A handful of billionaires own the Knicks. A few private equity firms own parts of the rest of the league. Marques Colston thinks fans should get a chance – and he’s selling them a stake at $500 a share.
Colston, the famous outside receiver for the New Orleans Saints, and former mixed martial artist Nick Edwards created it Champion Fundan investment fund that is structured so that everyone –not just the Mark Cubans of the world– can buy into sports for as little as $500. The idea is to give ordinary people a stake in an industry they love – and have paid into all their lives but never owned – with buckets in teams, sports technology, real estate around stadiums and other private deals, including a stake in English soccer club Ipswich Town.
The idea came about shortly after Colston’s retirement in 2015, when he realized that after all the value he had created for the ecosystem, “there was no more value to extract,” he said Assets exclusively. The fans, the players, the coaches “have no ownership of it. So it continues to be passed on to a few very wealthy owners.”
A balloon industry
Over the last decade, the sports industry has grown from a significant size to a herculean one. The four major leagues are now worth nearly $500 billion combined, and the average NFL team is worth about $7 billion. As measured by average team value, leagues have beaten the S&P 500 since 2014, thanks to a booming industry fueled by expanded TV deals, sponsorships, stadium revenue and fans continuing to discover new sports they love – all the way up to high-speed sailboat racing, which Edwards cited as an example. Of the 100 most-watched US broadcasts in 2024, 80 were sporting events.
But only a few groups have reaped the benefits: traditionally it has been the richest of the rich, like the Cuban billionaires or Steve Cohen. But in the last five years Private equity firms are eyeing minority investments in professional teams. Initially resisted, leagues gradually opened up to PE – the MLB in 2019, the NBA and NHL in 2021, and the NFL only in 2024, limiting a single company to 10% of a team. As of August 2025, nearly one in five teams in the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL had some level of private equity backing, according to a note from JP Morgan Asset Management.
Meanwhile, regular fans have turned their love into sports betting, which has drawn ire by senators and critics for its addictive qualities and house-favoring odds. Edwards and Colston were skeptical about betting but suggested the fund as an alternative.
“Instead of sitting there and continuing to wipe DraftKings“If you bet $500 on a parlay, you can have a meaningful possession,” Edwards said. Instead of picking winners, an investor buys a diversified basket.
“It’s an investment that gives you access to the entire sports space,” Colston said. “You don’t have to be a company selector. You don’t have to be an expert to go out and find the business.”
This is how the fund works
The way the fund works is more like a mutual fund than a bet on a single team. An investor invests $500 and receives a share of the entire portfolio that Colston and Edwards manage in their “buckets.” It’s structured as an interval fund, a type of registered fund designed to hold things that aren’t traded on an exchange, like private companies.
Then how do you know what a stock is worth? Because the holdings are privately owned and have no market price, the prospectus says they are valued at “fair value” based on estimates approved by the fund’s board – estimates it acknowledges are “inevitably subjective.” The same estimated value determines two things at once: the fee the managers receive and the price an investor would receive if they cashed out.
“It is a real-time calculation based on market trends, what is actually happening with that asset and specific sales figures,” Edwards said. “These are not fluffy reviews.”
What you can’t do so easily is get back out. Because the fund has private, illiquid assets, investors cannot withdraw on demand like a normal mutual fund. Instead, the prospectus says the fund will only offer to repurchase shares twice a year, and the first of those windows won’t open until August 2027 – more than a year after the fund started raising money. Even then, only a 5% share buyback is required. So if a lot of people want to get out at once, not everyone will get out. The filing describes the investment as illiquid and suitable only for people who can keep their money untouched for an extended period of time.
It is also not the cheapest fund. The founders quote a management fee of 2.9%, but that doesn’t represent the full cost. The prospectus lists total annual expenses of 5.75%, compared to well under 0.1% for a typical index fund. The filing clearly states that the fund charges more than most comparable funds. And the fee doesn’t go exclusively to Colston and Edwards: the registered manager is a fintech firm called Sweater, and the founding firm is a subadvisor paid out of Sweater’s share.
Still, the two founders claim they are building the company to appeal to the average sports lover and dad.
“We want this to be the largest retail investor-friendly platform in the country,” Edwards said. “We’re going to keep driving this sucker for a long time.”