Buy Low, Sell a Billion: Which Sports League Has Been the Best Investment?
Published on July 24th, 2026Written By: Dave Manuel
In January 1973, a shipbuilder from Cleveland led a group that bought the New York Yankees from CBS for $10 million, a figure that fell to $8.8 million once the network repurchased two parking garages included in the deal. His own cheque was $168,000. Today that franchise is valued at around $9.4 billion. That is a return of more than a thousand times the purchase price, compounding at roughly 14 per cent every year for fifty-three consecutive years - a rate that beats most professional fund managers over the same span, achieved by an asset that spent much of that period losing money on paper. And here is the detail that makes the whole story honest: the seller, CBS, had bought the same team nine years earlier and sold it at a loss. This file audits what sports franchises have actually returned across the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS - using documented purchase and sale prices wherever they exist rather than estimated valuations, comparing by compound annual rate rather than raw multiple, and answering the three questions everyone asks: which league has been the best investment, which single team produced the best return, and what exactly has been driving the line upward.
Sports-King Feature
The Best Investment in Sports
Fifty-three years of documented franchise returns across five leagues. What the buyers paid, what the assets became, which league compounded fastest - and the one famous seller who managed to lose money on the greatest brand in American sport.
The index - cheapest team in each league, 2021 set to 100
The cleanest league-versus-league comparison available, because it measures the same thing in every league: what it costs to buy the cheapest seat at the table. Hockey has more than doubled and a half. Baseball has barely moved.
Best Documented Return1,068x
Compounded Annually14.1%
Over53 Yrs
The Seller's Return-3.7%
Two warnings before the numbers, because this file is an audit and not a sales brochure. First, almost every current franchise value is an estimate - Forbes, Sportico and CNBC publish figures that routinely differ by hundreds of millions on the same club, because these are private businesses and nobody outside the room sees the books. Where a team actually changed hands, this file uses the transaction price, which is a fact; where it has not, it uses published estimates and says so. Second, a multiple is a flattering and largely useless way to compare investments held for wildly different lengths of time. Turning $1 into $100 over fifty years is a worse annual return than turning $1 into $10 over fifteen. So everything below is also expressed as a compound annual growth rate, which is how the money actually behaved. On that measure the winner is not the team you would guess, the best-performing league over the last five years is not one of the famous three, and the whole run has a beginning that most people have forgotten: for a long stretch of the twentieth century, owning a sports team was a hobby that lost money.
01
ASSET ......... NEW YORK YANKEESBOUGHT ........ JANUARY 1973 · $8,800,000 NET
VALUED NOW .... ABOUT $9,400,000,000
HELD .......... 53 YEARS, SAME FAMILYRETURN ........ 1,068x · 14.1% COMPOUNDED
George Steinbrenner led a twelve-man syndicate that bought the Yankees from CBS for a headline $10 million, reduced to a net $8.8 million when the network repurchased two parking garages that had been bundled into the sale. His personal contribution was $168,000 - under two per cent of the price. By his death in 2010 he controlled 57 per cent of the club, and the franchise is now valued at around $9.4 billion including its stake in the YES Network. Run the arithmetic on the group's $8.8 million and you get a return of more than a thousand times over fifty-three years, or about 14.1 per cent compounded annually - and that is the return on the whole syndicate. Measured against Steinbrenner's own cheque, the multiple runs into the tens of thousands. It is the longest continuously documented purchase-to-present holding at this scale in American sport, which is exactly why it opens this file. Everything after it is measured against fourteen per cent.
02
ASSET ......... NEW YORK YANKEESBOUGHT ........ 1964 · $11,200,000 FOR 80%
TOTAL COST .... ABOUT $14,000,000
SOLD .......... 1973 · $10,000,000RETURN ........ A LOSS, NOMINAL AND REAL
Before the compounding, the counterexample. CBS bought eighty per cent of the Yankees in 1964 and mopped up the rest over the following two years, spending somewhere around $14 million in total. Nine years later it sold for $10 million. That is a nominal loss on the most valuable brand in American baseball, and with consumer prices rising roughly forty per cent across the same window, the real loss was far worse. The club had aged out of its dynasty, attendance collapsed, the farm system dried up, and a television network discovered that running a ball club is not a quarterly-earnings exercise. Keep this entry in view for the rest of the file. The identical asset that lost a corporation money between 1964 and 1973 then returned more than a thousand times to the family that bought it. The difference was not the team. It was when they held it, and what happened to sports television afterwards.
03
ASSET ......... LOS ANGELES CLIPPERSBOUGHT ........ 1981 · $12,500,000
SOLD .......... 2014 · $2,000,000,000
HELD .......... 33 YEARSRETURN ........ 160x · 16.6% COMPOUNDED
Donald Sterling bought the Clippers for $12.5 million in 1981 and, after a forced sale, the franchise went to Steve Ballmer for $2 billion in 2014 - a hundred and sixty times the money, compounding at 16.6 per cent a year for thirty-three years. On a completed, documented, purchase-to-sale basis, that is the best rate in this file, and it was produced by a team that was mocked for most of the holding period, missed the playoffs for decades, and was never once regarded as a well-run business. The lesson is uncomfortable and important: the returns in this asset class have had almost nothing to do with competence. Ballmer's price was itself the single most consequential number in modern sports finance. The year before, the average NBA club was valued at $634 million. The year after, it was $1.2 billion. One buyer, paying what everyone called a wild premium, repriced an entire league overnight.
04
ASSET ......... LOS ANGELES LAKERSBOUGHT ........ 1979 · $67,500,000 PACKAGE
SOLD .......... 2025 · $10,000,000,000
HELD .......... 46 YEARSNOTE .......... PACKAGE INCLUDED THE KINGS AND THE FORUM
Jerry Buss paid $67.5 million in 1979 for a bundle that included the Lakers, the NHL's Kings, the Forum arena and a ranch - which is why this entry carries an asterisk rather than a clean multiple: the price was for four assets, not one. What is not in doubt is the exit. In 2025 the family agreed to sell the Lakers to Mark Walter at a $10 billion valuation, the highest price ever agreed for a controlling stake in any sports team anywhere, at roughly sixteen times revenue. Remarkably, that does not even make them the most valuable club in their own league on some estimates - Golden State sits above them - and the Lakers achieve it as a tenant in an arena they do not own, which normally caps a valuation hard. What they do have is the richest local television agreement in basketball, worth close to $200 million in a single season.
05
ASSET ......... DALLAS COWBOYSBOUGHT ........ 1989 · $140,000,000
VALUED NOW .... ABOUT $12,500,000,000
HELD .......... 37 YEARSRETURN ........ ABOUT 89x · 12.9% COMPOUNDED
Jerry Jones bought a franchise losing a reported million dollars a month, fired the only coach it had ever had, and proceeded to spend three decades arguing with his own league about who owned the right to sell sponsorships. He won most of those arguments, and the Cowboys have been the most valuable sports team on earth for years - now around $12.5 billion, the first sports franchise to cross several of those thresholds. His compound rate of roughly 12.9 per cent is not the highest here, which is the interesting part: an owner who genuinely transformed his asset returned slightly less per year than a Los Angeles landlord who did nothing at all. Time in the market, and the timing of entry, has mattered more than management in nearly every case in this file.
06
ASSET ......... DENVER BRONCOSBOUGHT ........ 1984 · $70,000,000
SOLD .......... 2022 · $4,650,000,000
HELD .......... 38 YEARSRETURN ........ 66x · 11.7% COMPOUNDED
Pat Bowlen bought the Broncos in 1984 for about $70 million and the Walton-Penner group paid $4.65 billion for them in 2022, then a record for an American sports team. It is the tidiest full-cycle NFL number available - a real price in, a real price out, thirty-eight years apart, no bundled arenas or parking garages - and it lands at 11.7 per cent compounded. Note where that sits: below the Clippers, below the Yankees, below the Cowboys. The NFL is the richest league in the world by revenue and its clubs are the most valuable on the planet, but the entry prices were never as cheap as the bargains available in basketball and hockey, so the multiples are smaller. A great asset bought at a fair price returns less than a mediocre asset bought at a giveaway.
07
ASSET ......... NHL EXPANSION FRANCHISEFEE ........... 1967 · $2,000,000
LEAGUE AVERAGE 2026 · ABOUT $2,100,000,000
ELAPSED ....... 59 YEARSRETURN ........ ABOUT 1,050x · 12.5% COMPOUNDED
In 1967 the NHL doubled in size and charged each of six new owners $2 million for the privilege. The average NHL club is now worth about $2.1 billion - roughly a thousand times that fee, across fifty-nine years, at 12.5 per cent compounded. The ladder since is its own story: $2 million in 1967, $500 million for Vegas in 2016, $650 million for Seattle, and a league that has told prospective owners the next fee will start at $2 billion with another billion expected for an arena. Hockey is also the quiet winner of the recent era. Measured by the price of the cheapest club in each league, the NHL has risen more since 2021 than the NBA, the NFL, MLS or MLB - and its average franchise value nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024 alone.
08
ASSET ......... MLS EXPANSION SLOTFEE ........... 2007 · $10,000,000 (TORONTO)
FEE ........... 2023 · $500,000,000 (SAN DIEGO)
ELAPSED ....... 16 YEARSRETURN ........ 50x · ABOUT 27.7% COMPOUNDED
The price of joining Major League Soccer went from $10 million in 2007 to $150 million in 2017, $325 million for Charlotte in 2019 and a record $500 million for San Diego in 2023 - a fifty-fold increase in sixteen years, or roughly 27.7 per cent a year, the steepest compounding rate in this file by a wide margin. Two honest qualifications, because this is the number most likely to be quoted out of context. An expansion fee is the cost of entry, not the value of a held asset, and the San Diego fee is payable over several years, giving it a present value nearer $400 to $450 million. And the recent trend has cooled sharply: measured by the cheapest club in the league, MLS has risen only around 22 per cent since 2021, well behind hockey, basketball and football. The explosive era was getting in early. The current era is harder.
09
LEAGUE ........ MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALLENTRY PRICE ... UP ABOUT 10% SINCE 2021
COMPARE ....... NHL +159% · NBA +127% · NFL +122%
AVERAGE VALUE . $3,170,000,0002026 ........ +12%, THE BEST YEAR SINCE 2021
For most of the last five years baseball has been the one broken line on the chart. While the value of the cheapest NHL club rose about 159 per cent and the cheapest NBA and NFL clubs rose 127 and 122 per cent, MLB's equivalent managed roughly 10 per cent - the wreckage of the regional sports network model, on which baseball depended more heavily than any other league, combined with an absence of a salary cap and therefore of predictable costs. The individual numbers are stark: the Marlins appreciated just twelve per cent across an eight-year stretch, and the White Sox valuation has now fallen in consecutive years. But the story turned in 2026. Baseball's average franchise value rose twelve per cent to $3.17 billion, its best year since these series began, with the Padres up fifty-nine per cent and the Marlins up forty-three. Investors appear to have decided that baseball at a discount is worth owning, which is precisely the trade that made everybody else in this file rich.
10
The rise is not mysterious and it is not really about athletes. First, media certainty: the NBA is inside an eleven-year agreement worth around $77 billion, the NHL has a twelve-year, $7.7 billion Canadian deal, and a contracted national revenue stream is the closest thing to a bond that a sports team owns - it makes cash flow forecastable, and forecastable cash flow is what lenders and buyers pay premiums for. Second, absolute scarcity: thirty-two NFL clubs, thirty in the NBA, thirty in MLB, thirty-two in the NHL, thirty in MLS, and no mechanism by which anybody can create more, so a growing pool of billionaires bids for a fixed number of units. Third, cost control: salary caps and revenue sharing mean the expense side is capped in a way it is in almost no other business, and even small-market baseball clubs turn profits on distributions - nine teams paid $403 million in luxury tax penalties last season, half of it redistributed. Fourth, liquidity: leagues now permit private equity and minority stakes, so owners can sell ten per cent, keep control and mark the whole asset up. The Giants sold a stake in 2025 at a valuation above $10 billion without giving up an inch of authority.
11
Three answers, in order of confidence. Best single team: on a completed sale, the Clippers at 16.6 per cent compounded over thirty-three years; on the longest documented hold, the Yankees at 14.1 per cent across fifty-three years and more than a thousand times the money. Best league: it depends entirely on the window, which is why so much writing on this subject is useless. Over the deepest period we can document, hockey's 1967 expansion buyers turned $2 million into an average club worth $2.1 billion. Over the last five years, hockey wins again on entry price. Over the last twenty, basketball's repricing after 2014 was the single largest step change any league has recorded. Football has produced the highest absolute values and the lowest volatility, which is a different kind of winning. Baseball has been the laggard and is now the value play. The caveat: every one of these returns was earned by someone who could afford to hold an illiquid, unlisted asset through decades in which it frequently produced no distributable profit at all. The compounding was real. So was the requirement to be rich enough to wait.
The Docket
Every documented transaction in this file, sorted by compound annual return. Prices are the actual amounts paid where a sale occurred; entries marked as valuations are published estimates rather than transactions.
| Asset | In | Out | Years | Multiple | Per Year | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MLS entry fee | $10M · 2007 | $500M · 2023 | 16 | 50x | 27.7% | Fee ladder |
| Clippers - Sterling to Ballmer | $12.5M · 1981 | $2.0B · 2014 | 33 | 160x | 16.6% | Sale |
| Yankees - Steinbrenner group | $8.8M · 1973 | $9.4B · 2026 | 53 | 1,068x | 14.1% | Valuation |
| Celtics - Grousbeck to Chisholm | $360M · 2002 | $6.1B · 2025 | 23 | 17x | 13.1% | Sale |
| Cowboys - Jones | $140M · 1989 | $12.5B · 2026 | 37 | 89x | 12.9% | Valuation |
| Suns - Sarver to Ishbia | $401M · 2004 | $4.0B · 2023 | 19 | 10x | 12.9% | Sale |
| NHL expansion class | $2M · 1967 | $2.1B · 2026 | 59 | 1,050x | 12.5% | Fee to average |
| Broncos - Bowlen to Walton-Penner | $70M · 1984 | $4.65B · 2022 | 38 | 66x | 11.7% | Sale |
| Lakers - Buss to Walter | $67.5M · 1979 | $10.0B · 2025 | 46 | 148x | 11.5% | Sale, bundled buy |
| Panthers - Richardson to Tepper | $206M · 1993 | $2.275B · 2018 | 25 | 11x | 10.1% | Sale |
| Commanders - Snyder to Harris | $800M · 1999 | $6.05B · 2023 | 24 | 7.6x | 8.8% | Sale |
| Yankees - CBS | ~$14M · 1964 | $10M · 1973 | 9 | 0.7x | -3.7% | Sale |
The Arithmetic
Compound annual return - the only fair comparison
Ranked properly, the league that barely existed in the 1990s tops the table and the corporation that owned the Yankees sits below the axis. Multiples reward patience; rates reward timing.
The cost of getting in - expansion fees over time
The entry fee is the purest signal any league sends about what it thinks its own units are worth. Hockey has gone from $2 million to a stated floor of $2 billion; baseball, which last expanded in 1998, has floated $2.2 billion; the NBA has not added a team since 2004.
The Record Book
The $168,000 ChequeGeorge Steinbrenner's personal stake in the 1973 purchase was $168,000 - less than two per cent of the price, and less than the cost of a good house in Manhattan today. He spent the following decades increasing it, controlling 57 per cent of the club by the time he died in 2010. Against a franchise now valued around $9.4 billion, that opening cheque is the single best-documented small-stake outcome in the history of American sport. It is also a reminder of how these deals are actually structured: control, not capital. The general partner ran the room while other people's money sat in it.
The Ballmer ResetSteve Ballmer paid $2 billion for the Clippers in 2014 against a Forbes valuation of $575 million the previous year, and was widely described as having overpaid by a factor of three. He had not. The year before the sale the average NBA franchise was valued at $634 million on a revenue multiple around 4.2; the year after, the average was $1.2 billion on a multiple of 7.2. Today those figures are about $5.4 billion and 12.9 times. One transaction re-rated an entire league, and every owner who thought Ballmer was foolish got richer because of him.
The Ones That Went DownNot every line goes up. The Chicago White Sox have seen their valuation fall in consecutive years, to about $1.94 billion. The Miami Marlins appreciated a total of twelve per cent across an eight-year stretch - a rate that loses badly to inflation, let alone to the S&P - before jumping forty-three per cent in a single year in 2026. And CBS, the most famous seller in this file, lost money on the Yankees in both nominal and real terms. Sports franchises are not a guaranteed one-way asset; they are an illiquid one whose price depends on when you need to sell.
The Stakes Without ControlThe newest development in this market is that owners no longer have to sell the whole thing. Leagues now permit private equity funds and passive investors to buy minority positions, which lets an owner convert paper value into cash without giving up a vote. Robert Kraft has done it in New England; the Giants sold a stake in 2025 at a valuation north of $10 billion. More than half of NBA and NFL clubs have reportedly considered a minority sale. It is the closest this asset class has ever come to being liquid - and it sets a public price without a change of control, which is itself a mechanism for pushing valuations up.
Sports-King's Note
Now for the fine printMethod, sources and limits. Transaction prices are documented sales: the Yankees at $10 million gross and $8.8 million net in January 1973 after CBS repurchased two bundled parking garages, CBS's own 1964 purchase of eighty per cent at $11.2 million with the balance acquired subsequently for a total near $14 million, the Clippers at $12.5 million in 1981 and $2 billion in 2014, the Broncos at roughly $70 million in 1984 and $4.65 billion in 2022, the Panthers at $206 million in 1993 and $2.275 billion in 2018, the Suns at $401 million in 2004 and $4 billion in 2023, the Commanders at $800 million in 1999 and $6.05 billion in 2023, the Celtics at $360 million in 2002 and $6.1 billion in 2025, and the Lakers at a $10 billion valuation in 2025 against a 1979 purchase of $67.5 million that also included the NHL's Kings, the Forum and a ranch - which is why that row is flagged as a bundled buy and its multiple should not be read as a clean single-asset return. Present-day figures for clubs that have not sold are published estimates and are labelled as valuations in the docket: the Yankees at about $9.4 billion including their YES Network stake and the Cowboys at about $12.5 billion, with the caveat that Forbes, Sportico and CNBC each publish materially different numbers for the same teams. League-level figures follow Sportico: average franchise values of roughly $7.1 billion in the NFL, $5.5 billion in the NBA, $3.17 billion in MLB, $2.1 billion in the NHL, with the most recent annual gains of 20, 20, 12 and 17 per cent respectively. The index chart measures the get-in price - the value of each league's least valuable club - indexed to 2021, because it is the only metric published on a consistent basis across all five leagues; a longer series is not possible, since MLS did not exist before 1996 and no comparable cross-league valuation set runs back further, which is precisely why the deep history in this file is carried by documented transactions rather than by the chart. Expansion fees are as announced: $2 million per club in the NHL's 1967 expansion, $500 million for Vegas, $650 million for Seattle, a stated minimum of $2 billion for any future NHL club plus about $1 billion toward an arena; $10 million for Toronto FC in 2007, $150 million in 2017, $325 million for Charlotte in 2019 and $500 million for San Diego in 2023, that last payable over several years for a present value nearer $400 to $450 million; $95 million for Colorado and Miami in 1993 and $130 million for Arizona and Tampa Bay in 1998, with roughly $2.2 billion floated by the commissioner for any future expansion. All returns are nominal and not adjusted for inflation, which materially flatters the longest holdings - a dollar in 1973 is worth several times a dollar today, so the Yankees' real compound rate is meaningfully below the 14.1 per cent stated. Compound rates are calculated from the two endpoint figures and take no account of dividends, distributions, capital calls, stadium contributions, debt or the tax treatment of any of it, all of which matter enormously to a real owner's actual return. None of this is investment advice, and none of these assets was available to anybody reading it.
One Last Word
The most instructive entry in this file is not the thousand-fold return. It is the nine years in which a television network owned the New York Yankees and lost money. Every fortune here was made by someone holding an unloved, unprofitable, illiquid asset through a period when nobody could see what it would become - and the reason the returns look inevitable now is that we are reading the chart from the end. The next CBS is out there somewhere, selling something cheap to somebody patient.
The hard numbers, for the road: the best documented long-run return in North American sport belongs to the group that bought the Yankees for a net $8.8 million in 1973 and holds an asset now valued near $9.4 billion - about 1,068 times the money at roughly 14.1 per cent compounded across fifty-three years, before inflation. The best rate on a completed sale is the Clippers, 160 times over thirty-three years at 16.6 per cent. The steepest compounding of all is an entry ticket rather than a team: MLS expansion went from $10 million in 2007 to $500 million in 2023, about 27.7 per cent a year. Hockey's 1967 expansion class turned $2 million into an average club worth $2.1 billion, and the next NHL fee starts at $2 billion. Since 2021 the cheapest club has risen about 159 per cent in the NHL, 127 in the NBA and 122 in the NFL, against 22 in MLS and 10 in MLB - though baseball just posted a 12 per cent year, its best since the series began. And the seller in the file's founding transaction, CBS, lost money on the New York Yankees, which is the only fact here that anybody should find genuinely surprising.
