Wale Ogunleye spent eleven years as an NFL defensive end. He now runs sports and entertainment at UBS, and his phone does something it didn’t do five years ago. “Every week I get a call from my investment bank that there’s a potential buyer of a certain team that wants to have inclusion of an athlete in their deal,” he told Front Office Sports at the outlet’s Huddle in the Hamptons event in August 2026.
Read that again. The buyers are calling the bank asking for an athlete. If you want to know why athletes are buying sports teams in 2026, start with the fact that the demand runs in both directions.
That inversion is the actual story behind a run of 2026 headlines that looked like celebrity news. Travis Kelce bought into the Cleveland Guardians in May. Caleb Williams joined the Boston Legacy FC investor group. Peyton Manning attached his name to a Denver expansion club that cost a record fee. Each got covered as a sports item. Together they describe something closer to a repricing of what a famous name is worth on a cap table.
Athlete team ownership is the purchase of a direct equity stake in a professional sports franchise by a current or former player, almost always as a passive limited partner with no operational control. It is not an endorsement, and it is not the same thing as the athlete investing collectives pooling player capital into consumer brands. Different mechanism, different risk, different reason it’s happening now.
Last updated: August 2026
Quick answers
Why are athletes buying sports teams in 2026?
Athletes are buying equity because leagues opened their ownership rules to smaller passive stakes, which created entry points at a few million dollars instead of a few billion. Buyers also want them. UBS executive Wale Ogunleye says investors seek athletes for community credibility, telling Front Office Sports it’s “more about their reputation” than their capital.
How do athlete ownership groups work?
An athlete usually buys a limited partnership interest from an existing owner rather than from the league. Travis Kelce, for example, purchased a slice of David Blitzer’s 35% position in the Cleveland Guardians. The athlete gets economics and a title, no board seat, and no vote on trades, hiring, or stadium decisions.
How much does a minority stake in a sports team cost?
Entry prices vary by league. NWSL expansion clubs sold for $53 million in Boston and $110 million in Denver, so a 1% slice runs in the hundreds of thousands. NFL stakes are far steeper, with Sportico valuing franchises between roughly $5 billion and $10 billion, which puts a 3% position near $150 million.
Why are athletes buying sports teams now?
The rules changed before the behavior did. For most of modern sports history, buying into a major American franchise meant assembling billions and passing a league vetting process built to keep outsiders out. That gate moved in August 2024, when NFL owners passed Resolution JC-7 by a 31-1 vote and allowed a vetted group of private equity firms to hold up to 10% of a team as passive, non-voting money.
The terms matter more than the headline. Per the league’s own announcement, each fund must take at least 3%, hold for six years, and can spread across no more than six teams. Arctos Partners, Ares Management and Sixth Street were among the approved firms, alongside a consortium fronted by former NFL running back Curtis Martin that included Blackstone, Carlyle and CVC Capital Partners.
That decision did something the NFL probably didn’t intend. It normalized the idea that a franchise could be sliced into passive pieces and sold to people who would never run it. Once institutional money got a mechanism, individual money got a template. An athlete writing a check for a fraction of a percent is doing a smaller version of what Ares does.
The second driver is price appreciation in leagues that were affordable five minutes ago. Sportico’s 2026 valuations put the average NWSL club at $184 million, a 77% jump in 18 months, with Angel City FC on top at $335 million and the 14 clubs worth $2.6 billion combined. Revenue hit an estimated $262 million across the league in 2025, or roughly $19 million per club, up 22% year over year.
Look at what that did to expansion pricing. Boston paid $53 million for its 2026 slot. Denver paid $110 million for the sixteenth franchise, a record for any U.S. women’s sports property. Anyone who bought into an NWSL club in 2023 watched the asset roughly triple while they did nothing.
The third driver is the compensation curve. Athletes earn most of their money in their twenties and stop earning it in their thirties, which leaves five decades to fund from a wasting asset. Ownership swaps a depreciating thing, on-field relevance, for an appreciating one. Tina Charles, the 2012 WNBA MVP who founded 78 Brewing Co., framed the appeal in terms that have nothing to do with returns. “When you get into ownership, you get to be a part of creating the asset, making the decisions, and taking the risk,” she said at the same Front Office Sports event.
How do athlete ownership groups actually work?
An athlete ownership group is a syndicate of limited partners who buy non-controlling equity from an existing owner, not from the league. The control owner keeps the votes. Everyone else supplies capital and, in the athlete’s case, credibility.
Kelce’s Guardians deal shows the plumbing. He didn’t buy from chairman Paul Dolan. He bought a small piece of David Blitzer’s 35% stake, and Blitzer holds an option to take majority control after the 2027 season. Kelce sits several layers away from any decision the team makes, which is exactly how the structure is designed.
Caleb Williams took a different route into Boston Legacy FC, investing through his strategic investment firm 888 Midas rather than personally. He joined a group that already included Indiana Fever center Aliyah Boston, Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman, actress Elizabeth Banks, and Celtics general manager Brad Stevens with his wife Tracy. The club debuts at Gillette Stadium in March 2026.
Three structural facts define what the athlete is buying.
No control, by design. Minority interests in sports franchises carry limited rights under the governing agreement. Attorneys at Loeb & Loeb put it plainly in their franchise investment guide: minority partners contribute capital and rarely get a say in day-to-day management or long-term strategy. The title is real. The authority isn’t.
No liquidity. There’s no exchange where a 2% stake in an MLB club trades. Value is realized when the whole team sells, which the athlete does not decide.
No dividends, usually. Sports assets soak up capital for facilities, roster spend and media investment, so cash rarely gets distributed. The return is appreciation or nothing.
The exception worth studying is Alpine. Renault sold 24% of its Formula 1 team to a consortium led by Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners and Maximum Effort Investments, the Ryan Reynolds vehicle. Otro then brought athletes in on top. The October 2023 announcement named Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Rory McIlroy, Anthony Joshua, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Juan Mata as strategic investors in a €200 million deal that valued the team a little above $900 million. Nobody disclosed how much the athletes put in, which is itself informative.
Which athletes own sports teams in 2026?
The current roster of athlete owners runs across five leagues and both genders, and most of the buyers are still playing. That’s the shift. Team ownership used to be a retirement move, the last chapter for the kind of athlete-turned-operator GJ has profiled for years. Now a 24-year-old quarterback closes on equity during his bye week.
| Athlete | Property | League | Announced | What the deal signals |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Travis Kelce | Cleveland Guardians | MLB | May 2026 | Hometown stake carved out of David Blitzer’s 35% position |
| Caleb Williams | Boston Legacy FC | NWSL | October 2025 | Bought through his firm 888 Midas, not personally |
| Peyton Manning | Denver Summit FC | NWSL | June 2025 | Retired star anchoring a $110M expansion club in his old market |
| Patrick Mahomes | Kansas City Royals, Alpine F1 | MLB, F1 | 2020, 2023 | Multi-property portfolio built mid-career |
| LeBron James | Boston Red Sox | MLB | 2021 | Stake held via Fenway Sports Group, the template others copy |
| Giannis Antetokounmpo | Milwaukee Brewers | MLB | 2021 | Cross-sport stake in the city he plays in |
Cade Cunningham holds a piece of the Texas Rangers. Aliyah Boston sits in the Boston Legacy group alongside Williams. Marques Colston, the former Saints receiver, went further and built a vehicle: his Champion Fund is an SEC-registered interval fund that took a position in newly promoted Premier League side Ipswich Town and lets ordinary investors in from $500. If you want the retail version of this trade, GJ has covered how small-dollar sports investing works.
What investors are actually buying
Buyers want the athlete for reputation transfer, not for the check. Ogunleye said it directly: “It’s not necessarily that they want the athletes’ capital. It’s more about their reputation and the things the athletes have built, which sometimes you can’t buy.”
Unpack the commercial logic and it stops sounding sentimental.
A control owner buying a franchise has to clear a set of gates that money alone doesn’t open. Local politicians decide stadium financing. Season ticket holders decide whether the takeover feels like a raid. Sponsors decide whether to renew. Media partners price the property partly on cultural relevance. Every one of those constituencies moves faster when a familiar face is standing next to the new owner.
Ogunleye framed the mechanism as validation: fans extend more trust to an ownership group when an athlete in it has a visible history of giving back to that community. Peyton Manning in Denver is not a marketing decision. It’s a permitting strategy.
There’s a supply-side reason too. Institutional capital flooded the space and made athletes a differentiator. Mark Cuban and Falcons minority owner Rashaun Williams launched Harbinger Sports Partners with a $750 million target, deploying $50 million to $150 million per deal for stakes of up to 5%, aiming at a 15-team portfolio. Its first move was a minority position in the Athletics ahead of the club’s Las Vegas relocation. When a dozen funds show up with identical term sheets, the group with a recognizable name attached wins the allocation.
Athletes know they’re the differentiator, and the smart ones price it. That’s the part founders should be watching, and it echoes what happens when a personal audience becomes an asset rather than a paycheck.
The math athletes don’t talk about
The trade has real downside, and the coverage almost never mentions it. A minority sports stake is one of the least investor-friendly instruments a wealthy person can buy.
Start with the exit. Law firm Bird & Bird noted in its 2026 review of minority sports investments that these positions are inherently illiquid, that dividends are frequently neither desirable nor possible given how capital-intensive clubs are, and that a return usually arrives only at the point of sale. Which means the athlete’s outcome depends entirely on a decision made by someone else. Kelce cannot force Blitzer to sell the Guardians.
Then the governance gap. An athlete owner with 1% has the same influence over a coaching change as a season ticket holder. The title travels well on Instagram. It does nothing in a room where votes are counted.
Then correlation, which nobody prices. A current player’s income, endorsement portfolio, and now their largest illiquid asset all sit inside the same sports economy. A media rights contraction hits all three at once. Diversification means owning things that fail at different times, and a quarterback with equity in two teams and a shoe deal has bought more of what he already had.
The valuations carry their own warning. NWSL clubs now trade at 9.8 times revenue, up from 6.8 in 2024, which slots the league between the NFL at 10.3 and MLS at 9.2. Those multiples assume the growth continues. Buy at 9.8 times, watch it settle to 7, and the asset can grow revenue while the stake loses value.
None of this makes the trade wrong. It makes it a specific bet: that franchise scarcity keeps compounding faster than the discount you take for having no control and no exit. Plenty of professional investors are making the same bet. They’re just not calling it passive income.
What founders can take from this
The transferable lesson has nothing to do with sports. It’s about the difference between renting a reputation and capitalizing one.
An endorsement is a fee for attention. It pays once, and the payer keeps the upside. Equity is a claim on what the attention creates. The athletes moving from the first to the second are running the same play a founder runs when they stop consulting and start owning product, and the same one behind Cole Palmer launching his own ice brand instead of fronting somebody else’s.
Three specifics worth stealing.
Price the thing you have that money can’t buy. Ogunleye’s line about reputation is a valuation statement. Bankers are effectively saying an athlete’s community standing is worth a discounted entry into a deal other buyers pay full freight for. Most founders hold a version of this asset, whether it’s a niche audience, a distribution relationship, or operating credibility in a category, and most of them sell it hourly instead of converting it.
Ask what would need to be true for a counterparty to pay you in ownership rather than cash. Usually the answer is that your involvement has to change their outcome, not just their marketing.
Buy the structure, not the headline. Kelce’s stake and Williams’s stake read identically in a press release and differ meaningfully in practice. One is a personal purchase from a secondary seller. The other runs through 888 Midas, a firm that can hold multiple positions, carry losses, and build a track record independent of the athlete’s playing career. Entity choice compounds over 30 years. It’s the least glamorous decision in the deal and usually the most valuable one, in the same way deal terms outrank headline valuation in a startup round.
Take illiquidity seriously before you take it on. Athletes have short earning windows and long lives, which makes locking capital into an asset with no exit and no dividend genuinely risky. Founders have a mirror version of this problem, with most of their net worth in illiquid private stock they can’t sell either, which is why the market for fractional access to private companies keeps expanding. The discipline is the same: size the illiquid position so a seven-year lockup never forces a bad decision somewhere else.
Ownership in 2026 keeps getting sold as access. It’s really a trade, and the price is control and liquidity. Athletes are making it with better information than most people assume, and worse terms than the press releases suggest. Both things are true.
