Sport Industry Investment Outlook: Trends & Forecasts to 2026

Barely half a decade into its existence, one of the UK’s most radical sports properties will enter a significant new phase in 2026.

The Hundred – English cricket’s revolutionary short-format competition – welcomed over $650 million of investment last year after selling partial or complete stakes in its eight men’s and women’s franchises. Bringing in capital from India and the US, those deals gave the teams a total valuation of $1.3 billion.

It is a remarkable development for a league that only launched, after a pandemic-induced delay, in 2021 – one recognised as the Business Moment of the Year at the Sport Industry Awards 2025. The new owners may demand changes in the short and medium-term – some teams have been renamed to align with related international franchises, while format updates are possible later in the decade – but their presence is also a significant indicator of the health of the UK sports investment landscape.

Over the past decade, sport in the UK and Ireland (UKI) has attracted over $50 billion of capital investment, deployed across nearly 600 transactions by high net-worth individuals (HNWI), institutional funds and corporate consolidators.

More than $4 billion was invested in UKI sports assets through 2025. The biggest single deal was MSP Capital’s $1.2 billion sale of its 33% minority stake in Formula 1 world champions McLaren to Bahrain’s Mumtalakat sovereign wealth fund and CYVN Holdings, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. That represented a five-fold return on MSP’s initial outlay of £250 million back in 2020. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) also completed a highly notable UK-based deal by committing $987 million to a minority interest in global broadcaster DAZN.

All of this underscores the diversity of valuable sports assets available in the UK – not to mention the resilience of the market in the face of broader risk factors that have hampered investor confidence in other sectors. While shifting interest rate expectations and slowing global demand have affected the pace of dealmaking elsewhere, sport has kept up its momentum and continued its maturation.

At the same time, global macro trends could stimulate further activity. According to projections from global investment bank Houlihan Lokey, the value of the global sports market will expand to $862 billion a year by 2033 – equivalent to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7% since 2022.

Meanwhile, Ares Wealth Management Solutions estimates that the total addressable investment opportunity in sport globally is over $2.5 trillion – a market five times larger than the one solely for teams and leagues.

The depth of UK markets in sports like football – where lower-league clubs continued to attract interest in 2025 – and the expansion of women’s sport are drawing further inward capital. Perhaps the most intriguing trend, however, relates to how investors are coming to evaluate sports assets.

Rethinking an asset

The value of sports assets has long been grounded in their scarcity, cultural significance and entrenched consumer demand. As a result, leading sports franchises have historically traded at a premium to other entertainment properties, reflecting both limited supply and durable relevance. For much of the past two decades, this was reinforced by the reliable growth of media rights revenues.

Predictable broadcast income supported increasingly optimistic valuation assumptions and, in particular, underpinned the additional premium afforded to franchises operating within closed-league systems, relative to European football clubs exposed to promotion and relegation risk. More recently, however, the sustainability of traditional broadcast models has come under pressure as the industry transitions towards streaming, introducing structural challenges to parts of the media ecosystem.

In isolation, this shift might have been expected to temper investor appetite for sports assets reliant on media rights. Instead, recent transactions point to a broader evolution in how such assets are being underwritten. Investors increasingly view elite sports franchises as diversified commercial platforms, capable of monetising scale, attention and data across a widening range of revenue streams.

These include betting and gaming, sponsorship innovation, data and analytics, performance technology and direct-to-consumer engagement, which collectively provide both downside protection and incremental upside. Against this backdrop, valuations have continued to appreciate.

According to EY analysis of MergerMarket data, whereas trailing revenue and EBITDA multiples have historically averaged around 2.1x and 11.3x respectively, over the past five years investors have exhibited a clear willingness to underwrite far more aggressive deal terms. This reflects a shift in perception from discretionary entertainment businesses to long-duration, scarcity-driven assets with infrastructure-like characteristics and growth optionality.

Crucially, the rationale driving investor conviction in sports is borne in empiricism. According to the Ross-Arctos Sports Index, North American franchises have compounded at 13% per annum over the past six decades, while simultaneously exhibiting annualised volatility comparable to investment grade fixed income securities.

“When evaluated against the historical returns of traditional and alternative asset classes, sports ownership has consistently outperformed its peers, delivering market beating upside potential with significant downside protection, including cross-portfolio diversification benefits,” says Allan Noble, Sports Transactions Partner at EY. “Taken together, these factors make sports the golden goose of all asset classes.”

Financing and possibility

The long-term dependability of high-quality sports assets has given rise to more sophisticated financing solutions as investors seek to fund growth, rather than own it. Typically, sports financing has operated on a straitened and simplified basis relative to other industries, whereby the underutilisation of leverage commensurate to asset stability has come at the cost of flexibility and opportunity.

In other words, sports teams and bodies have had limited scope to optimise capital efficiency and their use of resources, manage liquidity, or scale their operations without selling ownership stakes. This has made projects that might accelerate growth – like investments in infrastructure or innovative commercial strategies – harder to plan and slower to execute.

These issues have been exacerbated over the past few years by a slowing of the conventional lending markets during a period of tightening regulations and globally higher interest rates, that have reduced the supply and appeal of debt-financing.

It is into that context that more specialised financing options are emerging for sports teams that better enable asset owners to optimise balance sheets, accelerate commercial initiatives, and unlock value previously constrained by conventional capital structures.

Central to this development is the maturation of debt financing markets, particularly the continued ascent of the $1.6 trillion private credit market. Unlike standardised bank loans or publicly traded debt, private credit loans can offer structures that can be much more closely tailored to a team’s needs, its revenue profile and risk tolerance.

Features such as flexible repayment schedules and bespoke covenants further allow these products to be shaped around a team’s growth plans and can help minimise future cashflow leakage from interest payments.

Meanwhile, more and different securitisation products are also being offered through these markets. This is allowing sports teams to package long-term contractual revenues – including media rights income, ticket sales, sponsorships, and other guaranteed future income such as transfer fee instalments – into investable structures.

That makes it possible to release upfront cash without adding debt to the balance sheet, releasing capital to invest back into the business. Furthermore, these can be organised into tranches with varying risk and return profiles, broadening the range of options available to investors who may be willing to pay more upfront for diversified assets.

This approach can be well-suited to sports teams with diverse and predictable income streams. It can also help to enhance liquidity metrics and improve profitability measures such as return-on-assets (ROA) by converting idle working capital into cash on balance sheets.

The global private credit market, which is projected to reach nearly US$5 trillion by 2029, is likely to gain influence as these transactions become more prevalent in sport. Early adoption is already evident in European football, with high-profile stadium projects paid for through capital raised against media rights and transfer receivables.

FC Barcelona, for example, used asset-backed financing to help fund their ongoing $1.6 billion renovation of the Camp Nou, while English clubs including Nottingham Forest, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Leicester City have also capitalised using similar mechanisms.

“As private credit and asset-backed finance mature,” Noble says, “this could yield investment and grow the volume of capital available to sports organisations – once again increasing asset valuations. This can sustain a stronger, more resilient sport industry over the long term – so long as sports bodies can demonstrate positive, productive engagement with audiences and partners, along with future-focused revenue streams.”

Attitudes to investment

While total merger and acquisition (M&A) volumes recorded in 2025 are unlikely to reach the record-breaking activity of 2021 and 2022, the number of sports-related deals completed at the time of publishing is tracking at 18% above the annualised mean.

This is a busy market – both in historical terms and as a current share of M&A transactions across UK and Ireland industries – and it has generated inbound investment from an ever-broader range of sources and territories.

That has moved investment towards the centre of the conversation within the sports community – as wealthy football club owners enable on-field success and off-field regeneration, fans debate regulations to mitigate the impact of bad actors, and administrators explore the most effective ways to build growth without threatening stability.

The role of investors is complicated by the high profile and rich public relevance of teams. Financial performance is in no way the only pertinent metric, and understanding community sentiment is essential.

In the Sport Industry Report 2026 survey, professionals were actually likelier than fans to be sceptical about new investment. 53% of fans said they would be comfortable with sovereign wealth funds owning clubs in their favourite league, as opposed to 23% of professionals. 58% of fans trust that new investors in sport have supporters’ best interests in mind, compared to just 10% of industry respondents.

A clear majority of both groups, though, say they would seize the chance to get into the arena. Two-thirds of Nielsen survey respondents – 66% of fans and 67% of industry professionals – would be interested in investing in their sports team if the opportunity arose.