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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Investors have been buying athlete brands as if they were music catalogues. The Maradona war is the moment the market discovers they are not.
That reframe matters because the capital has already moved. Private equity has spent the better part of a decade treating the posthumous athlete brand as a variant of the legacy IP play: acquire the rights, build a licensing architecture around them, collect royalties at scale. The logic was borrowed directly from the music industry, where firms including Primary Wave and, most visibly, Hipgnosis Songs Fund demonstrated that a catalogue of hits could be treated as a financial instrument. Sport, the reasoning went, had its own catalogues. Names. Likenesses. Decades of cultural equity, compressed into a trademark registration. The only question was who would build the infrastructure to monetise them.
The Maradona dispute answers that question with a different kind of clarity. It reveals not just a contested estate, but a structural flaw in the entire asset class: athlete brands were never built as transferable assets. They were built as personality rights. And personality rights, in most jurisdictions, expire with the person who held them.
Diego Maradona was the registered proprietor of the EU trademark “DIEGO MARADONA.” After his death in 2020, his former lawyer requested that the EUIPO register the transfer of the mark in favour of his own company, submitting documents that Maradona had issued authorising commercial exploitation of the trademarks. The EUIPO initially accepted the transfer. Then reversed it. Then the matter went to the EU General Court.
The General Court held that the documents produced by that company “do not formally justify an assignment of the trademark in its favor under a contract signed between the two parties,” and further noted that since Maradona had died before the request for registration of the transfer was submitted, the irregularities could not be corrected. The legal mechanism had simply closed.
Under Article 1329 of the Commercial and Civil Code of the Argentine Republic, the power of authorisation for use and exploitation was automatically terminated on the death of the grantor. A contract signed during Maradona’s lifetime, intended to transfer commercial rights over his name, was rendered legally inert the moment he died.
After Maradona’s death, it was revealed that Sattvica, a company owned by his former lawyer Matias Morla, claimed ownership of rights to Maradona’s brand name. Sattvica has since been litigating the right to use the name Maradona around the globe. The litigation has spanned Argentina, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. In May 2025, a UK Intellectual Property Office decision refused three UK trademark applications that sought to appropriate the name “DIEGO ARMANDO MARADONA” and Maradona’s signature. Maradona’s five heirs successfully opposed the applications, with the UKIPO finding bad faith and, in part, likelihood of confusion with the heirs’ earlier registered mark.
The heirs have been winning. But the more consequential story is not who wins. It is what the fight itself costs, and what it signals about every similar deal that has been struck or is being contemplated.
The commercial logic of posthumous athlete IP rests on a simple premise: that a famous name, once trademarked, behaves like any other registered asset. It can be assigned, licensed, monetised, and passed between legal entities. The problem is that athlete trademarks are not ordinary commercial marks. They are, at their core, personality rights that have been given a trademark wrapper. And the wrapper does not survive the person in the same way a brand built around a product does.
This is the gap that the Maradona case exposes at the identity layer of the sports commercial stack. Whoever controls the trademark registration in a given jurisdiction controls the revenue layer in that market. But in the absence of a clear, globally consistent ownership protocol, that control is contested jurisdiction by jurisdiction, court by court, and year by year. The result is a fragmented stack that is almost impossible to monetise globally at scale.
Consider the asymmetry. A licensee in Italy, a video game company in Argentina, a merchandise operator in the United Kingdom: each of them may have signed deals with different parties claiming to hold the rights to the same name. An Argentine court upheld Sattvica’s trademark claim in one dispute, jeopardising a video game company’s rights that had been obtained in a prior deal from another individual. That is not a legal edge case. That is the operating reality of a market that has been capitalised ahead of the legal infrastructure needed to support it.
The International Trademark Association’s comparative analysis of publicity rights illustrates just how wide the jurisdictional gap is. California’s Celebrity Rights Act extends publicity rights for 70 years post-death. Argentina, Maradona’s home jurisdiction, applies a more limited and contested framework. The European Union, as the Maradona proceedings demonstrate, treats the question primarily through trademark formalities rather than through a unified personality rights doctrine. A cross-border licensing deal built on the assumption that rights are consistent across these jurisdictions is not a deal. It is a legal fiction dressed in commercial language.
The analogy to music catalogues is instructive precisely because it shows where the model works and where it does not.
Blackstone acquired Hipgnosis Songs Fund in a deal that became effective in July 2024, completing one of the largest music take-privates ever, in a transaction that demonstrated continued conviction in the music royalties asset class. The underlying thesis was sound: music copyrights are durable, their cash flows are relatively predictable, and the rights framework, while complex, is at least codified. Performing rights organisations, mechanical licensing bodies, and decades of copyright case law provide a functioning infrastructure for valuation and enforcement.
Hipgnosis’ value plunged to at times less than half of its 2021 peak of approximately 2.6 billion dollars, according to Citrin Cooperman, as interest rates rose and the price of available catalogues grew untenably expensive. The correction was painful. But it was a correction in pricing assumptions, not a collapse of the underlying legal framework. The rights were real. The cash flows were real. The market had simply overpaid.
Posthumous athlete IP faces a more fundamental problem. The rights themselves are contested. The cash flows are contingent on winning litigation in multiple jurisdictions. And the valuation methodology, borrowed from music catalogues, does not account for the cost and uncertainty of that litigation, nor for the jurisdictional fragmentation that makes global licensing structurally fragile from day one.
Authentic Brands Group represents the closest structural model for what a functioning posthumous athlete IP business looks like. ABG acquired the estate of Muhammad Ali and an 85% stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2013, and in December 2015 basketball player Shaquille O’Neal signed with Authentic to manage his likeness and marketing rights. ABG licenses these properties out to other companies in exchange for royalties, while retaining approval rights over how its brands are used and marketed. The model is asset-light and centralised: own the IP, license the execution, control the brand standards. As of 2023, the company was valued at approximately 20 billion dollars and owned multiple global brands through a portfolio that generates significant annual retail sales.
But ABG’s model works because it acquired rights that were either clearly established at the time of acquisition, or structured with the living athlete’s full cooperation. Shaquille O’Neal signed with Authentic to manage his likeness and marketing rights while he was still alive and in full legal control of those rights. The Muhammad Ali estate was acquired with the cooperation of Ali’s family. The Elvis Presley acquisition was a negotiated transaction with the estate’s existing rights holders. None of these deals required ABG to litigate the question of whether the rights existed in the first place.
The Maradona situation is the opposite. The rights were never cleanly structured during the athlete’s lifetime. The authorisation documents were ambiguous. The athlete’s capacity to sign them has been legally questioned. And the result is a multi-year, multi-jurisdiction litigation campaign that consumes capital and destroys licensing value simultaneously.
The ceiling case for athlete IP monetisation remains Michael Jordan. Jordan Brand reached 7 billion dollars in revenue for Nike in fiscal year 2024, a 6% sales increase making it Nike’s strongest performing division. Jordan’s arrangement is the product of a deal struck in 1984, renegotiated and extended over four decades, with a living athlete who has retained full control over his own rights throughout. It is not a posthumous IP story. It is the opposite: a case study in what happens when an athlete brand is built as a transferable, scalable asset from the outset, with clear ownership, clear contractual terms, and a single counterparty who can make decisions.
The Maradona case is the floor. Not because Maradona’s brand lacks value, but because the legal architecture around it was never built to support institutional capital. The brand was built as a personality. The personality is gone. What remains is a set of contested registrations, a fragmented rights landscape, and a litigation bill that grows with every jurisdiction.
Between these two poles sits the emerging market for posthumous athlete IP, and it is a market that has not yet found its pricing mechanism.
| Comparable | Rights Structure | Jurisdiction Consistency | Litigation Risk | Investability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jordan Brand (Nike) | Living athlete, full contractual control | Single primary framework | Low | Ceiling case |
| Muhammad Ali (ABG) | Estate, negotiated acquisition | US-anchored, managed globally | Low-medium | Functioning model |
| Elvis Presley (ABG) | Estate, negotiated acquisition | US-anchored, managed globally | Low-medium | Functioning model |
| Hipgnosis catalogue | Music copyright, codified framework | International treaties | Medium (pricing risk) | Corrected, not broken |
| Maradona (contested) | Disputed, multi-party, multi-jurisdiction | Highly fragmented | Very high | Structurally impaired |
The table makes the commercial problem visible. The deals that work share a common feature: the rights were either established with the living rights-holder’s full cooperation, or acquired through a negotiated transaction with a clearly identified estate. The deals that fail share a different feature: the rights were assumed to exist, rather than verified to exist, before capital was deployed.
Licensing International’s Global Licensing Industry Study estimated the global sports licensing market at approximately 28 billion dollars in 2023, with athlete and personality licensing representing a growing share as rights holders seek to extend brand value beyond active careers. That is a large and expanding market. But a significant portion of the deals being contemplated within it are being structured on the assumption that posthumous athlete IP behaves like music copyright. It does not.
The question the Maradona case leaves open is not whether posthumous athlete IP has value. It clearly does. The question is whether the sports industry can build the legal and structural infrastructure needed to make that value investable before a significant volume of capital is destroyed in the attempt.
The music industry needed a correction. Hipgnosis’ value plunged to at times less than half of its 2021 peak before the market recalibrated its pricing assumptions. But the music industry’s correction was a valuation correction. The underlying rights framework was intact. The sports industry’s reckoning, if it comes, will be more fundamental: a correction not just in price, but in the legal architecture that determines whether the asset exists at all.
The expectation is that Maradona’s heirs will continue rationalising the global portfolio across the UK, EU, Argentina, Italy, Spain, and the US, and build an official licensing architecture now on stronger footing given the UK and EU wins. That is the right direction. But it is also a retrospective fix, applied after years of litigation and destroyed licensing opportunity. The infrastructure is being built in the wreckage of the dispute, not before it.
The ABG model points toward a solution: centralised rights control, structured during the athlete’s lifetime, with clear contractual terms that survive death and transfer cleanly across jurisdictions. The WWE and TKO Group demonstrate the same principle at the character IP level: systematic, centralised rights management is the commercial foundation, not an afterthought. The lesson is not complicated. It is simply that the sports industry has not yet applied it consistently to the posthumous athlete brand.
The identity layer of the sports commercial stack has no stable ownership protocol once the athlete is gone. Until one is built, every posthumous athlete IP deal is, to some degree, a bet on litigation outcomes rather than a bet on brand value. Those are different bets. And they require different pricing.
If the music catalogue market needed a correction before investors priced posthumous IP correctly, how much capital will be destroyed in athlete brand deals before the sports industry builds the legal and structural infrastructure that makes posthumous athlete IP a genuinely investable asset class, and who builds that infrastructure first?
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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