|
On Friday, we hosted our third-annual Huddle in the Hamptons, ending in a pickleball tournament (won this year by Terrell Owens). I opened the day with a stacked athlete panel: Former NFL player turned UBS head of sports and entertainment Wale Ogunleye; former NFL star Jarvis Landry, now investing and plotting his next chapter; UConn and WNBA alum Tina Charles, who just launched her craft beer brand 78 Brewing (named, naturally, for UConn’s back-to-back undefeated seasons with a combined record of 78–0); and Matt Martin, former NHL player now working in the Islanders front office. They shared candid stories of their successes and failures with money.
But it was the next discussion, with Jason Wright, that most riveted me. Wright, a former NFL player and former president of the Commanders, now runs Project Level, the $250 million (and still raising) sports fund at Ariel Investments that has a minority stake in the NWSL’s Denver Summit. Two of Wright’s comments in particular stood out to me:
On investing in the Denver Summit:
“We paid a $110 million expansion fee, many multiples up from what it was, say, five years ago, when they were like $1 or $2 million. So you think, oh my gosh, we’re way past the value. Six months later, Arthur Blank and his team bought the Atlanta expansion franchise for $165 million. And then a few months after that, the Haslam family in Columbus bought for $205 million.
We had 63,004 attendees at our opening match in Empower Stadium. And this was not like a giveaway thing. The average ticket price, again, I’m not supposed to say, but let’s say it’s somewhere between $40 and $60 for an average ticket price. That’s real money. That’s real revenue. We’re pacing towards top three in revenue in the NWSL in our first year because it’s the right market, it’s run professionally, and it’s a combination of institutional investment and a local owner with the real chops and credibility to drive it. And I think that recipe will work across women’s sports. Our revenue in year one will be larger than every women’s team in Europe, with the potential of possibly Arsenal.”
On women’s sports as small-cap stocks:
“I see women’s sports as the small cap of sports. I’m stealing that from Mellody Hobson, the founder of our fund and my boss. You think of the NFL or the NBA valuations, the Lakers, the Dodgers, the Cowboys, think of those as Nvidia and Microsoft; that’s what they are in the stock market. Women’s sports is the small caps. Faster base of growth. They don’t have to become Nvidia or Microsoft to make a ton of money. Because it’s the return base-on-base that matters. I don’t know that they will catch the NFL or the NBA. Could the WNBA catch hockey? I think the numbers I share with you argue it should, at some stage, catch the NHL. Save for some weird gender bias that continues to oppress these values.
I think believing the Cowboys at, I don’t know what you guys would say, $13 billion? Let’s say $13 billion; that doubling in the next five to seven years is hard to see, even with the $9 billion for the Seahawks. On the other hand, we just watched WNBA valuations go from about $250 million average to $414 million average in a year’s time, and that will continue to happen over the next five to seven years. It doesn’t need to, but I think men’s sports, we keep saying it’s going to hit its cap; it never does. It never does.”
—Daniel Roberts
|
