure of media content scaled across platforms and geographies.
Finally, premium intellectual property is attracting premium interest. Investors prioritize rights and brands that transcend platforms and have intrinsic brand value. From global football clubs to The Hundred in cricket to crossovers such as FC Barcelona x Cactus Jack, investors are interested in opportunities to monetize premium brands across multiple facets — shoulder programming, creator collaborations, merchandise capsules and direct-to-consumer fan products. Creator-led leagues such as the Kings League and Baller League demonstrate how combining sport with influencer ecosystems can unlock younger audiences at scale.
Exit dynamics in emerging properties remain a key consideration for strategic family offices and specialized funds. Panelists expect smaller check sizes, lighter transfer restrictions and demonstrated operational playbooks to support liquidity as these assets mature.
Beyond the Field — Investing Across the Sports Economy
The sports economy offers compelling opportunities beyond team ownership, including in the “picks and shovels” segment — models that benefit from the same macro tailwinds as ownership without team-like valuation multiples. Three themes stood out.
First, data and infrastructure are foundational. The development of domed, multi-use venues demands expanded event calendars and increased use, including mega-concerts, international matches and marquee one-off events. This growth fuels demand for premium services and data analytics to enhance fan engagement and operational efficiency. Rights holders cannot unlock full lifetime value without structured fan data that integrates ticketing, merchandise, food and beverage, and digital interactions. Venues increasingly operate as technology platforms, where smart sensors, networked point-of-sale systems and crowd analytics drive security, guest experience and retail yield. As these next-generation venues proliferate, insights into hourly spend on guest services, security and event operations will scale in parallel with the expanding calendar.
Second, the booming youth sports market is institutionalizing on a national scale. The most successful models go beyond the “if you build it, they will come” approach and instead, capitalize on the scarcity of proper destination experiences. Such models combine sports matches and tournaments, lodging, food and beverage with the delivery of consistent and high service standards. Volume growth and experience enhancements, rather than base price increases alone, drive returns. Operating costs are simultaneously managed through professionalized operations, insurance structures and technology adoption. The panelists discussed the varying behavior of each youth sport. Baseball is a mature, monetizable ecosystem that contrasts sharply with the fast-growing, but nascent, flag football landscape.
Third, athlete and agency capital are more sophisticated. Equity-for-endorsement models evolved from niche experiments to standard practice that is often demanded by the athletes, particularly women athletes whose commercial momentum has accelerated. Agencies, meanwhile, are diversifying into name, image and likeness (NIL) representation, youth and collegiate content curation, and next-gen experiential marketing. These strategies create innovative distribution and monetization channels that align with institutional capital and long-term growth strategies.
Monetizing Collegiate Sports — The New Playbook for College Athletics
Universities and collegiate conferences face a fundamentally different set of value tradeoffs versus professional sports. A small number of collegiate athletics programs operate at a profit; universities have a dual mandate to sustain broad (and competitive) athletic programs and to support educational missions; and capital structure must align with governance needs. Layered on top is the reality that some premium institutions have access to capital (particularly debt), but most institutional leaders remain wary of the permanence of equity transactions. Panelists focused on a central theme: Creative structures are table stakes for any conversation around a partnership in college athletics, which is undergoing a revolutionary transition and offers unique and compelling investment opportunities.
Public universities require compliant vehicles — such as foundations, endowments or affiliated entities — to receive or deploy outside capital. Panelists discussed several innovative models, including the centralization of monetizable campus intellectual property and external-revenue functions under a single commercial entity. This approach allows universities to grow and manage enterprise value holistically, financing against the business rather than selling off fragmented rights. Still, many institutions — especially those generating the most revenue — may prefer flexible, nondilutive capital and debt-like structures over equity in core athletic assets.
With this, strategy must precede capital. Taking investments without a clear deployment plan can be costly. Schools and conferences should focus on initiatives with the potential for multiyear impact in areas that drive incremental revenue: premium seating and hospitality, practice and mixed-use facilities with “third-space” economics, naming rights and field branding, and modernized ticketing/CRM systems. Conferences are natural first-movers for institutional partnerships where aggregation of rights (especially media) and expansion initiatives can unlock step-change value. At the same time conferences present complexity with multiple constituencies with varied interests and value propositions. NIL represents both a cost center and a commercial opportunity. Institutions are exploring compliant ways to convert NIL outflows into revenue-positive activations — such as revenue-sharing constructs with stadium vendors tied to athlete-led promotions that drive product sales.
The time horizon for investing in college sports is generational. Both investors and athletic directors emphasized at least 10 to 20-year planning horizons, exit clarity and governance frameworks designed to minimize disruption across leadership transitions. Private partners who bring operational experience, patience and sensitivity to institutional governance will be best positioned to build durable partnerships with universities.
What This Means for Key Stakeholders
For private equity funds, family offices and other investors, sports investing is increasingly considered a unique asset class, with opportunities that span the risk-return spectrum: minority team stakes with durable cash flows, control investments in emerging and growth-oriented leagues, and resilient services platforms riding venue and youth-sports trends.
Clubs, leagues and rights holders should treat fan data, venue technology and content as core infrastructure. Build premium inventory and community-first experiences that travel across digital and physical channels. Leverage cross-over ownership and creator partnerships to reach younger audiences efficiently and effectively.
What to Watch Next
- Media Rights Recalibration: How leagues, teams and conferences restructure local and national media distribution will shape the next valuation curve.
- Women’s Sports Inflection: The trajectory of today’s momentum into category-leading properties will depend on capital formation, governance consistency, athlete contract structures and union dynamics, and strategic media packaging in the coming years.
- Collegiate Sports Monetization: Category-defining and creative structures are in development, which creates differentiated opportunities for investors looking for the potential for outsized returns while offering colleges an opportunity to enhance their competitive positioning.
- Stadium and Mixed-Use Pipelines: Domed, multipurpose venues and their surrounding districts drive operating leverage beyond game days, with the associated services and real estate experiencing secular growth.
As the sports industry continues to evolve, collaboration and innovation among investors, funds and institutions are essential to driving sustainable, mission-aligned growth.
About McGuireWoods Sports Industry Team
McGuireWoods’ Sports Industry Team leverages the firm’s Chambers-ranked experience in groundbreaking transactions and precedent-setting litigation that helped shape the modern sports landscape. The multidisciplinary team provides legal support grounded in a deep understanding of the sports industry while offering unparalleled access to unique investment opportunities and a preeminent network. McGuireWoods’ roster includes accomplished lawyers who have led billion-dollar stadium financings, closed headline-making M&A deals, negotiated endorsement contracts with global sports icons and handled high-stakes litigation for professional teams, professional athletes and universities; along with nonlawyer private equity professionals who differentiate McGuireWoods from other law firms.