![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-492243898-e1781812195489.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A handful of billionaires own the Knicks. A few private equity firms own slices of the rest of the league. Marques Colston thinks the fans should get a turn\u2014and he\u2019s selling them an in at $500 a share.<\/p>\n
Colston, the famous underdog receiver of the New Orleans Saints, and former mixed martial artist Nick Edwards have launched the Champion Fund, an investment fund built so that anyone\u2014not just the Mark Cubans of the world\u2014can buy into sports for as little as $500. The idea is to give regular people a stake in an industry they love\u2014and have paid into their whole lives, but have never owned\u2014with buckets in teams, sports technology, real estate around stadiums, and other private deals, including a stake in the English soccer club Ipswich Town.<\/p>\n
The idea began a little after Colston retired in 2015, when he realized that after all the value he\u2019d created for the ecosystem \u201cthere is no more value to extract,\u201d he told Fortune<\/em> exclusively. The fans, the players, the coaches, \u201chave no ownership in it. So it just continues to get funneled to a select few ultra-high-net-worth owners.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the last decade or so, the sports industry has gone from sizable to Herculean. The four major leagues are now worth close to $500 billion combined, and the average NFL team is worth about $7 billion. Measured by average team value, the leagues have beaten the S&P 500 since 2014 on the back of a ballooning industry through extended TV deals, sponsorships, stadium revenue, and fans who keep finding new sports to love\u2014down to high-speed sailboat racing, which Edwards cited as an example. Of the 100 most-watched U.S. broadcasts in 2024, 80 were sporting events.<\/p>\n But only a few groups have reaped the profits: Traditionally, it\u2019s been the richest of the rich like billionaires Cuban or Steve Cohen. But over the last five years, private equity firms have eyed minority stakes in professional teams. Initially resistant, the leagues opened up to PE one at a time\u2014MLB in 2019, the NBA and NHL in 2021, and the NFL only in 2024, which caps a single firm at 10% of a team. By August 2025, nearly one in five teams across the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL had some private-equity backing, according to a J.P. Morgan Asset Management note.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, regular fans turned their love into sports betting, which has drawn ire from senators and critics for its addictive qualities and its house-favoring odds. Edwards and Colston were agnostic about betting, but pitched the fund as an alternative.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of sitting there swiping on DraftKings, or putting $500 on a parlay, you can have some meaningful ownership,\u201d Edwards said. Rather than picking winners, an investor buys one diversified basket.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one investment that gets you access to the entire basket that is sports,\u201d Colston said. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be a company picker. You don\u2019t have to be the expert to go out and find the deal.\u201d<\/p>\n The way the fund works is more like a mutual fund than a bet on any one team. An investor puts in $500 and gets a share of the whole portfolio, which Colston and Edwards manage across their \u201cbuckets.\u201d It\u2019s structured as an interval fund, a kind of registered fund designed to hold things that don\u2019t trade on an exchange, like private companies.<\/p>\n So how, then, would you know what a share is worth? Because the holdings are private and have no market price, the prospectus says they\u2019re valued at \u201cfair value\u201d using estimates the fund\u2019s board approves\u2014estimates it acknowledges are \u201cnecessarily subjective.\u201d That same estimated value sets two things at once: the fee the managers collect, and the price an investor would receive when cashing out.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a real-time calculation based on market trends, what\u2019s actually happening with that asset, and hard revenue numbers,\u201d Edwards said. \u201cThey\u2019re not fluffy valuations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What you can\u2019t easily do is get back out. Because the fund holds private, illiquid assets, it doesn\u2019t let investors withdraw on demand the way a normal mutual fund does. Instead, the prospectus says the fund will offer to buy back shares just twice a year, and the first of those windows won\u2019t open until August 2027\u2014more than a year after the fund began taking money. Even then, it\u2019s only obligated to repurchase 5% of shares, so if a lot of people want out at once, not everyone gets out. The filing describes the investment as illiquid and suitable only for people who can leave their money untouched for a long time.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is also not the cheapest fund. The founders cite a 2.9% management fee, but that\u2019s not the full cost. The prospectus lists total annual expenses of 5.75%, against well under 0.1% for a typical index fund. The filing says outright that it charges more than most comparable funds. And the fee doesn\u2019t go entirely to Colston and Edwards: The manager of record is a fintech firm called Sweater, and the founders\u2019 firm is a subadviser paid out of Sweater\u2019s cut.<\/p>\n Still, the two founders maintain they are building the firm to be friendly to the average sports lover and their Dad.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want this to be the largest retail-investor-friendly platform in the country,\u201d Edwards said. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna keep driving this sucker for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Saints #legend #selling #fans #piece #professional #sports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A handful of billionaires own the Knicks. A few private equity firms own slices of the rest of the league. Marques Colston thinks the fans should get a turn\u2014and he\u2019s… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1971,37,92,2204,166,10432,8011,5854,10434,382,2100,1616,10433],"class_list":["post-8261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-fans","tag-funds","tag-investors","tag-legend","tag-markets","tag-mutual-funds","tag-piece","tag-professional","tag-saints","tag-selling","tag-sports","tag-sports-betting","tag-sports-gambling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A ballooning industry<\/h2>\n
How the fund works<\/h2>\n