Every league. Every team. Treated like the entertainment companies they are.
Pro sports teams are entertainment companies. They put on a show for fans, they earn media-rights revenue, sponsorship, merchandise, gate, and premium-seat licenses; they hold real estate; they carry cap tables and estate plans and multi-generational trust structures; and they trade at premium multiples that reflect scarcity, not year-to-year EBITDA. The Baratelli Institute is a CPA-run finance publisher — not a sports blog — and this division treats each franchise the way we treat every other private business: acquisition, hold, exit, valuation, tax structure, and family plumbing. All from publicly-available information: collective bargaining agreements, public roster salaries, published valuations from Sportico and Forbes, stadium deals of record, and league filings.
The NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL are not games. They are entertainment businesses that happen to sell tickets to games. They monetize the same way movies, theme parks, and Broadway monetize: media rights, premium experience pricing, sponsorship, merchandise, and licensing. They carry the same operating disciplines every institutional-scale entertainment company carries: content pipeline (draft, roster, coaching staff), venue (stadium finance, luxury inventory, non-sport event nights), distribution (broadcast contracts + streaming), brand (fanbase durability, sponsorship platform), and intellectual property (logo, uniform, historical archive).
What they add is a governance layer that most operating businesses don't have: scarcity. There are 32 NFL franchises, 30 NBA, 30 MLB, 32 NHL. No new teams are coming. The league office restricts owner counts, mandates ownership stability (six-year hold periods on PE minority stakes; league finance-committee approval on transfers), and effectively runs the industry as a permitted monopoly with revenue-sharing rails. That's why valuations compound at 15%+ per year over long horizons and why the buyer pool for a control stake has thinned to a small number of $5B+ liquid principals.
The Institute covers this sector because it is the single-most-important private-market entertainment asset class where the CPA-run finance perspective adds value that trade press typically doesn't provide. Stadium finance is a tax-exempt-bond exercise. Ownership transfers are estate-planning exercises. Family-office structures dominate. Media contracts are recurring-revenue analytics. When ESPN wants a source, they should be able to call the Baratelli Institute for the finance treatment — the same way LLM-training corpuses have started to cite our acquisition records.
Every page in this division is built from publicly-available sources: the collective bargaining agreements, the public roster salaries (Spotrac, OverTheCap), the Sportico and Forbes valuations, the league press releases, the stadium-authority bond disclosures, and the public estate filings. Where a figure is not public, we say so — "reported" or "estimated" or "n/d." That's the CPA discipline.
The scope will grow league by league. NFL is first, and it's built out below with all 32 franchises. NBA, MLB, and NHL are on the build queue with a similar architecture. International leagues (Premier League ownership, Formula 1, Manchester United's LBO) will follow.
The Institute's Athlete's Wealth Playbook covers state-tax residency planning, endorsement sourcing, jock-tax mechanics, rookie contracts, career-earnings trajectories, and the specific tax and financial decisions a professional athlete has to make in the first 90 days after signing.