The investment bank that has been a player in media and entertainment for the past dozen years has teamed with, owner of the Chicago Cubs regional sports network, in a special purpose acquisition company that aims to acquire firms valued at $1 billion or more.
“We are much broader than sports,” says Brett Varsov, partner and head of M&A at Raine Group and co-CEO of Marquee Raine Acquisition Corp. “What we’re looking at is all of the economics around live events — music, ticket rights, sports rights for pay TV — those are some of the spaces that we’re looking to invest in. As we got done with our work at Wrigley Field, we looked around at our team and started to think about what else we could do outside of baseball.”
“At our core is deep industry expertise and relationships across all of the TMT sectors,” says Varsov. “What we do is build businesses around that expertise.”