If team sport is big business, team investments seem a compelling way to get on to the pitch.

Fenway Sports Group’s (FSG) sale of a minority stake in English Premier League team Liverpool FC to the 1892 Holdings consortium for GBP 1.6bn (USD 2.2bn) in August is a textbook example of the growing appetite for using club deals to gain exposure to the asset class, according to several deal advisors.

It’s already been a benchmark year for sports investment.

At USD 38.4bn in announced global deal value this year, 2026 is the most valuable year on record for the asset class. The largest takeover in that haul is Josh Kushner and Bob Iger’s USD 12.5bn layup for the Los Angeles Lakers.

And out of the top ten sports team M&A deals announced so far in 2026, six have involved bid parties acting in concert, according to Mergermarket data.

“From our vantage point we have never been busier or more active in sports investment,” said Patrick Mitchell, Latham & Watkins London Entertainment, Sports and Media partner.

That’s true across the entire sports ecosystem, encompassing clubs, leagues, competitions and events, and “irreplaceable” service companies across sport, he added.

Nonetheless, “there is a lot more interest in teams than we have seen for a long time,” Mitchell said.

No transaction is more emblematic of the changing dynamics when approaching team assets than that Liverpool FC transaction, in which Latham & Watkins acted as lead legal counsel for 1892 Holdings, which is led by Amit Bhatia and includes the Mittal Family Trust; K5 Sports, a K5 Global Fund counting Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as lead investor; and EE Capital, the family office of Elaine and Eduardo Saverin.

While investment in a European football club was once the domain of sovereign wealth, Russian oligarchs, or domestic billionaires wanting a trophy asset, the rise of consortiums in these bidding processes holds out the prospect of widening the potential capital at play.

This emergence is partly out of necessity. Huge team valuations have considerably narrowed the pool of single investors who could conceivably acquire majority control of many global sports teams, noted Mitchell.

Taking a smaller initial stake via a consortium certainly provides “access to scarce assets […] with a much smaller outlay,” argued Chris McMillan, Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Private Capital, Europe, at Oliver Wyman.

There are other benefits. Due diligence on team assets inevitably involves “an element of asymmetric knowledge” across player pipelines and performance, reflecting the incumbent owner’s deeper familiarity with the set-up, he noted.

“This creates a strong incentive for co-investment versus outright purchase, so the seller still has skin in the game. Once you have partial ownership and a deeper understanding of the asset, you can increase your ownership stake if you like what you see,” McMillan added.

While derisking entry into the asset class, entering a consortium still affords investors the strategic and profile benefits of owning a top-tier sports team, McMillan said.

“The variety of investors in these types of deals speaks volumes as to how attractive an asset class it is, particularly in English football,” added Farah O’Brien, Latham & Watkins London corporate partner. “The breadth of investment through consortiums is vast and includes family offices, sports funds and high net worth individuals. The large amount of US capital interested also helps maintain competition and healthy valuations.”

When deployed in Europe, US capital has historically been more focused on football assets, McMillan said. However, more recently there has been growing interest in cricket, with US capital put to work in both the UK and India, he added.

American cash was very much to the fore in the most high-profile majority European club buyout by a consortium: the 2022 acquisition of London-based Premier League club Chelsea FC by an investor group including Clearlake Capital, Todd Boehly and Mark Walter.

That ownership structure has admittedly proven far from harmonious. And Walter’s ongoing travails are reportedly behind fresh talks that could see Clearlake emerge as full owner of the club.

But the attractiveness of the underlying assets is not in doubt. Especially in a market cycle where excitement over AI investments is matched only by concern that hype is taking valuations to unsustainable levels.

While the investment thesis for sport is backed by fundamentals, Mitchell noted that in an age of AI dislocation, exposure to such assets could also be seen as a possible hedge.

Indeed, Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital launched Thrive Eternal in April this year – a “permanent capital holding company [focused on] assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology. Iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition, identity, and shared experience.” Thrive Eternal is already invested in the San Francisco Giants MLB baseball team and will participate in the LA Lakers deal.

And in many ways, the real prize for sports investors outside the US is to replicate the American model, McMillan argued.

“US investors have a playbook. Increasingly, they are also bringing complementary expertise around real estate,” McMillan said, noting potential extends beyond the teams themselves to the redevelopment of associated real estate.

The leveraging of stadiums into premium event locations is a major plank of the investment case for the asset class, alongside enhanced media rights agreements.

You don’t need to be successful on the pitch to have impressive events revenue – something any fan of Tottenham Hotspur can attest to. Eight Sports Capital – backed by Wing-Fai Ng and Richard Tsai – purchased a 24.99% stake in Spurs’ parent company ENIC in June.

It’s this rationale that explains INEOS founder and Chairman-CEO Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s support for Manchester United redeveloping its Old Trafford stadium. Ratcliffe purchased a minority stake in the Red Devils back in 2024 from the Glazer Family. Fast-forward to 2026 and the Glazers are reportedly looking to sell another stake in the club.

The sports business is no longer a boom or bust bet on team performance but a highly structured platform investment across stadiums, marketing, and media rights – as well as match day income.

“Media rights revenues for premium events are still impressive,” added Mitchell. “They are not rising at the levels they once were but are still solid recurring revenue streams and, add to that all the headroom around match day, enhanced stadiums and global plays and you start to see the thesis.”

A more integrated approach unifying sports data, video and other digital channels to support fan engagement can create additional commercial opportunities, McMillan said.

Bidders as custodians 

None of which is to say that sentimentality can be brushed aside. Especially when it comes to European-exposed assets.

FIFA’s failed attempt to commercialise the World Cup alongside Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, and the short-lived effort to build a European Super League, demonstrate to any potential bidder the importance of keeping fans onside when investing in the crown jewels of European and English football.

Yet while the cooperative ownership structure of superclubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain makes investment difficult, many European territories have ownership rules that compare favourably with those applied to US franchises in major leagues.

In this context, the English Premier League remains the go-to destination for international capital seeking football exposure.

Investors seeking to engage in such opportunities must accompany the business rationale with a wider story about the heritage and future of clubs they are interested in.

“Valuations have skyrocketed and that is interesting as a lot of these are not competitive processes, rather a long negotiation, relationship building between multiple stakeholders and existing owners, and presenting the buyers as being proper custodians,” said Latham & Watkins’ London corporate partner Hector Sants. “These assets are so unique.”

Indeed, the Liverpool transaction was conducted at an enterprise value of USD 7.4bn – higher than the USD 6.4bn valuation paid by Ratcliffe and INEOS for their stake in Manchester United in 2024, even though the United stake sale was a public and heavily contested auction between the eventual victor and investors from Qatar.

1892 Holdings undertook a long set of bilateral negotiations with FSG. This kind of non-competitive bidding structure can have significant benefits, given the emotion attached to sports teams in general and football clubs in particular.

Unlike sport itself, sometimes the best M&A deals in this sector are ones where everyone wins.