FEATURED STORY
Sports Funds Should Incubate Their Own Companies
The most popular segment of The 4th Quarter Show is the “🚨NEW FUND ALERT”.
Any time a new fund in our space is launched, we announce it on the show.
Since March 2026, we’ve detected the launch of a new sports & entertainment fund almost every week:
30 new funds and investing platforms covered in the last seven months
The longest streak: 19 straight weeks of new fund announcements
$13B+ raised or targeted: $7.7B already raised, plus $5.5B in stated capital still to be raised
It’s been a hot year for raising capital in sports. That makes sense for a $3.7 trillion industry with a clear MOAT against AI.
But, what will all these funds invest in? Are there even enough companies to buy?
Only a handful of funds have the capital or political clout to buy minority stakes in professional sports teams and leagues.
Below that tier, the available acquisition targets get thin fast.
Chris Russo, CEO of boutique advisory firm Fifth Generation Sports, argued in a recent Sportico op-ed that there just aren’t enough independent sports businesses generating $10M+ of EBITDA.
This is the sweet spot that many PE firms want to buy into.
Now with the emergence of new investment funds with an abundance of dry powder chasing so few deals, the good ones will be very, very expensive.
So in this deep-dive, we’re breaking down:
All the new funds we’ve covered, and where the money is actually going
How investing platforms are getting creative to invest in new opportunities
What the industry needs next so this capital is allocated efficiently
New Fund Alert 🚨
Here’s every new fund alert we’ve covered, mapped by stage and what they’re targeting:
What stands out is how differently each one is investing across the sports & entertainment economy:
Buy a slice of the big leagues: minority stakes in established teams and leagues (CVC Global Sports Group, Cynosure | Checketts, Thrive Eternal)
Take control of emerging sports: majority stakes in emerging leagues and women’s sports, before prices catch up (Synergy, Juggernaut Diversified Sports, Athvance, Project Level)
Own the offline economy: buyouts of cash-flowing experiences, services, content rights and real estate (154 Partners, Maple Park, Sideline, Shamrock, Pleasant/Rock)
Fame as the edge: athlete, celebrity and creator GPs using their reach to win deals and grow brands (CHAMP, Starfire, OBSN, Goalhanger, CAA x TPG)
Trade access for equity: leagues, clubs and players’ associations investing instead of just selling sponsorships (NFL x General Atlantic, Hotspur Labs, LTA x Redrice, EnOne)
Despite all of these different strategies, one main problem remains:
There may not be enough to invest in.
Why?
Start with the early-stage. Historically, the investing ecosystem for sports startups was nowhere near as robust as it is today. Traditional VCs saw the market as too small of a total addressable market (TAM), too slow of an industry to adopt new tech, and too long of a sales cycle to pull teams and sports-adjacent companies off legacy providers. Some of that still holds…
Just look at Y Combinator. Of the 5,668 companies it has funded since 2005, only about 25-30 have focused on sports. That’s less than 1%.
With capital that thin, few of these companies got the funding needed to reach the profit levels these newer sports PE firms are looking for today.
The early-stage landscape looks very different now. But attracting the best founders to build in sports remains one of the most important problems for the industry to solve.
Then there’s the growth & buyout stage. Roughly $3.8B across the nine emerging-league and offline-economy funds we’ve covered are competing for a small pool of mid-sized companies.
The good news is the next wave of targets are being built right now or will be built: emerging leagues, offline experiences, AI-enabled services, mixed-use real estate, youth sports roll-ups. The bad news is that they aren’t mature enough yet.
So funds have two choices: wait out and be late, or pay heavy premiums for the few companies that already exist.
Our take? It’s time to incubate.
It’s Time to Incubate
While all these new sports & entertainment funds are racing to invest their freshly raised capital into companies that hit their EBITDA ranges, the most innovative firms will start to incubate the next great companies in-house.
Some private equity & venture capital firms that have partners with strong operating experience are rolling-up their sleeves to build the businesses they would want to invest in.
Here are some of the most prominent examples:
On Location Experiences (Incubated by RedBird Capital & NFL’s 32 Equity): Grew from three employees to 500+, expanded to 200+ live-event partnerships and completed four acquisitions before Endeavor bought a majority stake in a deal reportedly valued at $660M.
Unrivaled Sports (Incubated by David Blitzer, Josh Harris, & The Chernin Group): Existing assets of Cooperstown All Star Village and Ripken Baseball were then consolidated into Unrivaled as the operating company which later raised $120M from Dick’s Sporting Goods, Dynasty Equity, and LionTree.
Relevant Sports (RSE Ventures / Stephen Ross + Matt Higgins): Took an idea in a conference room to a major soccer commercial-rights company which secured global marketing and sales mandates for UEFA.
50M+ YouTube Creator CPG Brand (Will Ventures): Working with one of the world’s largest sports creators and hiring a CEO to launch a kids functional snack brand.
As these new sports funds are being announced, it’ll be important to figure out how they can create the next generation of sports companies instead of waiting to invest in the perfect one.
Some could argue that an operator may be more important to an investment firm than waiting for the perfect company…