The league has ended its resistance to institutional capital. The Premier League has shown the chaos and rot that the relationship can bring
The last of the holdouts has fallen. A few weeks ago, the National Football League passed a resolution to allow private equity investment in individual teams, thereby bringing to an end to the league’s long resistance to the incursion of institutional capital. The NFL joins the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer, all of which have opened up to institutional investment in recent years. Only one of the league’s 32 owners, the Cincinnati Bengals’ Mike Brown, voted against the proposal – a decision, reports suggest, born of his longstanding desire to maintain the financial viability of smaller franchises in a league where growth in team valuations and media revenues shows no sign of slowing down.
The effects of the new ownership regime will be minimal, for now at least. The NFL will not be transformed overnight from a league in which teams are owned by wealthy individuals and families and managed for the benefit of fans and communities to one run according to the whims of private equity’s bullies and money grubbers. But it seems hard to imagine that a shift of this nature won’t take shape eventually. The league has been careful to limit the initial scope of private equity investment in the league: individual funds can buy no more than 10% in a given franchise; will acquire purely passive stakes, stripped of any decision-making, governance or voting rights; and will have to hold on to their investments for at least six years. Only four participating funds are allowed to invest for now; they are all long-dated (meaning they generally have long investment horizons and are not, in theory, looking to generate quick returns) and have a lot of money to burn. Sovereign wealth funds, asset management firms, endowments, and pension funds are barred from investing in the league – a marked contrast to the NBA, which opened up to this bigger class of investors in 2022.
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