🗞️ MNP 004 ::: Let's Buy a Team

* * * * * *

“You don’t understand… we’re not in the basketball business. We’re in the experience business.”

* * * * * *

Thats a Mark Cuban line, related directly to his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks - a majority stake which he sold in December 2023 at a valuation of around $3.5B.

It’s more relevant this week than ever, as the Los Angeles Lakers were sold to a group led by former Disney CEO Bob Iger and tech investor Josh Kushner for $12.5B, making it the most expensive professional sports franchise ever sold.

I’m not gonna wax poetic about the sale, or its suspicious timing, or how maybe it was just sound tax planning, or the fairness and morality of private equity owning sports teams… that’s happening on every corner of the internet right now so you don’t need me to do it too.

But, as team ownership enters a new stratosphere and the dream of owning a franchise slips beyond even the wealthiest investors, something else is happening that I don’t think is being taken seriously yet. And I believe this little specific wrinkle will outpace the returns of the teams themselves…

There’s a better way to own the team, without Owning The Team.

I now believe assembling the key pieces that made a franchise irreplaceable will ultimately be more valuable than owning a piece of the franchise itself - short term, medium term, and potentially long term. 

This is the story of how I almost bought and syndicated ownership in the Yankees on Rally, and how it unequivocally convinced me I’d rather own what made the Yankees valuable in the first place…

* * * * *
Monday, August 17th 2026
* ISSUE 004 *

I’ve been starting a lot of these newsletters with an untold story and it seems to be interesting to a lot of you, so I’m going to do it again this week… 

I’ll set the table quick - it’s 2021, the Covid collectibles boom is pushing asset prices into crazy-town territory.

I get a phone call from someone deep in the game-worn collectibles world (a lot of my stories start this way, I know - the old-school “phone call” is still how so many of these deals actually get done). We’re talking about something completely unrelated when he asks:

“actually… would you be interested in a piece of the Yankees?”

I’m a millennial male from Brooklyn who grew up entirely through the Derek Jeter era from draft to final game (where I balled uncontrollably in the arms of my childhood friend Mike). To me, and pretty much everyone like me, the Yankees were and still are as much religion as baseball - so “owning” the Yankees wasn’t something I’d ever seriously considered possible. Even when we started having the “we should try to buy a team” conversations at Rally, the Yankees weren’t remotely on the radar…

SO... I’m on the phone trying to contain the excitement of a little kid in 1995 being handed the keys to Toys “R” Us as I get the details.

The deal was different, but extremely fascinating.

There was $10M of Yankees equity available, a small piece of a larger stake that had already been earmarked for another buyer. This wasn’t an auction and the seller wasn’t looking for the highest bidder. It needed to be structured more like a transfer of ownership than a “sale,” and every potential buyer was to be interviewed by the seller way before the deal even got close to signed.

As it was explained to me, the seller was the son of one of the financiers involved in George Steinbrenner’s original 1973 purchase (when the Yankees sold for $10M TOTAL, by the way - now worth $10B).

The seller wanted liquidity, but the family specifically didn’t want the stake going to a fund or private equity firm. They wanted to break up that last chunk of the investment among people who actually cared about the Yankees, and had the money to buy it.

Pass the interview, get through board approval, write the check, and you’d walk away “owning” the New York Yankees (which also includes YES Network, and Legends Hospitality).

This was an automatic YES… BUT, with all of that, the way it was positioned was that we should only expect to see around a 7.5% to 10% return per year.

Which, is less than the interest of some checking accounts at this point, and certainly less than the raging bull market public equities have provided over the last decade. 

Short-story long, the deal never materialized for reasons I’ll get into in a future, more in-depth piece.

At the time, I looked at it as a massive opportunity that was lost forever…

But, that was a much different time than present-day - 2021 may as well be 1921 given how violently money and sports have collided over the last five years. For context, the Yankees still had a no-facial-hair policy when this deal was in play… Today, aside from 5-o’clock shadows, the entire business of the Yankees and sports in general is nearly unrecognizable compared to the early 2020s. Gambling and private equity have worked their way into nearly every part of the game, its revenue, and increasingly, who gets to own it.

Which brings me to this week…

Two of the most valuable and historic franchises in sports, the Yankees and the Lakers - the absolute mountaintops of team ownership - were effectively “sold” to investors who view them far differently than the families and individuals who owned them in the past.

Wins and losses matter, but everyone knows what it means when PE comes into any business - whether its a chain of laundromats or a pro sport team, the end goal becomes binary: maximize the net revenue over a pre-determined period and ultimately sell it for more money than they paid.

The game is to be sold, not to be told. And this week was a preview of what’s coming.

The Lakers deal is particularly interesting for a few reasons, starting with the fact that in just over a year without a deep run into the playoffs and with the loss of a superstar (LeBron James), the franchise was repriced 25% higher. But this letter is about the collectible assets that sit around brands and franchises, so that’s where I want to focus...

I will almost certainly never own any significant piece of the Lakers, but I can pretty easily own the best parts of the Lakers - the objects tied to the players, moments and history that made the franchise worth billions in the first place.

And I believe those assets can return considerably more than the 7%-10% annually we were quoted for the Yankees in 2021.

The concept is dead simple, and can be put into action right now -(and it likely needs to be, because it won’t last long at the pace the tier-1 collectibles space is moving).

I’m going to break this thesis into three quick sections:

1: What you’re actually buying when you buy a team
2: Creating a synthetic/investable version of that ownership
3: What a “team index” might actually look like/where to start

👇👇👇👇👇

1: What You’re Actually Buying When You Buy a Team

First, there’s a difference between owning something and investing in something. And I’m not sure there’s anywhere that distinction matters more than professional sports.

“Buy what you love” is the mantra the art world has masterfully sold to us plebeians for as long as art has been sold. Thats fine advice for building a collection, but if the goal is also to preserve wealth (or, god forbid, make money) that only works if you’re already a billionaire or insider and your purchase alone can move the market.

If you’re investing, do NOT buy what you love. EVER. Unless you just want to gamble with the money.

Ted Leonsis, billionaire owner of the NHL’s Washington Capitals and NBA’s Washington Wizards, explained this perfectly a few years ago on the Thirty Minute Mentors podcast (absolutely worth a read/listen, btw). 

His basic point: there are two very different sides to owning a team:

They are not the same thing. Leonsis admits he started entirely with the first:

“I never entered this from a business standpoint. It was ‘I want to own a sports team in my hometown and I want to win a championship.’”

It ultimately became one of the best investments he could have made, and championships were won, but the return wasn’t the reason he bought. He followed that quote with what I think is the more important point for investors:

“I believe sports is the absolute toughest industry in the world to win a championship, and you have to keep score by that. We’ve done incredibly well on the business side by not focusing on it.”

In other words: he separated the emotional value of owning the team from the economics of the business.

Which brings me back to the Lakers...

This deal valued the franchise at roughly 20X their 2026/27 revenue projections. That’s a tech multiple for a basketball team. It’s insane. Nobody looking for alpha would buy that business at that valuation. The easy money in terms of percentage-return in simply owning the franchise may already have been made. But that doesn’t mean all the value has been captured. 

Using Leonsis’ framework, I think buying a professional team gives you something the revenue multiple completely misses beyond the business itself - you’re buying fully covered exposure to:

Team → Brand → History → Players → Moments

That’s the linear pathway. For the Lakers, a huge percentage of that cultural equity lives in some specific moments that are represented over a long period, all of which contribute to that $12.5B valuation outside of simply doing the math on ticket sales and revenue from the Staples Center (I refuse to call it Crypto.com Arena).

Here’s what that equity stack might look like:

The corporation owns the franchise, but it doesn't necessarily own the physical artifacts that represent its greatest history. Thats where a TON of the value of the Lakers comes from. And THAT is something anyone can own 👇

2: Creating The Synthetic Index

First thing you need to do is go look at LakersShrine on instagram. ASAP.

What you’ll see is a private, world-renowned collection of Lakers moments through memorabilia that’s been amassed over 40+ years by collector and SCP Auctions president David Kohler.

He built out a full museum-quality showroom in Southern California to house at least one piece or the singularly-important artifact from nearly every meaningful moment spanning the Lakers franchise's entire history.

This is likely the most complete version of a privately owned synthetic index for a top 10 global sports franchise on the planet.

This is team ownership. With any increase in value of The Los Angeles Lakers Co., so too goes the value of The Lakers Shrine.

Sometimes, the asset collection actually earns more on paper - TV is a perfect example. NBA teams largely split national media rights equally, but the Lakers consistently get more national exposure than almost any other team (including next season, where they lead the league with 34 nationally televised games). Those extra appearances may not mean a bigger piece of the TV-revenue check for the Lakers Co., but it absolutely means more exposure (and more value) for the scarce assets that make up the Lakers Shrine.

And while the valuation of the franchise at $12.5B is the headline this week, from an investment standpoint, the data for individual assets will actually tell you that the return on the artifacts outpaces the valuation increase of the team. 

3 of the 5 most expensive jerseys ever sold are Lakers (2 are Kobe, 1 is Wilt) and Kobe trading cards alone are in a meteoric bull run - its a basic chart, but its fact.

The most interesting part of this is that while access for regular people to invest in the Lakers is basically nonexistent, access to the pieces that make up the synthetic index is still wide open.

Do you need money to build it? Yes, absolutely. But with a concerted effort, you can still buy the top 5% of Lakers assets today.

Kobe jerseys are out there. They’re getting expensive, and I believe they’ll largely disappear into permanent collections by 2028, but they still pop up at auction: essentially 1-of-1 pieces like his 2008 throwback Showtime jersey that connects the franchise’s history to its most important modern superstar, or his debut first-ever game worn Christmas Day 2010 Grinch sneakers that JOOPITER debuted and will be retro’d for the next 20 years. Shaq artifacts still trade for under $100K - they’re criminally undervalued. Luka cooled off a bit but that might mean now is the time to accumulate with a little bit of capital and a higher risk tolerance. 

The contracts, rings, balls, tickets and other pieces of franchise history are still undervalued largely because those markets haven’t been liquid enough. That’s changing. Rally even sold the court floor from Kobe’s final game (the actual signed court) for under $1M. It ended up in a collector’s home, where it remains today. At the time, almost nobody wanted it - half the reason was definitely the size, but the other was that it was impossible to price.

That was shockingly undervalued, but the market was (and is) the market. It doesn’t currently price the future well - it still lives on past comps (thought that time is coming to an end soon).

As liquidity improves, I think those ancillary assets - particularly for globally relevant, historically important franchises - are where some of the biggest opportunities will emerge. That’s actually where I’d start. The alpha probably isn’t in the rookie cards anymore (though theres tons of money still to be made there). It’s in the pieces the market hasn’t fully figured out how to value yet. 

3: What I Believe That Index Looks like, Today

Here’s the breakdown of what I believe to be a logically weighted Lakers index today:

40% Kobe
20% Magic/Kareem
15% Shaq
10% LeBron
05% Jerry West/Wilt 
05% Franchise/championship artifacts
05% Luka/current era

You build this out within your budget, but only targeting the best possible singular pieces within your price range and most recognizable pieces in the context of media replay value (that part is important, as the visuals are going to matter).

You’re weighed toward Kobe because he’s going to liberate dollars from the 35-55 year old group - the demographic thats building all the wealth today which will be spent nostalgically in 2030 and beyond.

With $3M you can buy a killer game worn jersey. With $3K you can buy an entire 3-pack book of uncut tickets in really good condition from every game of Kobe’s last season (in itself, a relic of the last generation of physicality - which gives it extra crossover investment-points).

It’s all fair game because you aren't looking to buy “memorabilia” - you're assembling a physical index of the franchise's cultural history, which is what creates the asset momentum that allows for that $12.5B transaction value of the team. Last year, the Lakers generated $101 million in gate receipts for games. With the breakdown above you can assemble a $101M index, easily. 

This can be done for any team, any brand, and any franchise. And as basic as it is, I talk to all of the individuals with real money in this space on a very regular basis, and I don’t hear anyone thinking about it that way right now.

This is what comes next, and I think it will be the natural evolution of the collectible funds popping up now. If the card companies are smart, they’ll leverage their access to build collections around the world’s most important franchises, then distribute them first within those teams’ home markets, where fandom, demand, and liquidity already exist.

The best teams in the world have spent decades building relevance and creating the market.

The physical asset values associated with that team value is still disconnected, but now that tech billionaires and venture firms are jumping in to the ownership ranks more frequently, that value is about to get captured in full.

So, as I often do here, I’m going to give you my read, from the inside, on what comes next: where the money goes, who makes the biggest moves, and how sports franchise assets get financialized as the door to traditional team ownership closes. 👇👇👇

· · · · · · ·

(1)💰: We’re going to see funds built around individual franchises

I already gave this one away, but it feels like a must-move situation now. There’s enormous value in finding, acquiring and building investment vehicles around a diversified collection of n-of-1 sports assets. It’s already starting to happen. But not all players or franchises (or even whole leagues) carry the same equity value.

I’d personally rather have my retirement money tied to the New York Yankees than New York real estate, and I know a lot of people feel the same - they just have no way to do it.

And I don’t just want Aaron Judge cards - I want the entire history… I want 1927 Murderers’ Row, Derek Jeter diving into the stands, I want tangential pieces of pop culture like Marilyn Monroe from the Joe Dimaggio era, and I want whatever comes next. I want it weighted toward moments, with the Yankees logo, arguably the most important brand in sports, at the center of it.

Compile it, then make it publicly traded and give it one mandate: build the single most investable collection of linear Yankees history on earth. Then do it again for the most important teams, in the most important leagues, in the most important sports - each with its own vehicle. Portfolios of the top teams from the top leagues in the top sports.

· · · · · · ·

(2)⭐: Athlete value is going to keep evolving

This one is more abstract, but athletes are increasingly going to influence the value of their own collectibles through everything they do outside the game, contributing to the current premium of their franchise’s index value. You still have to be great at the sport, but that’s becoming just the starting point.

As an example, I believe Tom Brady is hurting the value of his own assets through the post-career media decisions he’s making, and, by extension, hurting what would be a heavily Brady-weighted “Patriots Index.” Others are doing the opposite. Micah Parsons is an obvious example: moving from the Cowboys to the Packers (one storied franchise to one that may actually be more relevant and closer to a championship), building a podcast and streaming audience that doesn’t even need to know football, creating opportunities off the field in non-sports arenas, and genuinely understanding and respecting the history and culture of sports.

I’ve seen it firsthand - people love him. He’ll go to a basketball game and bring a jersey to trade with a star, gets it signed, and puts it in his collection. He just gets it, and he’s a generational talent on top of it. This is an alpha add-in for a Packers Index, which would be absolutely loaded and relatively inexpensive to assemble.

We were actually going to release a signed card with Parsons and Jordan Love because the Packers have a unique merchandising arrangement outside normal league rules - another reminder that understanding the mechanics matters when building these indexes.

Athletes like this are still cheap, and I think they’ll become increasingly important components of the indexes of the future. You can still get in early. And more of their value creation will happen independent of the team. Players are richer, have enormous direct audiences, and increasingly control their own brands. You can’t tell the talent to shut up and dribble anymore, because now they have the distribution. Thats all becoming a huge weighting when it comes to individual players and their associated team index. 

· · · · · · ·

(3)⏳: The timeline will continue to shrink.

This is the last and probably most important point of the entire letter. The alpha is being sucked out of sports collectibles every single day.

If you want in, you need to jam your foot in the door, right now.

In 12 months, it’s my belief that you’ll need a massive checkbook to even sit at the table - seven figures and up. Period. There’s a narrow window to build these indexes before the next wave of institutional and private-equity money closes the window and the last sliver of daylight disappears. We’ve seen what happens when that capital enters and then dictates direction of any asset class: prices rise, supply consolidates, and access disappears. 

So move.

The Lakers set a new benchmark.

As franchise values move from $5B → $10B → $15B+, the objects representing their most important history become increasingly mispriced. And unlike buying the Lakers, you don’t need the NBA’s permission to buy Kobe’s jersey. Oddly enough, many of the people making these deals aren’t inaccessible. Mark Cuban answers emails and DMs from strangers. I cold-emailed Josh Kushner early in Rally’s fundraising and got a conversation (though I will say I sent him a note about a new project a few weeks ago, and he hasn’t responded yet -  I’ll chalk it up to having been busy buying the Lakers 🤷). 

The point is: these people are making bets with some combination of data, intuition, and access. You can do the same without being distracted by billion-dollar headlines or trying to replicate their exact trades. The assets are still available. The access still exists. The window is still open. 

For now…

* * * * * *
FIN
* ISSUE 004 *

Thats all I got for #004.

Next week is a good one. Until then, follow along on X, and if you've got any material non public info that you wanna share anonymously or just want to talk about life, reply to this email or text me direct anytime: 203-442-6083. I may start putting a bounty on it (I’m getting in a little bit of hot water using only my first-hand accounts lately - I really don’t care what anyone thinks though so we’ll keep it moving). 

And, finally, the standard disclaimer: NOTHING in this newsletter is financial advice. If/when any of what I’ve predicted happens, it was pure luck 😉

Until next week… a quick tweet that outlines the opportunity as we accelerate into the asset-light future, and it’s a bit less dystopian than last weeks:

This goes for everything - even your investments. 

* 🤫 *

=========

A final note: I ran the randomizer for the Theranos Machine giveaway for one subscriber on Saturday, and 🥁... the winner is: [mwal*****[email protected]] - sent you an email, haven’t heard back yet, reply with your shipping info asap! Next subscriber giveaway will be announced next week.