Sports Teams Are Consumer Brands That Don’t Act Like It
There’s no denying that sports teams have some of the most loyal customer bases in the world. Yet despite valuations in the billions, most teams don’t know their fans’ names (or much else about them) because they don’t own their consumer data. That gap, in our eyes, is the structural problem in sports — they are not acting like consumer brands.
The critique isn’t that valuations are wrong, but that they are incomplete. Today’s market prices in brand equity and media rights, but not yet data infrastructure or the compounding value of a direct customer relationship built over decades. The conventional justification is that the supply of sports teams is scarce, fans don’t churn, and a new investor will always want in. We don’t disagree. But it explains the floor, not the ceiling.
Data infrastructure and customer data don’t appear in a traditional sports team’s valuation, but they do in every other consumer business. Netflix commands its valuation not because of its content library alone, but because it knows exactly who is watching, when they stop, and what brings them back. That gap between what a sports team is worth today and what it could be if it centered on fan data is where the next tier of value is created.
I. The Valuation Paradox
In the last 5 years, franchise valuations have defied gravity. The NFL’s average team now exceeds $5 billion, with the NBA, NHL, MLB, and European football clubs not far behind — all trading at multiples that compare to most tech deals. Every new sale seems to set a record that the next one breaks.
And to be fair, the track record justifies the attention. Over the past two decades, the big four North American leagues have generated 13.2% annualized returns (outpacing the S&P 500 by more than 2x). As an asset class, sports franchises have been among the most consistent wealth-creation vehicles over the last generation.
When you look past the headlines, most teams still run a business model designed for a different era. They don’t own their ticketing infrastructure, don’t control their merchandise, and have outsourced their media rights. At some point, price appreciation alone stops being a thesis. We are confident that reality has either arrived or is close.
The business of sports teams is not easily explained on a spreadsheet. The real question is what they would be worth if they were run like a consumer brand that owned its customers?
II. A Brand With No Customer
Think about the brands with the most loyal customers in the world: Apple, Netflix, Adidas, and Spotify. Their business is built around one obsession: knowing their customers better than anyone else. Spotify knows your favorite artist and can recommend a new song to you. Adidas knows which sneakers you bought and can offer a special-edition Samba next release. Now think about your favorite sports team. You’ve worn the jersey since you were 8 years old. You’ve never missed a home game, with season tickets, exclusive merchandise, and the league pass. Chances are, the team has no idea who you are.
Sports franchises sit on the most emotionally committed customer bases ever assembled. This is loyalty that consumer brands spend billions trying to manufacture. In sports, it exists organically and is inherited across generations, geographies, identities, and communities. By every metric that matters in a modern consumer business, teams have already won the hardest part. It’s precisely why sponsorship commands such a premium: partner brands are paying to access a loyal customer base they could never build on their own.
And yet, structurally, they operate like a business that is not direct-to-consumer.
The average fan can appear as four entirely different users across four entirely different systems. The ticketing platform knows you by your seat number. The merchandise provider knows you by your shipping address. The broadcast partner knows you by your subscriber ID. The team itself? Often, it knows you as little more than an email address. Of course, through innovation, this is changing drastically, and it is most teams’ top priority.
The average fan can appear as four different users across four entirely different systems. The ticketing platform knows you by your seat number; the merchandise provider by your shipping address; the broadcast partner by your subscriber ID. The team itself? Often, little more than an email address. Through innovation, this is changing drastically, and it is most teams’ top priority.
The model currently optimizes for the vendor partner over the fan relationship. It has not measured what it’s losing: the compounding value of unified fan data.
III. Why Intermediaries Made Sense And Why They Don’t Anymore
For most of the 20th century, sports organizations lacked the technology and operational infrastructure to sell directly to fans at scale. Ticketmaster could distribute inventory across thousands of outlets. Fanatics could manufacture, warehouse, and ship merchandise globally. Broadcast networks could reach tens of millions of households that no team could reach.
The problem isn’t that intermediaries exist. It’s what happens over time when the entire fan relationship is built on someone else’s infrastructure.
Every time a fan interaction is outsourced, the team loses a little more visibility into who that fan is, what they value, and how their behaviors connect. Intermediaries don’t just take margin; they take context. And unlike margin, context doesn’t show up on financials until it’s gone.
The model highlights a structural weakness: the idea that ticketing, merchandise, media, and sponsorship are separate businesses that happen to share a logo. Each vendor relationship became its own silo, with its own contract, data, and definition of who the customer is.
IV. What Would a D2C Business Model Look Like?
We provide a blank-page exercise exploring what could be possible if they were run more like a consumer business, with examples below.
- Ticketing: The status quo is that outsourced providers such as Ticketmaster, Live Nation, SeatGeek, StubHub, and others control primary/secondary distribution. The D2C vision is to sell inventory through owned channels, with price optimization and other strategies managed by the team.
- Media/Broadcast: The status quo is that broadcast rights deals are the dominant revenue engine for teams today. The D2C vision is to include behind-the-scenes programming, player storytelling, and other content opportunities owned by teams and leagues, built on a direct, owned audience.
- Merchandise: The status quo is that Fanatics controls manufacturing and distribution for most major North American league apparel. The D2C vision is to sell all merchandise through an owned commerce infrastructure, in which the sports team retains all customer data.
V. The Talent Evolution in Sports
If the problem were technological, it would already be solved. The tools to build a D2C business exist and are accessible; the harder problem is organizational.
For decades, the sports industry has been powered by career insiders, people who have built deep institutional knowledge over 20 years within the same organization, league, or ecosystem. That experience is genuinely irreplaceable. Nobody understands a fanbase, a market, or a league relationship better than someone who has lived inside it for a generation.
But the next chapter of value creation requires bringing in diverse thought and experience alongside these leaders. In technology, the pace of change is relentless by design. Companies like Anthropic, SpaceX, and Ramp operate on an iteration cadence that most industries never experience. Operators who have built consumer businesses from scratch think differently about data, retention, and customer lifetime value.
Sports are beginning to import talent. AC Milan hired Maxime Laharrague, formerly a data scientist and insights manager at Spotify, to lead their data strategy across business and marketing. The Florida Panthers brought in Michael White, President of Business Operations, who previously served as Chief Product Officer at Amazon’s autonomous vehicle division. These examples are early signals of what more ownership groups will begin to implement.
Sports are beginning to import talent. AC Milan hired Maxime Laharrague, a Spotify data scientist and insights manager, to lead their data strategy across business and marketing. The Florida Panthers brought in Michael White as President of Business Operations, a former Chief Product Officer at Amazon’s autonomous vehicle division. These are early signals of what more ownership groups will begin to implement.
VI. The Valuation Implication
Here’s the question we keep coming back to: if two teams generate identical revenue but one runs through intermediaries and the other through owned channels with first-party data infrastructure, are they worth the same multiple? We don’t think so. Not even close.
When a team knows every fan, it can model churn, underwrite a fan product, build sponsorships based on verified performance, and personalize experiences at scale. It carries a technology asset alongside the sports asset. The comps stop being other sports teams and start looking more like Spotify and Netflix: consumer businesses where the depth of the customer relationship is itself a source of enterprise value.
That’s the shift we’re watching for at LEAD. Not which team sells next, or at what price, but which groups are quietly building the infrastructure that turns every fan relationship and data point into a driver of valuation.
The teams that get there first won’t just be worth more; they’ll be worth it.
