Private Equity in Sports: The NBA Went to Eight

Every major North American league now admits private equity. The only question left is how much.

And on 3 December 2025, the NBA raised the number of teams a single fund may hold stakes in from five to eight.

The rules, league by league

League	Single fund cap	Team’s total PE cap	Teams per fund
NFL	10%	10%	Pre-approved firms only
NBA	20%	30%	8 (raised from 5)
MLB	15%	30%	—
NHL	20%	30%	—
MLS	20%	30%	—

The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS and NWSL have each amended their ownership frameworks in recent years to accommodate funds. None of them permitted this a decade ago.

The NFL vets the investor, not just the deal

The NFL’s policy is the tightest in major American sport, and it is restrictive in two ways at once.

The cap is 10% — per fund and as a team’s total private equity ownership. Where the NBA lets a franchise sell 30% of itself to funds, the NFL allows a tenth.

And the firms are pre-approved. Participation is limited to a named list including Arctos Partners, Ares Management, Sixth Street, and a consortium of Blackstone, The Carlyle Group, CVC Capital Partners and Dynasty Equity.

That second condition is the more unusual one. The league is not merely approving transactions; it has decided which investors exist for its purposes. A fund outside the list cannot bid at any price.

Eight teams is multi-club ownership by another name

The NBA’s change deserves more attention than it received.

A single fund may now hold passive stakes in eight of thirty teams — more than a quarter of the league, in one portfolio, competing against each other.

Set that against football, where UEFA rules bar any entity from having “control or decisive influence” over more than one club in the same competition, and RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg needed a separation-of-powers review before both could enter the Champions League — covered in our guide to multi-club ownership.

The distinction leagues rely on is control. A 20% passive stake is not decisive influence; a controlling shareholding is. That is a real difference and it is why the two regimes can coexist without either being incoherent.

It is also a distinction that gets thinner as the number of teams rises. Eight simultaneous financial interests in one competition is a position no individual owner would be allowed to hold.

Motorsport, meanwhile, does not draw the line at all: Red Bull GmbH openly owns two of the eleven Formula 1 teams, as our guide to who owns Formula 1 sets out.

The same firms keep appearing

Follow the names and the pattern across sports becomes hard to miss.

Firm	Where else
CVC Capital Partners	NFL-approved · bought 14.3% of Six Nations broadcast revenue
Silver Lake	Minority of New Zealand Rugby’s commercial arm
Dorilton Capital	Williams, in Formula 1
Otro Capital	Alpine, in Formula 1

CVC is on the NFL’s approved list and holds a slice of Six Nations broadcast income. Silver Lake’s position in New Zealand Rugby is still a convertible loan the union is considering buying back. Two of the eleven Formula 1 teams are held by investment firms.

This is one movement, not several. A small number of funds are acquiring minority positions across every sport that will sell them, and the leagues have been rewriting their rulebooks to make it possible.

Why the leagues opened the door

Not ideology. Arithmetic.

Franchise valuations have risen faster than the number of individuals who can buy at those prices. When a team is worth several billion dollars, the pool of single buyers is very short, and an existing owner wanting to sell a portion has nowhere to go.

Funds solve both problems. They provide liquidity for existing owners and capital for teams without requiring anyone to purchase the whole asset. The caps exist to ensure that what changes hands is money rather than control. More ownership breakdowns sit in our ownership hub.

Our ranking of the most valuable sports teams shows the valuations that made this necessary.

The models this cannot reach

Three ownership structures on this site are structurally immune, and it is worth naming them.

Model	Why funds cannot enter
Bundesliga 50+1	Investors capped at 49%; members hold control
The GAA	Amateur association; no equity exists to sell
Socio clubs	Non-profit status; no dividends, all revenue reinvested

Germany’s competition authority upheld 50+1 in August 2026. The GAA has no shares. Spain’s four exempted clubs pay no dividends by law — though Real Madrid has been preparing outside investment that would break from that model.

Where sport is owned by members, private equity has nothing to buy. Where it is owned as an asset, it now has a price and a permitted percentage.

How we checked these numbers

The league-by-league caps — the NFL’s 10%, MLB’s 15% per fund, the NHL’s and MLS’s 20%, and the 30% team-level caps — and the observation that the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS and NWSL have each amended their frameworks are from Sportico’s comparison of league private equity policies and Sports Acquisition’s ownership rules summary. The NBA’s historical five-team limit, the 20% single-fund and 30% aggregate caps, and the increase to eight teams effective 3 December 2025 are from Clifford Chance’s briefing. The NFL’s pre-approved firms — Arctos Partners, Ares Management, Sixth Street, and the Blackstone, Carlyle, CVC Capital Partners and Dynasty Equity consortium — are from PitchBook, with market context from SportsGrid.

League ownership rules change frequently and the detail is more complex than a single percentage. Caps interact with approval processes, holding periods, governance restrictions and limits on what a passive investor may do, none of which a table can convey. Treat these figures as the headline limits rather than the full rulebook.

Review class: event-driven. Recheck on any league rule amendment, new approved-fund list, or major fund transaction.