Jason Wright, former president of the Washington Commanders, says his experience in NFL circles suggests the league is close to opening itself up to foreign investment.
“I think you will see the smaller, scrappier leagues start to bring in sovereign investment more directly first, because the need is there,” he said on a sports business panel Thursday at Gabelli Funds’ annual Media & Sports Symposium in New York. “A slower mover like the NFL doesn’t have to until it has to, and so they’ll be a later mover, but you’ll see it sort of come up the funnel in terms of maturity and size and scale of the leagues.”
Sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have taken significant stakes in soccer, golf, auto racing and other sports, but major U.S. leagues have thus far held them at bay. In many cases, the ethical circumstances and societal practices of foreign entities can generate backlash, as the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour has encountered given the Saudi government’s ties to terrorism and civil rights violations. But with the NFL continuing to surge as a business and eager to keep expanding its presence internationally, Wright sees expanding the money pool as an inevitability.
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Bigger leagues like the NFL, he said, will start with “a portent of direct investment coming from foreign entities,” he said, via “partnership deals at scale with companies and brands that we know foreign governments are behind and supporting. And once you see those partnerships at scale, getting things like naming rights deals done at the team level or marquee partnerships at the league level, that’s the way you test the waters on this.”
Wright, who previously worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. and played for seven years in the NFL, spent five years running the Commanders. He left earlier this year to spearhead Project Level, an initiative to support women’s sports backed by Ariel Investments. Wright’s tenure with the Commanders involved renaming the team, updating its culture after Dan Snyder’s problematic tenure as owner, and shepherding a league-directed sale to new owners.
“Without speaking outside of school, those discussions have been happening in the background,” Wright said of foreign investment. “You’ll start to see partnerships like that emerge on the sponsorship side, and that’ll be the first indicator.”
The panel covered a wide gamut, yielding some provocative takes. One involved the near future of Major League Baseball. Sal Galatioto, a former Wall Streeter who formed his own boutique firm nearly 30 years ago to facilitate sports investments, offered a stark prediction about what will follow the expiration in December 2026 of the current collective bargaining agreement between owners and players. His outlook certainly won’t soothe any fans who recall the 1994-95 strike, but it would encourage anyone with a financial interest in the sport.
“If you look at the revenue multiples, MLB is the lowest of the four major leagues. It is tremendously undervalued,” Galatioto said, in part because of skyrocketing player salaries and the absence of a salary cap, which the players’ union has staunchly opposed. “I have never seen the owners – and I personally know 28 of the 30 owners – I’ve never seen them more united. I think there will be a lockout. I think there’ll be a salary cap, and I think it will completely change league economics, team economics, and the revenue multiples will go up significantly. So I am very bullish on baseball right now, very bullish.”
Arun Manikundalam, an investor at Dynasty Equity and before that Silver Lake and Morgan Stanley, agreed on the benefits of such an outcome. “Salary caps, cost controls, and ultimately profitability, are all things we absolutely look at in terms of value. And so, as Sal said, if [a cap] does get done, that’s obviously that’s net good for the ecosystem, for the health of everything, and I think, you know, buyer interest should reflect that.”