Who owns basketball now: how private capital is repricing the game, worldwide

When a group led by Bob Iger and Josh Kushner agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers at a record $12.5 billion valuation this month, the coverage fixed on the number. The more important fact sat underneath it: Mark Walter had bought the same franchise barely 14 months earlier at a $10 billion valuation and flipped it for a $2.5 billion premium in a deal that, per Reuters, came together in roughly 72 hours. Franchises do not move like that unless a deep, patient pool of capital has decided the asset class is underpriced. That pool is private equity and institutional money, and it is no longer a North American story. From Barcelona to Hangzhou to Hobart, the same logic is repricing basketball. This is a map of where the money already is, and where it is heading next.

The United States is the furthest along, and the numbers show it. Owners tied to private-equity funds now hold stakes in 20 of the NBA's 30 franchises, according to Yahoo Sports, and the league keeps widening the door. In December, the NBA raised the number of teams a single institutional fund may hold passive stakes in from five to eight, as Clifford Chance detailed. The firms are consolidating too: KKR is buying the sports-focused fund Arctos Partners in a deal worth around $1 billion, per Akin Gump, which turns "PE buys teams" into "PE buys the firms that buy teams." Arctos itself just more than doubled its Golden State Warriors stake to 13% from 5%, per Sportico, at a roughly $5.5 billion valuation.

What makes this more than a financing footnote is that the capital is starting to shape the basketball. The Boston Celtics sold last year at a $6.1 billion valuation, and analysts increasingly read roster decisions through a balance-sheet lens, with the Jaylen Brown trade cited by Yahoo's Matt Perrault as a case where the profit-and-loss statement mattered as much as the depth chart. New money keeps arriving: Mark Cuban launched a sports PE firm, Harbinger Sports Partners, in July, and Walmart heir Lukas Walton took a 10% stake in the Chicago Bulls at a roughly $6.45 billion valuation, both reported by InvestmentNews. And the fastest-appreciating corner is women's: the same outlet notes the average WNBA franchise is now valued around $427 million, up 345% from 2024, with a new media deal worth $2.2 billion over 11 years. The open question, the one the whole asset class is circling, is liquidity. Akin Gump flags that a secondaries platform for sports stakes and the first sponsor-to-sponsor trade could both arrive in 2026, the mechanisms PE will need to actually cash out.

Europe is a decade behind on structure and moving fast to close the gap. In March, EuroLeague Basketball's board approved exploring a €2.5 billion capital raise, split between €1.5 billion for strategic growth and €1 billion for arenas, alongside a possible shift to permanent franchise licenses, according to SportsPro, which reported private-equity firm BC Partners linked to an investment and a target valuation of €3 billion within five years. Permanent licenses are the crux: institutional capital wants guaranteed participation and defined governance before it commits, which the old promotion-based model never offered.

Running in parallel is the NBA's own European play, and it is a magnet for exactly this money. More than 120 investors, including private-equity funds, sovereign-wealth funds and wealthy individuals, expressed interest in NBA Europe franchises, with multiple billion-dollar offers on the table, per Sportico, and Saudi Arabia's PIF and Qatar's QSI among the names circling. The plan is 12 permanent franchises across markets like Barcelona, Berlin, Istanbul, London, Madrid, Milan, Munich and Paris, with league equity split 50/50 between the NBA and the founding owners. This is a change in kind, not degree. European basketball historically leaned on wealthy benefactors, the model behind Juan Roig's roughly €400 million investment in Valencia's Roig Arena, and the Fourth Quarter notes EuroLeague clubs have collectively burned around €200 million a year staying afloat. The benefactor is now giving way to the fund. Britain is the retail edge of this, with the American-backed Liverpool franchise and London's NBA-preseason turn that we covered in the British-basketball breakout, both signs of foreign capital pricing an under-monetized market.

Where Europe is retrofitting old institutions, Asia is building new ones for capital from day one. The clearest example is the Asian University Basketball League, which closed a Series A led by Blue Pool Capital with Avenue Capital, HSG and Nan Fung, and an investor roster of Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai, former Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry, 76ers co-owner David Blitzer and Yao Ming. It is a venture-funded startup wearing a college league's clothes: pan-regional across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia and Hong Kong, with the Philippines and Australia entering this year, positioned explicitly as Asia's answer to March Madness. The bet is on greenfield scale, and the Southeast Asia Desk reports the 2025 debut already drew more than 65 million livestream views. When the same names that own NBA franchises are seeding a college league in Hangzhou, the asset class has clearly gone global.

Australia offers the most vivid proof that this is not only a big-market phenomenon. In a landmark first for the league, Brisbane-based private-equity firm Altor Capital bought the reigning-champion Tasmania JackJumpers from NBL owner Larry Kestelman for around $35 million, per Business News Australia, notable because the franchise attracted institutional money barely five years into its existence. Melbourne United then reset the NBL benchmark with a restructure at a $50 million valuation that handed majority control to private-equity investor Nick Sansoni, as Australasian Leisure Management reported. The women's game is following: a consortium led by Tesla chair Robyn Denholm's Wollemi Capital, alongside the NBL, acquired a majority of the WNBL from Basketball Australia, a deal first reported by the Australian Financial Review. NBL franchise values have climbed from under $1 million a decade ago to $40 million and up, which is the whole thesis in miniature: a small league, far from Wall Street, being repriced the same way the Lakers were.

The two regions where institutional private equity has not yet arrived at scale are Africa and Latin America, and that gap is itself the story. Here the capital building the pipeline is still mostly strategic and corporate rather than financial: the NBA's own money and league-building through the Basketball Africa League and NBA Africa, plus the sponsor-funded youth infrastructure we covered with the NBA Africa and Tidewater deal, and in Latin America the slow professionalization of Brazil's NBB and Argentina's Liga Nacional. If the pattern from every other region holds, these are the markets where the funds land next, once the leagues are structured enough to give capital the governance guarantees it demands. For a worldwide publication, they are the frontier worth watching hardest, precisely because the smart money has not priced them yet.

The reason this is happening everywhere at once is that basketball franchises offer something rare: predictable revenue from media, ticketing, sponsorship and IP, scarce supply, and a live product that, as one analyst told Yahoo, is the one thing not being swallowed by AI. That combination has made teams appreciate faster than almost any other asset, which is why funds are holding longer than the old three-to-four-year flip and reaching for tools like continuation funds rather than selling. The risk is a ceiling nobody can currently see: saturation in media rights, a recession, or the black-swan shock that resets the whole board. As one investor put it to Yahoo, the real question is when the market hits the peak of the peak.

There is a human line under the financial one, too. The Ringer framed the Lakers sale as the end of the mom-and-pop era, family estates selling to institutions in quick succession and wealth concentrating as they go. Whether you read that as maturation or as loss, the fact is the same, and it is global. From Los Angeles to Hangzhou to Hobart, basketball is being priced less like a civic institution and more like a yield-bearing asset. That repricing, not any single sale, is the story of the year, and it is only getting started.