• Firm has taken control of the league
• Founded by former TPG senior partner
• Raised capital mostly from Mexican, US family offices

Michael MacDougall, a former senior partner at TPG, had been seeking sports investment opportunities since retiring in 2022.

About six months ago, Ryan Kalil – a former Carolina Panthers center whom MacDougall knew through a mutual friend – approached him with an offer to invest in Osos Monterrey, one of eight professional football teams in Mexico’s Liga de Fútbol Americano (LFA). In January, Kalil, former NBA All-Star Blake Griffin, and a group of 10 former and current NFL players – including San Francisco 49ers stars Christian McCaffrey and George Kittle – acquired a majority stake in the team.

MacDougall passed on the opportunity to invest in Osos in favor of investing in the entire league. “It became clear that Osos could be an amazing team, but you needed to have an amazing league,” he told Mergermarket.

On 25 November, MacDougall’s newly launched private equity firm Global Sports Capital Partners (GSCP) announced it would invest growth capital and take control of the LFA. “We control the TV production, the TV distribution, the merchandising, the sponsorships. All those key things,” he said. “We have the right to charge some dues and fees and other things to the owners and then, as we create a profitable league, we share the profits back.”

The combined investment of GSCP and the owners of the LFA’s eight teams is expected to total more than USD 100m over the next seven years. MacDougall declined to share GSCP’s exact investment commitment.

MacDougall sees a lot of growth potential for professional football in Mexico, which is the NFL’s largest international market and where the sport has been played at university level for more than 80 years.

The LFA was launched in 2016. Its season runs in the spring – when there are no NFL or NCAA football games. Each team has 35 Mexican players and a maximum of 15-16 foreign players, mainly from the US, who get paid more than local players, MacDougall said. One of GSCP’s near-term goals is to raise the salaries of Mexican players. “I really want to elevate the economic proposition for the players in Mexico, so that this can really become a career for them.”

GSCP also aims to enhance the TV production quality of the league’s games to attract more sponsors, he said. While the New York-based investment firm does not plan to market the media rights for the LFA in the short term, MacDougall expressed confidence that the league will not have trouble securing a media partner in the future. Local broadcast networks, sports cable channels, and even local TV stations in cities like New York, Houston, or Phoenix with large Hispanic communities have already shown interest, he added.

Meanwhile, some of the Mexican family offices that invested in GSCP own large conglomerates with local media channels. “They can be sponsors. They can get us better coverage and better distribution,” said MacDougall, who also worked at Goldman Sachs when it launched the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network (YES Network).

GSCP is forming an advisory board for the LFA, whose initial members include Tony Vinciquerra, non-executive chairman and former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment and former chairman and CEO of Fox Networks. “He’s the one that created Fox Sports [back when] Fox didn’t cover the NFL, MLB, or college football,” MacDougall said.

The goal is to bring the expertise of executives from US sports leagues to the LFA, he said, noting that four or five years ago, leagues like the WNBA were at the stage where the LFA is today.

GSCP also wants to add two new teams to the LFA by 2027 with the goal of eventually having 20 teams – two in each large city, with the idea of eventually having two divisions, he said.

The LFA currently has two teams in Mexico City, two in the industrial hub city of Monterrey, and one each in Querétaro, Guadalajara, Puebla, and Saltillo.

GSCP has already received inbound interest from family offices in Mexico and the US about launching new LFA teams. “They all love football, and they all have their favorite city … and soccer is out of reach for many of them,” MacDougall said. “I need investors who can actually make my league better.”

The investment firm plans to continue supporting the LFA teams’ youth academies and the LFA Flag Femenil, the only professional women’s flag football league in Mexico, he said. Mexico’s national women’s flag team is the current World Games and International Federation of American Football champion and quarterback Diana Flores featured in a two-minute flag football commercial on Super Bowl LVII in 2023.

GSCP has named a former NCAA Division 1 woman athlete as head of women’s sports, MacDougall said. “Her job is how do we support, not just make money,” he said. “We want to support girls’ sports and women’s sports in Mexico and the US.”

MacDougall said the firm plans to expand its sports investments beyond the LFA, both in Mexico and internationally. He added that he has already received interest from former professional sports players and TV channel owners. GSCP, he noted, operates more like an evergreen fund and so, “There’s no pressure I have to sell… in five years.”

Vinson & Elkins serves as legal counsel to GSCP in the US and Bufete Robles Miaja as legal counsel in Mexico.