For most of modern history, sport was never seen as an institutional investment opportunity. The economics were opaque, governance standards uneven, and returns difficult to benchmark. Serious capital looked elsewhere.
That has changed. Elite sports franchises are scarce assets with global audiences, recurring media revenues, and fan bases that remain engaged across economic cycles. At the same time, live sport has become one of the few forms of media still capable of attracting large real-time audiences, making broadcasting rights increasingly valuable. Private equity noticed first. Venture capital arrived nearly a decade later, as advances in data, wearables, streaming, gaming, and fan monetization expanded sport far beyond the field itself.
Now the same capital thesis extends downstream: consumer biometric platforms have turned elite performance infrastructure into subscription products sold to millions. Together, franchise ownership and performance technology represent the investable surface of sport as a modern capital market.
THE FIRST BET: OWN THE SPORT CLUBS
Scarcity became investable.
The institutional investment case for sports ownership began in Europe.
In 2006, CVC Capital Partners acquired Formula One for roughly $2 billion. Over the following decade, CVC stabilized the commercial framework, expanded broadcasting revenues, and refinanced the business against its predictable cash flows, ultimately extracting approximately $4 billion before exiting to Liberty Media at an enterprise value near $8 billion. The transaction validated a simple thesis: premium sports assets are scarce global media businesses with loyal audiences and long-term contractual revenue streams.
European football followed quickly. Multi-club ownership structures expanded, US investors accumulated Premier League positions, and institutional capital increasingly applied private equity operating frameworks to historically fragmented sports organisations. Today, more than 36% of clubs across Europe’s Big Five leagues operate with backing from private equity, venture capital, or private credit investors.
North America arrived later, but at a significantly larger scale. Major League Baseball opened to institutional ownership in 2019. The NBA, NHL, and MLS followed. The NFL approved private equity ownership for the first time in 2024, permitting funds to acquire up to 10% of franchises.
The latest and most consequential entrant has been sovereign wealth from the Middle East. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund acquired Newcastle United and engineered the LIV Golf disruption. Qatar Sports Investments transformed PSG into a global media platform. Abu Dhabi’s City Football Group built a multi-club network spanning five continents.
The supply side of these transactions is equally telling. Early institutional involvement in sport was often driven by necessity rather than financial sophistication. Many teams and leagues remained undercapitalized, operationally inefficient, and heavily dependent on volatile matchday revenues, forcing owners to seek outside capital for stadium financing, commercialization, debt restructuring, or international expansion. Over time, however, the economics of sport changed dramatically. As franchise valuations climbed into the billions, the traditional ownership model that had governed sport for decades began to break down. Many long-time owners found themselves holding enormously valuable but highly illiquid assets, while the pool of individuals capable of acquiring an entire franchise outright narrowed sharply. Minority institutional capital offered a solution: owners could unlock liquidity, diversify personal exposure, and fund long-term growth initiatives without relinquishing control entirely.
The Scale of Capital Moving In
The volume of capital entering sport has escalated sharply. According to S&P Global, sports services deal value reached $31.6 billion in 2024, nearly quadrupling the $8.8 billion recorded in 2023. Sports team acquisitions alone hit a record $23.6 billion through August 2025, driven by franchise sales including the Boston Celtics at $6.1 billion and the Los Angeles Lakers at $10 billion.
Private equity’s footprint now extends across the major North American leagues: as of late 2024, PE firms were connected to 20 of 30 NBA teams, 18 of 30 MLB teams, and 8 of 32 NFL teams. In European football, private equity investment in the Big Five leagues rose from roughly €67 million in 2018 to €4.9 billion in 2023. Cumulatively, Drake Star’s 2025 annual review estimated approximately $200 billion in announced sports deal value across more than 1,000 transactions globally, with $14.3 billion in private financing and roughly $12 billion in new sports-focused funds launched during the year.
The repricing extended beyond legacy men’s leagues. Early investors in women’s sports benefited from a similar scarcity dynamic as institutional capital entered the category. Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, Seven Seven Six, backed Angel City FC shortly after its formation in 2020. By 2024, the club was reportedly valued at approximately $250 million, setting a record for a women’s sports franchise and illustrating how rapidly premium sports assets with strong media positioning and audience growth can reprice once larger pools of capital enter the market.
Media, Betting, and Pricing Power
The driver behind these high valuations is mainly media.
The NBA finalized an 11-year, $76 billion rights agreement with Amazon, Disney, and NBCUniversal, while the NFL’s current media portfolio exceeds $110 billion in contracted value. Broadcasters and streaming platforms are expected to spend approximately $67 billion on global sports media rights in 2026, with payments projected to continue growing through the decade.
That said, perpetual rights inflation is not guaranteed. Much of the recent escalation has been driven by competition between technology platforms bidding aggressively for subscribers rather than for profitable sports businesses. If that competitive dynamic softens, through consolidation, platform fatigue, or rights proving unable to move the needle on retention, fewer bidders will show up at renewal, and the pricing logic that has underpinned franchise valuations starts to look more fragile.
But media is not the only accelerant.
The legalization of sports betting deepened revenue per viewer by embedding gambling into the live viewing experience. However, the category remains exposed to regulatory risk as governments continue to debate gambling advertising and consumer protection.
The Return Profile
The data has validated the points mentioned.
Across the four major North American leagues, franchise values compounded at approximately 14.4% annually over the past twenty years versus 10.7% for the S&P 500, with materially lower volatility.
THE SECOND BET: PERFORMANCE INFRASTRUCTURE GOES DOWNSTREAM
Elite performance data, repackaged as consumer subscription products, became the venture capital layer built on top of the sports economy.
Professional sports teams spent decades building proprietary performance infrastructure, sensors, hardware, and software systems monitoring athlete training, recovery, and exertion. That infrastructure generated a new category of data captured continuously and at scale for the first time. The investment thesis emerged when both proved transferable: devices could be miniaturised for consumers, and models trained on elite athletes could be applied to anyone willing to wear the hardware.
Wearables and the Data Moat
The broader wearable technology market reached $85 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $175 billion by 2030. Venture funding in fitness and wellness startups peaked at $6.3 billion in 2021 before pulling back to $5 billion in 2025, but the capital has concentrated into fewer, larger bets. Whoop, Oura, and Strava collectively carry pre-IPO valuations exceeding $23 billion, having raised a combined $2.9 billion in venture funding.
Whoop launched in 2012 as a tool for professional sports teams, offering the same heart rate variability, sleep staging, and strain tracking that NFL and NBA franchises paid six-figure contracts to access. By 2026, it was on the wrists of over a million subscribers paying $30 per month, giving consumers continuous biometric monitoring that would have required a sports science lab only a decade earlier. The company recently raised $575 million in a Series G at a $10.1 billion valuation.
Oura, the Finnish smart ring company, brought recovery data to consumers: resting heart rate trends, body temperature deviation, respiratory rate, metrics that Olympic training centres once treated as proprietary. The company filed for a US IPO in May 2026 at an $11 billion valuation, with revenue reportedly doubling annually toward a projected $2 billion.
Eight Sleep extended the model into sleep and recovery itself: instrumenting the recovery environment, not just the workout, and charging a premium subscription for the intelligence layer built on top of the data.
The economic model increasingly resembles software rather than traditional hardware.
Devices acquire users. Data and recurring engagement retain them.
These companies are not simply selling wearables. They are building subscription businesses around performance optimisation, recovery tracking, and daily behavioral engagement. Increasingly, retention depends less on the hardware itself and more on the ecosystems layered on top of it: recovery scores, streaks, peer benchmarking, and routines that make the product part of a user’s identity. That distinction matters because the hardware layer may ultimately prove less defensible than the engagement layer. Apple and Google control the dominant consumer health ecosystems and can integrate biometric features directly into devices consumers already own. If the Apple Watch introduces continuous glucose monitoring, as widely expected, it could absorb core functions of standalone wearables into a platform with vastly larger distribution.
Strava illustrates the alternative path. The platform has no proprietary hardware and no biometric moat, ingesting data from Garmin, Apple, Whoop, and Oura. Yet, it filed for an IPO in early 2026 at a valuation north of $3 billion, with revenue approaching $500 million growing 50% year-on-year. The company now has over 180 million registered athletes, and nearly a billion runs logged in 2024. The asset is the network: identity, competition, visibility. If the hardware layer commoditises, the platforms that already sit above it inherit the value.
From Track to Table
The playbook extends beyond wearables.
Maurten, a Swedish sports nutrition company, developed a patented hydrogel technology that solved a problem elite endurance athletes had faced for decades: the human gut could not absorb carbohydrates fast enough to sustain race pace. The hydrogel encapsulates carbohydrates and delivers them past the stomach, pushing absorption from roughly 37 grams per hour to over 100. Sebastian Sawe consumed 120 grams per hour during his sub-two-hour marathon, sustaining an energy output that previous sports science literature considered physiologically impossible. That scientific credibility, built as the official nutrition partner of every World Marathon Major, Ironman, and L’Étape du Tour de France, has since translated directly into consumer reach.
The broader endurance nutrition category is now approaching a $1 billion global market, driven by record participation in marathons, triathlons, and ultra-endurance events. The commercial logic mirrors the wearables playbook: validate at the elite level, then distribute the same technology to the millions now training like professionals.
The Longevity Economy
Sport built three things that longevity now inherits: the credibility (validated at elite level), the data formats (HRV, sleep staging, and recovery scores are now standard metrics), and the behavioural habit (tens of millions of consumers already wear continuous monitors every day). Longevity and preventive medicine, a category that has attracted over $50 billion in financing since 2014, did not need to bootstrap any of these. The hardware is on the wrist, the user is already engaged, and the willingness to pay has been pre-tested at scale.
The biometric data collected by Whoop, Oura, and others are the same data longevity clinics use to build baseline health profiles. As GLP-1 drugs normalize pharmaceutical optimization of healthy bodies, that convergence accelerates: the addressable market is no longer patients managing disease, it is everyone who wants to age better. The global fitness tracker market is projected to grow from $84.9 billion in 2026 to $377.8 billion by 2035, an 18% CAGR, and the heaviest users skew toward high-income, health-conscious professionals: the cohort with the lowest churn and the highest willingness to pay.
When Whoop tells a user their recovery score is 61%, it delivers a cardiovascular risk signal, framed as athletic readiness rather than a clinical warning. That framing is deliberate and commercially essential: consumers who would never subscribe to a medical monitoring service will pay $30 a month to optimize their performance. The underlying signal is identical. The willingness to pay is determined entirely by the frame around it.
The natural acquirers may be insurers, not consumer electronics companies. Wearable makers are not HIPAA-covered entities, meaning they can share health data with payers or transfer it upon acquisition. When Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion in 2019, it was buying health data from 28 million active users. The same logic applies to every insurer or platform currently circling Oura or Whoop.
WHERE THE MARKET IS MOVING
Scarcity drove the first wave of returns. Consumer performance and longevity may drive the next.
At the top end of professional sport, much of the repricing has already happened. The rarest franchises now trade at valuations that often exceed traditional media, cash flow, or private equity comparables. Scarcity still matters, but so does prestige, geopolitical positioning, and the willingness of sovereign and ultra-high-net-worth buyers to pay prices disconnected from conventional underwriting frameworks.
Outside that top tier, however, the economics are less straightforward. Many clubs remain operationally fragile, dependent on broadcasting distributions, vulnerable to relegation risk, or structurally constrained by league economics and wage inflation. The gap between the top 1% of global sports assets and the rest of the market has widened materially.
The venture layer may offer a different profile. Wearables, recovery systems, endurance nutrition, and longevity platforms remain earlier in their adoption curves and are still compounding through consumer health, behavioral engagement, and preventive medicine rather than scarcity alone. Some parts of the category are clearly overheated, but the broader direction is difficult to ignore: the commercialization of elite performance infrastructure has expanded the sports economy far beyond the stadium itself.
Sport increasingly resembles a distribution layer for a larger market centered on health, optimization, and longevity. The franchises became the first institutional asset class. The data infrastructure built around human performance may become the next.
Sources
- S&P Global Market Intelligence, “Sports Services Deal Value Report,” 2024–2025.
- Drake Star Partners, “Sports Tech Annual Review 2025: Global Deal Activity and Fund Launches.”
- Sportico, “NBA Finalizes $76 Billion Media Rights Deal with Amazon, Disney, and NBCUniversal,” 2024.
- PitchBook, “Private Equity in European Football: Big Five Leagues Investment Tracker,” 2018–2023.
- Grand View Research, “Wearable Technology Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report,” 2025–2030.
- Oura Health Oy, SEC S-1 Filing, May 2026.
- Whoop, Inc., “Series G Funding Announcement,” 2025.
- Strava, Inc., “IPO Filing and Company Metrics,” 2026.
- Global Wellness Institute, “Fitness & Wellness Startup Venture Funding Report,” 2021–2025.
- Precedence Research, “Global Fitness Tracker Market Outlook, 2026–2035.”
