Josh Harris, owner of several professional sports teams and a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, said at the CNBC CEO Council Summit that he expects to see more and more private equity and institutional investor deals for sports teams.
While part of that was driven by the fact that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was also a bidder for the team, former owner Dan Snyder and the, and the normal challenges of buying one of the NFL's 32 teams, simply putting together the capital to buy the team was a huge hurdle.
Harris noted that while the growth of the underlying businesses of the teams and media rights has kept valuations growing and cash flows high, the capital-intensive nature of running a team has grown too, between player salaries, staff and the cost of maintaining or building an arena or stadium. "We've got a lot of interest in the private equity space," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said at the league's spring meeting in May."We are making real progress on potential private equity. We're going to continue to be very deliberate, but I expect there to be something by the end of the year."