27 August 2026
The Code-Share Era: Why Sport's Next Growth Market Is Someone Else's Audience
Bayern Munich and the NHL just signed a partnership with no disclosed money in it. That is exactly what makes it interesting.
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Elite sport’s most underpriced commercial risk is not a bad broadcast deal or a failed expansion. It is the athlete.
That claim sounds obvious until you examine how the industry actually behaves. Sponsors build multi-year activation plans around individual names. Private equity firms construct multi-billion-dollar portfolios whose projected returns depend, in the most direct sense, on those individuals showing up, performing, and remaining commercially legible. Data businesses price their valuations on the assumption of competitive continuity. And yet, across all of these structures, the psychological and physical durability of the athlete is treated not as a balance-sheet variable but as someone else’s operational concern. It is assumed. It is not modelled. It is not priced.
That is a structural mispricing. And it is becoming harder to ignore.
CVC Capital Partners has formed its Global Sport Group, a division holding what Sportico described as $13.6 billion of sports properties, spanning football, rugby, tennis, and volleyball. The firm has since raised approximately 3.7 billion euros for that division, with Pimco lending around 1.5 billion euros and KKR committing a further estimated 1.4 billion euros. The agreements value the Global Sport Group at around 7 billion euros.
That is a serious capital commitment. And it rests, ultimately, on a single assumption: that the athletes who make these properties worth watching will continue to do so.
CVC bought into Formula 1 for $2 billion in 2006 and sold it to Liberty Media a decade later for $8 billion. The thesis worked because the sport’s stars, its constructors, and its competitive drama remained intact. Strip out the athletes, or degrade the quality of their participation through burnout, injury, or welfare failure, and the underlying asset deteriorates in ways no financial model currently captures.
This is not a hypothetical. It is the operating logic of every sports property in CVC’s portfolio, and in the portfolios of Silver Lake, Advent International, and every other institutional investor that has moved into sport over the past decade. The commercial infrastructure of elite sport is built on the assumption of athlete continuity. The system’s own incentive structure systematically undermines that continuity. The industry is, in effect, short-selling the asset it is simultaneously trying to monetise.
The sports sponsorship market has grown strongly in recent years, projected to reach $74.59 billion in 2026 from $70.2 billion in 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 6.3%. The market is expected to see continued strong growth, reaching $96.45 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 6.6%. These are not abstract figures. They represent contracted obligations: naming rights, jersey deals, activation campaigns, and athlete endorsement agreements that are priced on the expectation that the named individual will perform, appear, and remain culturally relevant.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Sponsors are not buying access to a sport. They are buying proximity to a specific athlete’s audience, attention, and cultural authority. When Emma Raducanu won the US Open in 2021, she assembled a sponsorship portfolio, reported by Forbes and The Guardian to be worth tens of millions of pounds within her first year, that included Tiffany and Co., Dior, British Airways, and HSBC. Those deals were written before any evidence of sustained on-tour performance. They were priced on a moment. The risk embedded in that moment, the physical and psychological demands of sustaining elite performance across a full season, was not priced at all.
That is not unique to Raducanu. It is the standard model. Sponsors buy the peak. They do not buy the durability of the person behind it.
| Commercial Layer | Athlete Dependency | Welfare Risk Exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Broadcast rights | High (star power drives viewership) | Indirect but structural |
| Sponsorship contracts | Very high (individual athlete named) | Direct: delivery risk on activation |
| Private equity valuations | High (competitive quality drives media value) | Systemic: portfolio-wide if multiple athletes affected |
| Data/analytics businesses | Moderate-high (availability drives data volume) | Operational: reduced data quality and continuity |
| Ticketing and live events | Moderate (event quality depends on participation) | Event-level: cancellation and refund exposure |
| Youth academy models | Long-term (pipeline integrity) | Governance and reputational |
The clearest demonstration of welfare risk converting into commercial cost came not from a league or a federation but from a training programme. Alberto Salazar, head coach of the Nike Oregon Project, was banned for four years by USADA after arbitration panels ruled that he and consultant Dr. Jeffrey Brown should be banned for “orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct.” Nike shut down the Oregon Project in October 2019, a couple of weeks after the ban was issued.
Documents released by USADA showed that Nike CEO Mark Parker had been made aware of experiments that Salazar and a doctor conducted on employees and athletes to test the amounts of substances that could be applied without breaking anti-doping rules. Nike had initially backed Salazar after he denied the allegations. The reputational cost, at a moment when Nike was already navigating scrutiny over its treatment of female athletes, was significant and compounding.
The Oregon Project case is instructive not because doping is the same as welfare failure, but because it illustrates the mechanism. A commercial entity, Nike, had built a high-profile performance programme around athletes. The incentive structure of that programme, optimised for results rather than athlete wellbeing, produced conduct that ultimately destroyed the programme itself. The asset was consumed in the process of extracting value from it.
USADA chief executive Travis Tygart stated that the athletes “found the courage to speak out and ultimately exposed the truth,” adding that Salazar and Brown had “demonstrated that winning was more important than the health and wellbeing of the athletes they were sworn to protect.”
That is not a welfare statement. It is a business post-mortem.
The more commercially significant shift is not the failure case. It is the emergence of welfare positioning as a source of competitive advantage in the sponsorship market.
In 2021, Simone Biles signed a long-term partnership with Gap Inc.-owned Athleta, a performance lifestyle brand far smaller than Nike. She had reportedly been earning as much as $1.6 million a month through her Nike deal. The decision to leave was not primarily financial. Biles made clear in 2021 why she parted ways with Nike: she was not chasing a check, but seeking alignment with her personal values, more support, and greater creative input.
When Biles withdrew from multiple events at the Tokyo Games citing mental health concerns, Athleta publicly supported her decision, reinforcing its positioning around athlete wellbeing. Athleta later made Biles the centrepiece of its first national TV campaign ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
The commercial outcome matters here. When Naomi Osaka withdrew from the 2021 French Open citing anxiety and depression, her sponsors supported her. The brands that held their positions through that moment, rather than distancing themselves, retained and in some cases deepened their athlete equity. The ones who had built their contracts around performance delivery alone faced a different calculation.
This is the emerging bifurcation in the sponsorship market. Brands that treat the athlete as a performance output are exposed when that output is interrupted. Brands that treat the athlete as a person, and structure their commercial relationship accordingly, are building a different kind of asset: one that is more resilient to the inevitable disruptions that elite sport produces.
| Athlete Event | Sponsor Response | Commercial Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Simone Biles, Tokyo 2021 withdrawal | Athleta: public support, maintained partnership | Biles became centrepiece of Athleta’s Paris 2024 campaign |
| Naomi Osaka, French Open 2021 withdrawal | Core sponsors held positions | Long-term brand equity preserved across portfolio |
| Nike Oregon Project, 2019 | Nike shut down programme post-USADA ban | Reputational cost; programme dissolved; athlete trust damaged |
| Emma Raducanu, post-US Open 2021 | Sponsors built portfolios on peak moment | Delivery risk on multi-year activation vs. inconsistent on-tour performance |
| Allyson Felix, Nike maternity dispute 2019 | Felix left Nike; signed with Athleta | Athleta’s first-ever athlete deal; welfare positioning established |
The IOC’s 2019 consensus statement on mental health in elite athletes is one of the most commercially relevant documents in sport that the commercial side of sport has largely ignored. The statement found that mental health symptoms and disorders are common among elite athletes and may impair performance, and that mental health cannot be separated from physical health, as evidenced by mental health symptoms and disorders increasing the risk of physical injury and delaying subsequent recovery.
Read that again through a financial lens. Mental health deterioration increases injury risk and delays recovery. Injury risk reduces athlete availability. Reduced availability degrades broadcast quality, sponsorship delivery, and competitive continuity. Competitive continuity is the foundational assumption of every private equity model in sport. The chain is direct.
Research on former elite athletes has found prevalence of common mental disorders, with symptoms including distress, sleep disturbance, anxiety, depression, and alcohol misuse. Factors associated with the occurrence of these conditions in former athletes included involuntary retirement from sport, concussions, and high-contact sport. The transition out of elite sport, particularly when that transition is forced by injury or psychological breakdown rather than chosen, is itself a welfare event with commercial consequences. A Grand Tour winner stepping away mid-contract, as Tom Dumoulin did in early 2020 citing psychological exhaustion, illustrates the contractual and roster-planning exposure that teams carry when athlete mental health is not managed as a business variable. The commercial infrastructure around that athlete, team sponsors, broadcast narratives, race organisers, does not have a contingency for it.
The IOC has also documented, through its consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, how prolonged under-fuelling can impair bone health, immunity, reproductive health, metabolism, and cardiovascular function, producing both poorer wellbeing and greater injury risk. The incentive structures of elite sport, which reward leanness and endurance at the expense of physiological sustainability, are systematically generating the conditions for the asset to fail.
The commercial properties most exposed to athlete welfare failure are not the ones furthest from the athlete. They are the ones closest to the athlete as a living, functioning individual.
A broadcast rights deal with a league is one step removed. A jersey sponsorship with a club is closer. A personal endorsement contract with a named athlete is the most proximate commercial relationship in sport, and therefore the most exposed when that athlete breaks down. The data businesses, Sportradar, Genius Sports, Fanatics, whose valuations depend on athlete availability and competitive continuity, sit at a different point on the same spectrum. Their models assume a certain volume and quality of competitive action. Athlete welfare failures reduce both.
This is the proximity risk that the industry has not yet formalised. The closer a commercial property sits to the athlete as a person, rather than as a performance output, the more it needs to treat welfare governance as a risk management function, not a pastoral one.
| Property Type | Proximity to Athlete | Welfare Risk Category | Current Pricing of Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal endorsement (named athlete) | Highest | Delivery, reputational, continuity | Largely unpriced |
| Club/team jersey sponsorship | High | Reputational, squad continuity | Partially priced via force majeure |
| League broadcast rights | Moderate | Competitive quality, star availability | Partially priced via ratings clauses |
| PE portfolio (league/federation stakes) | Moderate | Systemic, portfolio-wide | Largely unpriced |
| Data/analytics platforms | Moderate | Operational, data volume | Largely unpriced |
| Youth academy commercial models | Long-term | Governance, pipeline integrity | Not priced |
CVC’s Global Sport Group, described by Sportico as the largest sports fund in private equity, consolidates seven league investments across football, rugby, tennis, and volleyball under a single $13.6 billion structure. The sophistication of the capital structure around that portfolio is considerable. The modelling of broadcast churn, stadium yield, media rights inflation, and geographic expansion is detailed and rigorous.
The modelling of athlete durability is not.
This is not a criticism of CVC specifically. It is a description of an industry-wide gap. The commercial infrastructure of elite sport has developed extraordinary precision in pricing the outputs of athlete performance: rights values, sponsorship rates, data licensing fees, ticket yields. It has developed almost no precision in pricing the sustainability of the input that generates all of those outputs.
The athlete is not a fixed asset. The athlete is a biological system operating under extraordinary psychological and physical pressure, within an incentive structure that is optimised for extraction rather than sustainability. The IOC has documented this. The sponsorship market is beginning to price it, unevenly and incompletely. Private equity has not yet started.
The question is no longer whether athlete welfare has commercial consequences. The evidence for that is now substantial. The question is whether the industry will price it correctly before the failures become large enough to force the issue.
If private equity can model broadcast churn, stadium yield, and media rights inflation to three decimal places, why does the industry still treat the psychological and physical durability of the athlete, the single asset on which every other valuation depends, as someone else’s problem?
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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