Pro Sports Franchises — the Baratelli Institute reference library

Looking for a player rather than a franchise? Jump to the individual altitude — 23 contract pages built on at-signing guarantee structure, indexed at The Player Reference.

The leagues we cover

Athlete-founder / operator — sports legends as diversified business principals

Eleven cases where the athletic career was Chapter One and the operating-company platform became the durable estate. All cases live in both the Sports Division and the Entertainment Division of the Institute because the careers span both surfaces — endorsement portfolios, franchisee operating businesses, IP licensing platforms, sports-franchise ownership stakes, and (in Rodriguez's and Curry's cases) media platforms alongside the operating work.

The individual altitude — contracts, endorsement stacks, and family enterprise

The Institute covers pro sports at two altitudes. Above is the franchise: ownership, stadium finance, media economics. This is the other one — the player as his own enterprise. Contract structure and guarantee mechanics, the endorsement stack, off-field operating businesses, domicile and tax drag, and the family architecture that has to survive a career measured in single-digit years. Every figure is tied to reported contract terms or on-the-record disclosure.

The player pages are the individual-altitude companion to the 32 NFL franchise cases. Where a player has built an operating platform large enough to outlive the playing career, the case graduates into the athlete-founder band above.

Reference assets that sit above the case library

Two reference pages sit above the team-by-team case library and are cross-linked from every case they apply to. They are the reusable analytical vocabulary for the entire Sports Division — learn them once, apply them across every case.

Pro sports teams are entertainment companies. We cover them like companies.

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 four analytical lenses we apply to every franchise

• Ownership + estate. Who owns it. When they bought it. Family-office structure vs. corporation vs. PE-backed group. Multi-generational trust plumbing. Succession plan. Where it fits in the family-office reference frame.
• Stadium + real estate. Venue, capacity, opened, public/private financing split, naming-rights deal, lease terms, non-sport-event calendar, and the operating platform economics beyond the eight NFL home games.
• Revenue stack + media. National media allocation (roughly 70% of team revenue post-2021 renewal), local media, gate revenue, premium seating and suites, sponsorship platform, merchandise + licensing, and non-sport-event calendar. The line-by-line stack that determines operating margin.
• Player payroll + cap structure. Cap discipline, guaranteed money, dead cap, deferred compensation treatment, and how the salary structure interacts with revenue-sharing and the jock-tax exposure for players. This is where the case connects to the Athlete's Wealth Playbook.