By Tania Ganguli
Not long ago you could buy a National Basketball Association (NBA) team in the country’s second-largest city for just $2 billion. Yet those days are already a thing of the past.
Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner announced this week that they had bought control of the Los Angeles Lakers in a deal that priced the franchise at $12.5 billion. It was a record figure for a NBA team, eclipsing the $10 billion paid for the Lakers just last year — and was the latest in a pattern of skyrocketing sale prices for sports franchises. Is it mania or just a reasonable resetting of the market?
“Like anything else, it’s worth what someone is willing to pay,” Mark Cuban, the former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said in an email. Cuban bought the Mavericks from Ross Perot Jr in 2000 for $285 million. When he sold a majority stake of the NBA team to Miriam Adelson and her son-in-law Patrick Dumont in 2023, the team was valued at around $3.5 billion.
That same year, the NBA’s Suns and the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA’s) Mercury, both in Phoenix, were sold to Mat Ishbia, who had made his fortune in mortgage lending, for a valuation of $4 billion. Also in 2023, Michael Jordan, the NBA legend, sold a majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets that priced the team at $3 billion — $2.7 billion more than he paid in 2010. At the time, those numbers seemed outlandish, especially given the size of those teams’ markets. It was only the start.
In 2025, Bill Chisholm-led group bought the Boston Celtics at a $6.1 billion valuation, just a few months before Mark Walter, a financier, bought a majority stake in the Lakers with a valuation at $10 billion. NFL teams sell much less frequently, but the Seattle Seahawks sold for $9.6 billion last month.
“I am absolutely convinced that we have not reached anything close to a ceiling,” said Irwin Kishner, a partner at the law firm Herrick and co-chair of its sports law division. And particularly with the most recognisable teams, he said: “You could only envision the numbers going further north.” By that he means teams like the NBA’s New York Knicks, the National Football League’s (NFL’s) Dallas Cowboys and the New York Yankees of Major League Baseball. Indeed, the Yankees received a $2.6 billion investment this week that valued the franchise at close to $10 billion.
People in the sports industry said at least a few things had contributed to the rising prices. Sports is one of the last big draws to live TV, and as a result leagues — and therefore the teams — are being paid far more. Kishner pointed to the NBA’s recent TV rights package: an 11-year agreement with broadcasters worth about $77 billion.
The legalisation of sports betting has also opened a new revenue stream for franchises, Kishner said. And then there’s the feeling that sports, as well as other live and in-person events, may be insulated from the impact of artificial intelligence. Many of the recent deals have involved investor groups, not individual buyers. On Friday, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was part of a crowded investment group that joined forces to buy about a third of Liverpool Football Club.
“I do think that going forward, one individual writing a check for a team will be rare,” Cuban said. “Which brings its own inherent changes.” Not everyone agrees this influx of cash is a good thing.
“Sport is the goose that laid the golden egg,” said David Andrews, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies the sociology of sport. He has wondered if fans will become disillusioned if sports leagues and teams become too commercialised or financially driven. “But that doesn’t seem to have happened,” he said. “For whatever reason, the goose is kind of still alluring, and we’re still enchanted by the game despite its hyper-financialisation.”
Bill Simmons, a media mogul and prominent Boston sports fan, has lamented that the super wealthy increasingly view sports teams as investments, rather than prized civic entities to protect.
“You still want to think that the people running the best teams actually care about those teams,” Simmons said during a recent episode of his namesake podcast. He said there seemed to be an era approaching where sports teams were “just giant hedge fund plays.”
Simmons argued that Iger, the recently retired chief executive of Walt Disney, and Kushner, a venture capitalist, would also view the Lakers as simply a financial asset.
Kushner and Iger tried to soothe such concerns in a statement released after announcing their purchase. They said they were “deeply honoured for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers.”
“I don’t think like the people that own these teams, that their motivation is to buy and flip,” said Diane Gotua, who led the NBA’s global business strategy for almost five years and is now the chief commercial officer for the start-up Pro Padel League. “It’s almost like a legacy asset. It’s how they want to be known and remembered.”
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