Sports franchises just broke private equity.

The Lakers sold for $10 billion. The 49ers got $8.6 billion for a 6% stake. All, as the average PE fund sits at $763 million AUM—pocket change compared to what teams cost now. 

Even the biggest sports-focused funds can only afford slices of franchises that billionaires used to buy outright.

We had to understand this insane gap for ourselves, so we pulled data from McKinsey's Global Private Markets Reports, Forbes' team valuations since 2010, Preqin and CAIA's PE market data, and Cambridge Associates benchmarking. 

Frankly, the numbers floored us and only scratched the surface as to how sports franchises have become too valuable for private funds, and have forced the complete collapse of how professional sports franchises get bought and sold.

Based on aggregating the data we pulled, the two lines tell entirely different stories: PE fund average AUM barely budged from $573 million in 2010 to $763 million by 2025—a sleepy 1.9% compound annual growth rate. Sports team valuations in comparison exploded from $450 million to $3.3 billion, clocking a 14.2% CAGR. 

The divergence really kicks in after 2020. PE funds hit their peak at an average $848 million AUM  in 2022, then deflated. Sports franchises went parabolic, especially post-COVID. 

Why the massive gap? PE's victim of its own success—fund counts ballooned from 3,000 to 8,000, diluting average sizes even as total industry AUM grew. Sports teams rode the opposite wave: scarcity value, lucrative media deals, and a growing lineup of investors wanting a trophy asset.

The latest franchise acquisitions further add to the narrative that traditional PE funds are getting priced out of owning a team.  

Take the Los Angeles Lakers. Mark Walter bought majority control from the Buss family for $10 billion in June 2025. Four years earlier, Walter and Todd Boehly valued the same team at $5 billion when they bought out Philip Anschutz's stakes for $1.35 billion. 

The valuation literally doubled in under five years. 

No PE fund on earth generates those returns—and more importantly, no PE fund on earth has $10 billion lying around to buy a basketball team alone.

Even tiny slices of teams now cost more than entire PE funds. The 49ers sold just 6.2% of the franchise mid-2025 at an $8.6 billion valuation (a record for an NFL minority deal). 

Do the math: 6.2% of $8.6 billion equals $533 million. That's nearly the entire AUM of an average PE fund ($763 million) blown on a sliver of one team. 

Want 20%? You need $1.7 billion. Want control? Forget it. PE funds are now fighting over crumbs, and even the crumbs cost half a billion dollars.

So what happens when buyers can't afford the product? PE firms pivot desperately. Think taking minority positions, begging their way into co-investment deals, and accepting whatever scraps of equity they can get.  

Teams face a different problem: who's left to buy them? Owners now float public listings, pitch crypto-token ownership schemes, and slice franchises into smaller pieces.  

The math is simple: the buyer pool shrank and sports franchises outgrew their buyers. PE funds need a miracle or a massive consolidation ever to be sole owners of a championship team again, and until then, they're stuck watching from the nosebleeds.

That said, some PE giants refuse to give up. They're raising record funds, chasing minority stakes, and getting creative by buying everything around them—stadium revenues, league commercial rights, media platforms, and more. 

Here's the thing: even individual billionaires can't own a sports franchise alone anymore. Modern sports franchises require entire syndicates of ultra-wealthy investors, and leagues have strict rules about who gets to play and how much they can own. 

Today's typical ownership structure looks like one control person plus 5 to 20 limited partners—a country club of billionaires pooling their cash. The NFL caps ownership groups at 25 people total (the controlling owner needs at least 30% of the team). The NBA requires a controlling governor with at least 15% and historically limits teams to around 25 individual owners.

Josh Harris, for example, didn't buy the Commanders alone—he brought 20 limited partners along for the ride. The Bills added 10 new limited partners after the NFL opened to PE money in 2024. Even MLS teams like LAFC list celebrity-heavy syndicates with three managing owners and a roster of part-owners that reads like a Hollywood VIP list.

The upper bound sits around 25 individual owners for NFL and NBA teams. MLB, NHL, and MLS often land in similar ranges, though their formal headcount caps aren't as clear. 

PE funds can't control teams—period. They get table scraps: passive minority stakes with league-imposed handcuffs. Here's what each league allows:

Yes, ownership groups tend to look like billionaire conventions.

But what happens when even billionaire conventions can't afford the entry fee? 

European soccer figured it out years ago—Manchester United trades on the NYSE, Juventus on the Milan exchange, Borussia Dortmund on Frankfurt. Twenty-plus European clubs already let regular people buy shares. 

Could American sports follow suit?  

The idea sounds crazy until you realize we're running out of billionaires who can write $10 billion checks.

PE funds averaging $763 million can't touch $10 billion teams. Even the biggest sports funds max out at $7 billion—enough to buy 70% of the Lakers if they're lucky.

Except they're not lucky, because leagues cap them at 10-30% stakes. The money that bought entire franchises five years ago now barely gets you into the ownership meeting.

Meanwhile, franchises worth more than small countries explore public listings because what else can they do with the buyer pool as small as ever?

Sports franchises won so hard they broke the game. They outgrew private equity, outpriced billionaires, and outpaced the very system designed to buy them. The Lakers at $10 billion, the Cowboys at $12.8 billion—these aren't sports teams anymore. They're borderline sovereign wealth fund territory.  

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