By James Flashman-Fox, Partner and Global co-Head, Consumer, Sports & Entertainment Practice, Calibre One
The next decade of enterprise value in sport will be built by owners who own the fan relationship and hire like private equity investors. Most are not ready.
For a century, a sports organisation lived or died on results. Win, and the money followed. That world has gone.
The most valuable franchises now operate as media companies, technology platforms, consumer brands and investment assets, often all at once. The people who own them have worked this out. The people who run them are catching up. And the way the best of them hire has changed completely.
They have stopped recruiting like sports teams. They recruit like private equity firms.
I think that is the single most important shift in the business of sport, and it is only just beginning.
Capital changed the question
Between 2019 and 2024, private equity put more than $55 billion into sport. Every major North American league now permits some form of institutional ownership. That money did not arrive quietly.
Private capital does not buy passion assets. It buys enterprise assets, and it expects enterprise returns: governance, margin, scalable growth, a credible path to a much larger business. The owner who once measured success in trophies now measures it in enterprise value.
That changes the question every leadership team has to answer. Not “did we have a good season” but “did we build a more valuable company.” Those are not the same question, and they do not require the same people.
The old revenue model is breaking
Here is where most commentary on sport gets it wrong, and where I want to be direct.
For thirty years the industry has treated media rights as the golden goose. Owners built their business cases on the assumption that the rights cheque would rise forever. That assumption is finished.
Look at what happened to the regional model in the United States. The company behind the Bally and FanDuel regional sports networks paid $9.6 billion for those rights in 2019. It went bankrupt, shed teams, cut fees and is now winding down. The St Louis Cardinals watched a local deal once worth more than a billion dollars across fifteen years reset to roughly $75 million a year, a cut of more than twenty per cent. The regional rights model, the reliable annual cheque that underwrote hundreds of franchises, is disappearing in real time.
At the very top of the market the numbers still look enormous. The NBA sold its national rights for $76 billion. But read the structure. The league had to split those rights across Disney, NBC and Amazon to reach that figure. Fragmentation is now the price of the headline. Every marquee property is being carved across more platforms, more paywalls and more apps, and every carve makes the audience harder to reach and the relationship harder to own.
So here is my view. For the vast majority of the sector, the era of the ever rising rights cheque is over. Prices for anything below the very top tier will be squeezed hard over the next five years. Fragmentation will accelerate. And the franchise that has handed its audience to a broadcaster in exchange for a cheque owns nothing durable when that cheque shrinks.
Direct-to-consumer is the whole game
The asset that matters now is the direct relationship with the fan.
Own the fan and you own the data, the pricing, the product, the lifetime value and the right to sell them ten things instead of one. Rent the fan to a broadcaster and you own a contract that renews on someone else’s terms.
The winners of the next decade will look less like sports teams with a media deal and more like consumer subscription businesses that happen to own a team. Direct-to-consumer platforms, membership, premium hospitality, commerce, gaming, data products, international audiences reached without a middleman. That is where the growth is now. Media rights will still be on the page, but they stop being the thing that drives the business.
This is the business model itself changing, all the way down.
And it rewrites the job description at the top of the house.
The modern leadership team looks nothing like the old one
Twenty years ago a franchise was run through finance, operations and sporting leadership. That team cannot build what I have just described.
The roles that now decide who wins:
Chief Product Officer. This is the role that has moved furthest, fastest. The CPO owns the direct-to-consumer platform: the app, the subscription product, the membership tiers, the streaming experience, the entire fan-facing ecosystem the new model rests on. Everything else in this list feeds it. Get the product wrong and the fan never comes direct, which means no first-party data, no pricing power and no lifetime value to compound. The best product leaders in the world are already in streaming, subscription consumer apps, gaming and marketplaces, where they have built products used daily by millions and lived the retention and engagement loops that decide whether a subscriber stays or churns. A franchise that hires that person is buying a proven operator for the single most important asset it now owns.
Chief Revenue Officer. The old sponsorship director sold inventory. The modern CRO builds a diversified commercial engine. Partnership and hospitality still matter, but they now sit alongside subscription revenue, licensing, commerce, data products and international monetisation, and the CRO is measured on the growth of all of it. This is a role that thinks in average revenue per fan and lifetime value, not just renewal cycles. It packages, it prices, it cross-sells, it finds the second and third revenue line inside a relationship that used to produce one. The strongest candidates come from media and consumer businesses that have already learned to monetise a large audience across many streams at once. That discipline is rare in sport and increasingly decisive.
Chief Technology Officer. The CTO decides whether the direct-to-consumer ambition is real or a slide in a deck. This role owns the data infrastructure, the engineering behind the product, the AI layer, the integrations and the security wrapped around all of it. As a franchise takes on millions of direct relationships it inherits the obligations of a technology company: uptime, scale, privacy, fraud, resilience. Traditional sport has never had to solve any of that. High-growth software and platform businesses solve it every day, which is exactly where this talent is proven and exactly where the best owners are now recruiting.
Chief Data Officer. Data is the asset that ties the whole model together, and someone senior has to own it as an asset rather than a by-product. The CDO turns first-party fan data into personalisation, pricing, retention and commercial decisions, and turns performance data into a sporting edge. Done well, this is the difference between knowing a fan bought a ticket and knowing what they will buy next, at what price, through which channel. The capability is most mature in retail, streaming, financial services and adtech, sectors that have treated data as a monetisable asset for years. Sport is early here, which makes a strong CDO one of the highest-leverage hires an owner can make.
Chief Experience Officer. Acquisition is expensive and retention is where the value sits, so the CXO owns the end-to-end fan journey across the physical venue and every digital touchpoint. Loyalty, personalisation, membership, the quality of the relationship at every step, and above all churn. This is a role imported wholesale from consumer brands, hospitality and direct-to-consumer businesses that live or die on whether customers come back. In a franchise that now depends on recurring revenue, keeping the fan is worth more than winning the next big sponsor, and someone has to be accountable for it.
Twenty years ago most of these roles did not exist in sport. Today they decide whether a franchise compounds in value or stalls. Notice what they share. Every one is about acquiring, engaging, monetising and keeping fans directly. At root that is a technology and consumer challenge, and sport has rarely trained its leaders to meet it.
The real advantage is the ecosystem these roles unlock
There is a second benefit to building this team that most owners miss.
These are not bespoke sports roles. They are the standard operating roles that run the best consumer, streaming, gaming and platform businesses in the world. Hire them, and the franchise stops sitting outside the digital brand economy and starts behaving as a full member of it.
That matters commercially. A franchise with a genuine product, data and experience function can plug directly into the adjacent digital brand ecosystem: streaming platforms, consumer tech, gaming, retail, payments, loyalty networks and the brands that want access to an engaged audience. It can co-market, integrate, share data responsibly and strike partnerships as a peer rather than as a rights holder waiting to be bought. The franchise becomes a node in a much larger network of digital brands, and every node is worth more than a standalone asset.
It also compounds the talent advantage. Executives who have built in that ecosystem bring their networks with them. A CPO from streaming knows the platforms. A CRO from consumer knows the brands. A CDO from adtech knows how audience value is actually created and priced. Each hire is a door into the wider ecosystem, and the franchises building these teams first are the ones being invited into partnerships the rest of the sector never sees.
This is the quiet reason the capability-first approach wins twice. The right leader solves the problem in front of them, and connects the franchise to an economy that traditional sports hiring never reaches.
Hire for capability, not for the badge
This is where sport has to break its oldest habit.
The industry has always recruited from within itself. Twenty years in a league counted as the strongest line on a CV. The logic was that sector experience reduces risk. In this new model it often does the opposite.
Private equity worked this out decades ago. The question a PE investor asks is not “has this person worked in our sector.” It is “has this person solved this problem before.” A Chief Revenue Officer who has scaled a subscription business will build more value than a twenty-year league veteran. A product leader from high-growth software will build a better direct-to-consumer platform than any career sports operator. A marketer from streaming or gaming will reach audiences the traditional sports marketer cannot.
The best owners now hire for the problem in front of them, not the logo behind the candidate. The talent that has already solved scaling, engagement, digitisation and retention mostly sits outside sport, in technology, media, consumer, gaming and financial services. That is where the next generation of sports leadership is being recruited from, and the flow is only increasing.
What sport should take from private equity
Four principles travel straight from the PE playbook into the front office.
Hire for outcomes. What someone has actually delivered tells you far more than how long they have spent in the game.
Prioritise scale. The only question worth asking is whether this person can run a business several times the size of today’s.
Recruit for transformation. Someone who has led real change is worth more to you than someone who simply knows the sector well.
Build for where the business is heading. The strongest teams are designed for the next chapter, and they will look odd to anyone still judging them against the last one.
None of this is complicated. It is just a higher standard than sport has traditionally set for itself.
The bottom line
The best franchises of the next decade will not be the ones with the biggest stadiums or the richest owners. They will be the ones that own their fans and build leadership teams capable of turning that ownership into enterprise value.
The rights cheque is not coming to save anyone. The owners who understand that, and who hire accordingly, will pull away from the field. The ones still waiting for the next broadcast cycle to bail them out will spend the decade wondering why the gap keeps widening.
I know which group I would back. I also know who they are already hiring.
Sources
- Private equity investment into sport, 2019 to 2024, exceeding $55 billion. CFA Institute; Meketa Investment Group.
- Institutional and private equity ownership now permitted across major North American leagues. Meketa Investment Group.
- Collapse of the regional sports network model: Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy and wind-down (rebranded Main Street Sports Group, FanDuel Sports Network); St Louis Cardinals local rights reset. Sportico, Forbes, Sports Media Watch, 2024 to 2026.
- NBA national media rights of approximately $76 billion split across Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon, from the 2025-26 season. NBA; Sports Media Watch; Wall Street Journal reporting, 2024.
- Convergence of sport with media, technology, AI and digital commerce. Deloitte 2026 Sports Industry Outlook.
- Women’s elite sport revenues forecast to exceed $3 billion globally in 2026. Deloitte Sports Business Group.