NRFL
Emerging Sports Leagues
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NRFL
Emerging Sports Leagues
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The mature end of sport is the most analyzed asset class on earth. The emerging end, where a league is still being built, is where the returns still live and where almost no one has drawn a map. This is that map.
Written by an operator building in this space, not a spectator studying it from the outside.
This guide was written by Steve Ryan, Managing Director of the National Rugby Football League, an emerging U.S. professional rugby league. The NRFL is currently raising capital from accredited investors, and this guide is published by the NRFL. That is a direct interest in the subject matter, and you should read what follows with it in mind.
Two things follow from saying that plainly. The market data here is drawn from independent third-party sources and named throughout, so you can verify any figure yourself. And the conclusions are argued, not asserted, including the parts that cut against an emerging league. The failure rate is the base rate, and it is covered in full.
This is an educational document. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Any securities offering is made only through official offering documents provided to eligible investors.
Professional sport has become one of the most coveted private asset classes on earth. Over the past two decades, major North American franchises have compounded at roughly 12 percent a year, ahead of the S&P 500's roughly 10 percent, with strikingly low correlation to public markets. That record is what pulled private equity and family offices into the room.
Here is the part most write-ups leave out. Those returns went to people who bought early and cheap, then held through decades of compounding. Today the marquee assets already trade in the billions. The Los Angeles Lakers sold at a $10 billion valuation in 2025; the average NFL franchise reached $7.1 billion. The Boston Celtics returned roughly 17x, from a $360 million purchase in 2002 to a $6.1 billion sale in 2025. A real result, and one that cannot repeat from a $6.1 billion base.
So the simplest source of outsized return in sport, getting in before the asset is fully built, has moved. It has migrated away from mature franchises, now richly priced, toward the emerging league: the one place left where an investor can underwrite the creation of the asset rather than pay full price for a finished one.
And here is the strange thing. The mature end of sport is among the most documented corners of finance. The emerging end has almost no serious literature at all. This guide is written to close that gap. What an emerging league actually is, how it makes money, how it should be built, what really kills one, and how to tell a fundable league from a vanity project. With real numbers, not mystique.
For most of modern history, owning a professional team was a closed room. Several forces have pried it open, and each one pushes capital toward the earlier, cheaper end of the market.
There is a fixed number of major-league teams and expansion is rare. Scarcity drove value the way it does in trophy real estate, and it worked so well that the easy appreciation at the top is now spent. A minority stake in a mature league is the most expensive, most passive way to own sport: no votes, no influence, a finished price.
Live sport is one of the last things audiences reliably watch in real time. The NBA's most recent media agreement runs to roughly $77 billion over 11 years. Broadcast and streaming remain the most durable revenue line in the business, and the leagues still building that line have the most room to grow it.
In 2024 the NFL became the last major U.S. league to permit private-equity minority stakes, under strict, passive terms. Family offices are building dedicated sports allocations. As that capital saturates the mature end, it looks earlier for the returns the mature end has already paid out.
New sports, new formats, and women's leagues are opening entry points that did not exist a decade ago, at a fraction of a legacy price. That is the emerging end of the market, and it is where the rest of this guide lives.
"Investing in sports" is not one thing. It runs from the trophy at the top to the frontier at the bottom, ascending from the most expensive and proven to the earliest and riskiest. Most capital, and nearly all the research, clusters near the top.
An emerging league is not a category of sport. It is a stage of company. The asset is still being assembled, and that fact, more than the sport itself, defines the risk and the opportunity.
It can take several forms. A new sport reaching for a professional tier. A new format for an old one. A women's league scaling into real commercial weight. Or a media-first property built for audiences before gate receipts. Different surfaces, same underlying stage.
What they share is the build. Demand, the media product, the venues, and the commercial engine are all being constructed at once, usually against a clock and a finite amount of capital. That is the hard part, and it is also the source of the return.
The spectrum runs from idea to launch to scale to establishment, and where a league sits on that line determines everything. A pre-launch league is a venture bet. A league three years in, with a national media deal and rising attendance, is a different and more underwritable animal, at a higher entry price. "Emerging" is not one risk. It is a curve.
A mature team monetizes an audience it already has. An emerging league has to build the audience and the revenue lines together. That single difference explains most of what follows.
The revenue stack is the same menu a mature team eats from, in a different order:
The survival principle underneath all of it is diversification. A league that leans on a single line, one investor's checkbook, or one revenue stream, is fragile. The Alliance of American Football had a national television deal and roughly three million opening-night viewers, and it still collapsed in eight weeks, because it had one real source of oxygen and it ran out. At this stage, diversified and compounding revenue is not a refinement. It is the difference between a league and a single season.
Two structures dominate. The franchise model: independently owned teams, each negotiating its own economics, loosely federated. The single-entity model: the league owns the teams or centralizes their economics, controls the IP, the media, and the player contracts, and distributes centrally.
For an emerging league, single-entity is the structural edge, for four reasons that compound.
The proof is in the tape. Major League Soccer has run as a single entity since 1996. Its expansion fees rose from $10 million in 2007 to $325 million in 2019 to $500 million in 2023, roughly a 50x climb, because each new owner is buying into a steadily more valuable collective. The average MLS club is now worth close to $700 million.
The Premier Lacrosse League built its entire value at the parent-company level, owning all of its teams, then raised $218 million and reached a valuation above $500 million. ESPN took a minority equity stake alongside a multi-year media deal, and the league can now sell franchises into the value it created, the same path Major League Soccer and Formula 1 walked before it. Under Liberty Media, Formula 1 centralized its commercial engine and turned a $4.4 billion asset in 2017 into one Forbes later valued near $17 billion.
The alignment can reach the people who actually build the audience. The Premier Lacrosse League grants its players equity, and its broadcaster took equity too. When the people producing and distributing the product own a piece of it, every incentive points the same direction. Structure is not paperwork. It is the machine that decides whether value compounds or leaks.
The fastest way to lose money at this end of sport is to fall for the glamour and skip the structure. What follows are the failure modes, roughly in the order they tend to kill a league, each paired with how disciplined operators mitigate it.
None of these mitigations removes the risk. They convert an unknowable bet into a knowable one, which is the most any honest emerging-league opportunity can offer.
Theory is cheap. Here is what has actually happened at the emerging end: the models that worked, and the one that did not.
Single-entity since 1996. Expansion fees climbed from $10 million in 2007 to $325 million in 2019 to a record $500 million in 2023, and the average club is now worth close to $700 million, underpinned by a $2.5 billion, 10-year media deal. The lesson: a league-owned structure turns each new entrant into a return for the owners already inside. Structure compounds.
Founded in 2018 and single-entity, owning all of its teams. It has raised $218 million and reached a valuation above $500 million, with ESPN taking an equity stake alongside a multi-year media deal. Since 2019, ticket revenue is up 149% and sponsorship more than 100%. The lesson: build value at the platform level first, bring your broadcaster in as an owner, then sell franchises into the value you created.
Acquired in 2017 at a $4.4 billion equity value. Revenue grew from $1.78 billion to over $3.4 billion, and Forbes later valued Formula 1 near $17 billion. The lever was media and entertainment: a hit documentary series, new U.S. races in Miami and Las Vegas, and a digital-first push for younger fans. The lesson: an under-monetized sport with a real audience is a value-creation opportunity for operators who treat it as entertainment.
Expansion fees ran from roughly $2 million in 2021 to $110 million for Denver in early 2025 to $165 million for Atlanta later that year. Angel City sold at $250 million, and the average club reached about $184 million, up 77% in a single year. The lesson: a genuine audience, plus scarcity, plus capital, reprices an emerging league quickly. Women's sport is an infrastructure build, not a moment.
Launched in 2019 with a national TV deal, name-brand founders, and roughly three million opening-night viewers. It nearly missed payroll in week two, folded after eight weeks, and filed for bankruptcy with more than $48 million in liabilities. The lesson: demand and distribution do not save an undercapitalized league that leans on a gatekeeper it does not control. The failure is the base rate, not the exception.
The glamour is the trap. These are the questions that actually predict which emerging leagues survive. Bring them to any opportunity, and the answers tell you most of what you need.
Is it capitalized for the full build, or only for launch?
What is the structure, single-entity or independently owned, and who controls the IP and media?
What is the path to distribution, and is any of the media relationship aligned by equity?
How diversified is revenue, and which single line is it over-reliant on?
Does it depend on an outside gatekeeper for talent, distribution, or approval?
Is there a catalyst, a fixed date or event, that disciplines the plan?
What does the league own outright: teams, IP, data, technology, media?
How is the audience actually growing: attendance, watch-through, return rate, not just impressions?
Who is operating it, and have they built something before?
What is the entry valuation, and how was it set?
What rights, information, and governance come with a stake?
What is the realistic downside, and could you lose everything? You can.
At the mature end, you pay full price for a finished asset and hope multiples keep expanding from a high base. At the emerging end, you underwrite the creation of the asset. If it works, value is created, not merely transferred from the last owner to you.
The mechanics of that value are specific. A rising valuation as the league proves demand. An expansion-fee ladder that reprices every new entrant upward, the $10 million to $500 million climb in MLS, the $2 million to $165 million climb in the NWSL. A media-rights step-up as distribution matures. And, in a league-owned model, a share of a whole platform rather than a single team.
The shape of the return is venture, not blue-chip. It is illiquid and long-dated, pays no dividends, and is realized on a sale or a step-up years out. The distribution of outcomes is wide, and it includes zero. Many emerging leagues do not make it; the AAF is not an outlier, it is the base rate.
What you are buying, with your eyes open, is asymmetry: venture-level risk for the chance to be the early owner rather than the late buyer, in an asset class that, at its mature end, has compounded at roughly 12 percent for two decades. Whether a specific emerging league earns that is exactly what the diligence in the previous section is for. Nothing here guarantees it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
Most writing on sports investing comes from the outside, from people who study the cap table. This comes from inside the build. From that seat, three things matter more than any spreadsheet shows.
It is a competition, a media product, and a live-events operator, each on a different clock. Capital that funds only the games, and not the media and commercial engine around them, builds the least valuable version of the asset. Ask any emerging league where the next dollar goes; the answer tells you how it actually thinks about value.
New leagues live or die on whether they reach credible scale before a defining moment in their sport arrives. Building toward a fixed date disciplines every decision, and it is a very different exercise from operating an established team with no clock.
The reason a founding stake costs a fraction of a legacy franchise is that the asset does not exist yet. That is the opportunity and the risk in one sentence. An honest operator will tell you which milestones convert risk into value, and will not pretend the league is further along than it is.
The mature end of sport will keep setting records, and it will keep rewarding the people who bought in decades ago. That trade has not vanished. It has moved to the emerging end, where the asset is still being built and the entry price still reflects that.
The investors who do well here will be the ones who can tell a disciplined build from a vanity project, who read structure and capitalization before the highlight reel, and who are willing to own the risk of creating an asset rather than the comfort of buying a finished one.
That is the whole thesis. The map is here. The wager is yours.
Steve Ryan builds and operates emerging professional sports leagues. He is the Managing Director of the National Rugby Football League, a U.S. professional rugby league building toward the 2031 Men's and 2033 Women's Rugby World Cups on American soil, and he writes and advises on the business of emerging sport: league structure, media rights, revenue diversification, and the economics of scaling a new competition from the founding stage.
He works on the operating side of the exact stage this guide describes, which is the reason it is written from inside the build rather than from the outside looking in. It is also the reason the affiliation is stated at the top rather than buried at the bottom.
If you are evaluating the emerging end of sport, I am glad to share how I think about it. If that conversation turns to what we are building at the NRFL, you will get the same straight answers you just read: what stage we are actually at, what the risks are, and where the plan could fail. And if a different rung on the ladder fits you better, I will tell you so.