Buying Fifth Avenue

Announced on Tuesday, this deal started with a call on Sunday night. Kushner's Thrive famously runs on concentration and conviction ("You want to invest in Fifth Avenue... high-quality companies that you want to own for decades"), and the Lakers are the Fifth Avenue of American sports franchises, which is how you get to 22x revenue and a $2 billion-plus markup. Thrive Eternal is a permanent-capital vehicle built explicitly to hold what AI can't synthesize, and with no exit clock, paying today for a decade of future appreciation is a perfectly rational trade.

NBA Europe's London franchise is the crown jewel of the league's 12 planned teams. Less than a year after the Lewis family showed Daniel Levy the door at Tottenham Hotspur, the two sides are bidding against each other for it. Levy has lined up Liberty Global and MSP Sports Capital, while the Lewis family joins the Checketts and Eccles families in a rival consortium. That's a billion-dollar grudge match over a team with no players, no arena, and no league to play in yet.

LSU is exploring housing its SEC broadcast revenue ($72.4 million last year) in a private company and selling stakes to outside investors, with the school insisting private equity firms won't be allowed in directly. The bet is that a repricing is coming when the ESPN deal expires in 2030, and LSU would rather turn tomorrow's TV money into capital it can invest today. Only Clemson and Utah have attempted anything close to this, so every athletic director in the country will be watching how it prices, and we speculated on how the structure might work (plus the Michigan State deal it resembles).

On this week’s Clubhouse I kept coming back to how poorly the messaging around these commercial sports deals has been handled, and how negatively the average fan reacts when a piece of their sport gets sold to somebody they've never heard of. This piece is that reaction in long form, written by a soccer lifer who sees the Thrive and FIFA saga as football trading its soul for 30 pieces of silver.

I'm not down with the author’s doomerism, and emotion clearly gets the better of the analysis in places (“All of these companies are dependent on the macro health of a stock market and economy that frankly is utterly dominated by lunatic valuations of AI businesses (none of which make money).” He must have missed that Nvidia had $49 billion of FCF last quarter. Regardless, anyone working near these deals should read it, because this is precisely the sentiment that all the financial engineering in the world can't spreadsheet away.

The NFL's Head of Europe and APAC ran World Rugby as CEO, and he explicitly says he'd have done a better job running rugby if he'd worked at the NFL first. This is the best articulation I've heard of the league's international playbook, from the failed European league of the 90s to today's model of one big game per market creating what he calls the “rock in the pond” ripple effect. And it's all underpinned by a stat that reminds you that the NFL is the beast of all beasts: it generates roughly $25 billion annually, while FIFA generates $13-14 billion per four-year World Cup cycle.

That works out to roughly $1,200 per employee per year across a workforce of 200,000+. BofA is self-insured, so this is a cold actuarial bet rather than a perk…a single avoided heart attack or diabetes case pays for a lot of prescriptions. As a reminder, roughly 1 in 6 Americans have now tried a GLP-1.

ESPN spent 40 years hunting for the lost tapes of its very first live broadcast, a 1979 slow pitch softball game between the Kentucky Bourbons and the Milwaukee Schlitz. They turned up in the basement closet of the Schlitz owner, who had bought them from ESPN a month after the game for $750.