Sports team owners gathered in droves to speak at this week’s Bloomberg Invest conference in New York, but I was surprised to learn of their prospective heirs who joined me in the audience.
“For me personally, these are long-term assets, they’re gonna be in our family hopefully for generations. My daughter’s in the audience — I’m gonna have to ask her,” Apollo Global Management co-founder Josh Harris said on stage with Bloomberg’s Jason Kelly.
Harris, who established HRS Management as his family office, led a group last year that bought the Washington Commanders of the National Football League for $6.05 billion, the highest price ever paid for a sports franchise. His sports empire includes stakes in English soccer’s Crystal Palace, the New Jersey Devils of the National Hockey League and the Philadelphia 76ers of the National Basketball Association, a team he bought in a group with Blackstone’s David Blitzer for $280 million from Comcast in 2011. Forbes now values the 76ers at $4.3 billion.
“It’s really more of a long-term and passionate thing for our family, where our job is to win for the cities and create memories. The financial part of it has been exceptional, and I do think it will keep going up,” Harris said, mentioning the continued growth of media deals for top leagues.
“Sports is a really unique proposition — it brings people together.”
By my count, at least eight speakers at Bloomberg Invest have ties to team ownership, either individually or through firms they work for. And that doesn’t include speaker Paul J. Taubman, whose advisory investment bank PJT Partners has been hired by the NFL to serve as a liaison between the league and incoming private equity firms interested in team ownership stakes.
“This is a new asset class,” said speaker Michael Arougheti, the Ares Management CEO and Baltimore Orioles part-owner. “When COVID hit, you had a lot of owners of teams that had generational wealth created through their ownership that were asset-rich and cash-poor and suddenly had a business model where they were struggling to actually support the asset. So that caused a lot of the team owners and leagues to start thinking about the importance of some other form of creative capital to come into the market.”
Other affiliated sports team owners to speak at Bloomberg Invest: Eldridge Industries’ Todd Boehly (Los Angeles Dodgers, Chelsea FC), The Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein (Baltimore Orioles), Oaktree Capital Management’s Robert O’Leary (Inter Milan), the Qatar Investment Authority’s Mohammed Al-Sowaidi (Washington's Wizards, Capitals and Mystics), Crescent Capital Group’s Mark Attanasio (Milwaukee Brewers) and Fenway Sports Group’s Tom Werner (Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC, among other clubs.)
“I think we're scratching the surface on what the Dodgers can do. If I had to bet, the Dodgers will be the first [Major League Baseball] team to hit $1 billion in revenue,” said Boehly, who signed Japanese superstar Shoehi Ohtani to a record-breaking $700 million contract last winter. “I think our global appeal with our global superstars is really going to be driving the demand.”