The Lakers sold for $10 billion in June.
Not $10 billion in stadium revenue, not $10 billion in TV contracts stacked together — $10 billion as a single transaction for the right to own one basketball team. The Celtics went for $6.1 billion. The Washington Commanders, $6 billion. And the thing nobody says out loud when those numbers get announced is that the people who sold them almost certainly regret it already.
Chris — a venture capitalist who's spent years thinking about sports franchises as asset class the way most people think about Series A rounds — came on the show this week to break down how these deals actually work. Not the headline number. The structure underneath it. And the conversation went somewhere I didn't expect: the reason these assets keep appreciating isn't the sport. It's the scarcity. And scarcity, once you really understand it, changes how you think about every entry point.
Thirty teams. That's it.
There's a concept in venture capital called an earned secret — something you know that the market hasn't priced in yet. Joe Lacob had one when he bought the Golden State Warriors. Chris spent eight and a half years in the Bay Area and watched it up close.
When Lacob bought the Warriors, they were effectively a charity case. Floor-side tickets were being given away. Nobody wanted to go. Baron Davis had come and gone and left a franchise with no identity and no momentum. Lacob saw something different: he saw a commodity market — sports entertainment in one of the wealthiest, most tech-forward cities on earth — where the brand had collapsed so completely that there was nowhere to go but up. He applied a venture capital framework to an asset everyone else was treating as a bad business.
What followed was Chase Arena. Steph Curry. Four championships in eight years. A franchise worth something north of $7 billion today against a purchase price of $450 million in 2010.
The earned secret wasn't basketball. The earned secret was that the asset was mispriced because everyone was evaluating it on recent performance instead of structural position. Thirty teams in the NBA. That's the whole supply. They're not printing more.
This is the argument Chris kept returning to — and it's the one I think most people miss when they look at these headline numbers and decide the price is too high. Bitcoin looked expensive at $50,000. It looked expensive at $100,000. The people who anchored to an old price paid for it. Sports franchises are the same dynamic with one additional feature: there's a hard cap on supply, and the leagues themselves control it. You don't get to create a competing product.
The cap table question nobody asks first
Once you accept that these assets are structurally scarce and directionally appreciating, the question stops being should I own a piece of a team and becomes how do I actually get in, and at what level does that entry make sense?
This is where most conversations about sports ownership fall apart. People hear $5 billion for the Portland Trail Blazers and check out of the conversation entirely, because they're imagining writing a $5 billion check. That's not how these cap tables work.
The first layer is the majority ownership group — the controlling stake, the voting power, the people who can hire and fire executives and make decisions at the league level. Jerry Jones on the Cowboys. Joe Lacob on the Warriors. That's real control, real responsibility, real capital.
But below that, the structure opens up. Peter Guber is on the Warriors cap table as a minority owner — a meaningful position, real equity, real upside — but he's not running the team. He's holding a piece of one of the most valuable franchises in professional sports and benefiting from every decision that group makes well.
Below that, the SPV model starts to make sense for more people than most realize. Special purpose vehicle — a pooled structure where a group of investors comes together under one entity. Fifty people. One clean line on the cap table. The managing partner handles the league relationship, the governance, the reporting. The LPs write checks and hold positions in assets they'd otherwise never access.
Chris put a number on the minor league entry point: $1 to $5 million checks to get into smaller franchises. That's not a retail investment — but it's not $5 billion either. RedBird Capital, Arctos Sports Partners, Josh Harris's group, Blue Owl Capital — these are the firms building the infrastructure that makes this accessible to the next tier of investors. Former athletes are starting to show up on these cap tables not just as brand value but as actual capital allocators. Serena and Venus just invested in the Miami Dolphins. Rich Paul and Katie Couric have been putting money into sports entities for years through Boardroom. Mark Cuban just put together a new vehicle.
I've been watching this happen and thinking about it in relation to my own position. I sat on cash from 2010 to 2012 because I didn't have the right people around me to translate what I should have been doing with it — missed one of the biggest market rallies in a generation because I didn't understand what I was looking at and didn't trust anyone yet who could explain it. The opportunity cost on that was real. I think about that every time I see a structure that takes something previously inaccessible and opens a door.
PULL QUOTE: "You gotta have money in order to make money — but these are people's lifelong dreams and goals that have gotten them into this point where now they can go play in these leagues." — Chris
The strategic minority position nobody talks about
Here's the part of the conversation I want every person with capital and a longer time horizon to sit with: minority ownership in a sports franchise isn't just equity. It's a platform.
Michael Jordan owned the Charlotte Hornets. While he did, Cincora — his tequila brand — was distributed through team venues. Now, with the Celtics' current ownership group, Cincora has another distribution channel built in. I was just in Greece at the Jordan board of governors event. Cincora was everywhere. That's not coincidence. That's ownership as infrastructure.
The Wrexham story is the cleanest version of this. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney didn't buy a Premier League team — they bought a fourth-division Welsh football club for a price that wouldn't have purchased a decent house in Los Angeles. They knew media. They knew entertainment. They knew how branding and storytelling work at scale. They applied that to a sports asset in a completely different category and created a documentary series that made the whole world care about a small Welsh town's soccer club. Every promotion Wrexham earned bumped the franchise value. The asset and the brand were the same bet.
This is where I've started to think differently about what I'd actually bring to an ownership group — beyond the check. The things I've been afforded in seventeen years of professional football: the physical infrastructure, the training systems, the recovery modalities, the structure that makes elite athletes elite. The Portland Thorns have some of the best women's players in the world. Their facilities are not a fraction of what we have in the NFL. That gap isn't an argument against women's sports — it's an argument for exactly the kind of ownership that knows what elite looks like and can close that distance. The Thorns are already winning. Imagine what they do with the resources.
Serena and Venus aren't on the Dolphins cap table because the Dolphins needed their money. They're there because what they represent — what they know about building athletes and building brands — is itself a strategic asset the organization wanted on its side.
The frontier nobody has priced yet
Chris closed the conversation with something I've been turning over since we recorded: tokenization.
The Green Bay Packers are the existing model — fan ownership, but structured as non-voting class B shares. You hold paper. You own a piece. You don't control anything. The franchise is community property in the truest sense, which is why it cannot be sold or relocated. That's why there will never be a Seattle Sonics situation in Green Bay.
The crypto version of this takes that structure and makes it liquid, global, and programmable. You take 10% of a franchise's equity, tokenize it, and sell fractional ownership to fans who would never otherwise have access. No voting rights — you're not running the team — but you hold a position in an appreciating asset, you receive distributions if the team generates them, and you have a verifiable, transferable claim. Fan tokens, digital membership rights, on-chain LP positions in SPVs.
The regulatory environment hasn't caught up yet. The leagues haven't approved it yet. But the logic is sound, and the demand is obviously there. Every person who has ever worn a jersey of a team they don't own is already emotionally behaving like an owner. The infrastructure to make that emotional ownership financially real is closer than most people think.
What I'd actually do with a blank check — and how I'd structure it
Three things, in order, that I think create the right entry into sports franchise ownership at this moment:
- Chase the expansion slot, not the existing franchise. Chris said he'd knock on Adam Silver's door every day with a blank check waiting for one of the next NBA expansion teams. I understand exactly why. A Vegas NBA franchise is starting on third base — the city infrastructure is there, the tourism flow is there, the entertainment economy is built for exactly this kind of venue. Every other franchise in Vegas has succeeded. But more than the location: starting from scratch means you design the culture, the brand, the ethos, the logo from day one. You're not inheriting someone else's decisions or someone else's debt. You're building the thing the way you believe it should be built. That opportunity doesn't come available often. When it does, the price will be historic — and it will still be a good deal in thirty years.
- Find the SPV that already has league approval and a real managing partner — not just access to the idea. RedBird, Arctos, Josh Harris's group — these are the firms with track records and existing relationships with leagues that matter. The difference between a real SPV and a well-intentioned one is whether the GP has done this before and has a seat at the table already. I've seen too many people pay for access they thought they were getting and end up with a position that doesn't transfer cleanly when the team eventually sells. Clean structure, real governance, a GP you can call on a Saturday and get an answer. That's the minimum.
- Bring something besides capital. The investors who are getting into meaningful positions on these cap tables — Reynolds with Wrexham, the Venus and Serena deal, what Tom Brady is doing with the Raiders — they're not just writing checks. They're bringing a strategic dimension that makes the ownership group more valuable than it was before they arrived. If you're an athlete who's lived inside elite sports infrastructure for fifteen years and knows what the gap looks like between what men's leagues have and what women's leagues don't, that's not a soft credential. That's a real competitive advantage for the organization. Know what you bring. Price it honestly. Negotiate for a position that reflects it.
The asset class is real. The scarcity is real. The structures exist to get in at multiple levels.
The only question left is whether you're paying attention before the next door closes.