Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment

Section 1 — The finding, stated first

Sports franchise valuation runs almost entirely on models, because franchises almost never trade. When one does, the transaction is treated as the truth and the models are quietly marked to it. MLSE is the rare case where that reflex can be tested, because the same buyer priced the same asset twice inside two years and the two prices do not agree.

Grossed up pro rata, BCE’s 37.5% at C$4.70 billion implies C$12.533 billion for all of MLSE — C$125.33 million per ownership point. Kilmer’s 25% at C$4.35 billion implies C$17.400 billion — C$174.00 million per point. The step-up is +38.8%, which is the figure the trade press reported as a 39% rise in the grossed-up value of MLSE.

The corollary matters more than the number. A practitioner who takes C$17.40 billion as MLSE’s value, converts it, and compares it to the Forbes and Sportico franchise marks will find a gap of roughly US$1.7 to US$2.0 billion and will reach for “the models are too low.” Section 6 argues the gap is mostly composition — an unvalued CFL club, an arena, a real-estate position and control — rather than model error. Two numbers can differ because they measure different things, which is the same conclusion the Institute reached on the MLB valuation hub when the Padres and Angels transactions landed beside the model marks.

Section 2 — What MLSE actually holds

MLSE is a portfolio, not a franchise, and the distinction does the analytical work in this case. The holdings, as of the September 11, 2026 publication date of this page:

Composition as described in Rogers Communications’ releases of July 2, 2025 and July 6, 2026 and in contemporaneous trade coverage. League memberships current at the September 11, 2026 publication date of this page.

What is not in MLSE, and why it is the most common error on this subject

Rogers owns the Toronto Blue Jays and Rogers Centre directly. They have never been MLSE assets. Adding the Blue Jays’ roughly US$2.9 billion Sportico mark — as printed in Sportico’s July 6, 2026 report — to an MLSE valuation double-counts, and it is the single easiest way to mis-model this structure. Any figure describing “Rogers’ sports assets” is a wider perimeter than any figure describing MLSE, and the two must never be compared without saying which is which.

Nor was MLSE Rogers’ only exposure to the hockey economy on either pricing date. Rogers holds the NHL’s Canadian national media rights under a twelve-year agreement running through the 2037–2038 season, announced alongside the July 2, 2025 closing. That is a separate contract with a separate counterparty — the league, not the club — and it is one of the reasons a strategic buyer’s price for MLSE need not equal a financial buyer’s.

Section 3 — Two legs, with both clocks printed

Every figure below carries the date it was struck, separately from the date it closed. Section 4 explains why conflating the two produces an error of roughly a factor of two in the implied growth rate.

Leg one as agreed and announced in BCE Inc.’s news release of September 18, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as Exhibit 99.1 to a Form 6-K on the same date, and as closed per Rogers Communications’ release of July 2, 2025 stating the transaction “closed effective July 1.” Leg two as announced in Rogers Communications’ release of July 6, 2026. Implied 100% values and per-point figures are the Institute’s arithmetic, not disclosed by any party — see the inference warning immediately below.

Who Kilmer is

Kilmer Sports Inc. is approximately 80% owned by Larry Tanenbaum, who has chaired the NBA’s board of governors since 2017 and was last reelected to that role in 2024. The 25% MLSE interest was the long-standing Tanenbaum position in the portfolio. Correcting a figure the Institute previously carried: Kilmer’s stake is 25%, not 20% — Rogers’ July 6, 2026 release describes the purchase of “the remaining 25% ownership stake.” An internal Institute research note of September 10, 2026 stated 20%; that was wrong and is corrected here rather than silently amended.

Section 4 — Four reasons the 38.8% step-up is an upper bound

One — the first leg was not priced in cash alone

BCE’s September 18, 2024 release states that alongside the C$4.7 billion sale, Bell Media secured 20-year content rights to Maple Leafs and Raptors games for TSN through a long-term agreement with Rogers, subject to league approvals, while continuing to carry the Argonauts and Toronto FC under independent league agreements and remaining the Raptors’ official telecommunications sponsor. BCE directed the proceeds to debt reduction.

A twenty-year rights grant on the two crown assets is consideration. It flowed from buyer to seller and it is not in the C$4.7 billion. So the 2024 per-point figure of C$125.33 million is a price struck net of value moving back the other way, while the 2026 figure of C$174.00 million is gross. Comparing them compares a net number to a gross one. The true 2024 economic per-point cost to Rogers was above C$125.33 million, which means the true step-up is below 38.8%. By how much is not determinable from public disclosure: neither party put a value on the rights grant, and the Institute will not invent one.

Two — the span is twenty-two months, not twelve

This is a two-clock error hiding inside a growth rate, and it is easy to make. Leg one closed July 1, 2025. Leg two was announced July 6, 2026. Those dates are twelve months and five days apart, and a 38.8% rise over twelve months is a spectacular number.

But the closing date is not the pricing date. Leg one was priced on September 18, 2024 and spent nine and a half months in regulatory and league approval before closing. The interval between the two prices is therefore approximately twenty-two months. Compounded, 38.8% over twenty-two months is roughly 20% a year, not 38.8% a year — still a strong number, and roughly half the naive one.

Three — the second leg was an option exercise, not an open-market sale

Rogers held an option to acquire the Kilmer stake, exercisable in the summer of 2026, with a fallback price mechanism based on multiple independent appraisals had the parties failed to agree. They agreed before invoking it. That structure has two consequences for anyone reading C$4.35 billion as a market price.

First, Kilmer was not a willing seller into a competitive process. There was one buyer with a contractual right and an appraisal backstop. The negotiated price sits somewhere inside a range bounded by that mechanism, not at whatever a third party might have bid for a 25% interest in the Maple Leafs and Raptors.

Second, and more interesting: the minority stake priced higher per ownership point than the stake that conveyed control. C$174.00 million a point for a 25% interest carrying no control, against C$125.33 million a point for the 37.5% interest that took Rogers from 37.5% to 75%. That inverts the textbook ordering, in which control commands a premium and minority interests trade at a discount.

The Institute’s reading of the inversion: the appraisal-backstop mechanism priced the stake on an as-of-2026 view of the portfolio rather than an as-of-2024 one, and the 2024 seller was a leveraged telecom directing proceeds to debt reduction while the 2026 seller had a contractual floor and no financing pressure. A control premium is a premium over what a willing minority seller would take. Neither leg was that. The inversion is evidence about the two sellers’ positions, not about control being worthless.

Four — the largest figure in circulation is management guidance, not a transaction

Rogers’ chief executive has put the value of the company’s consolidated sports, media and entertainment assets at greater than CA$25 billion — a figure given on an earnings call in April 2026, in the context of a stated intention to sell a minority stake in those consolidated assets. Rogers’ July 6, 2026 release restates that intention: “Rogers intends to sell a minority stake in the consolidated Rogers sports, media and entertainment assets over the course of the next year.”

That number is doing none of the work on this page and it should do none in any model. It is an executive’s estimate of a wider perimeter — MLSE plus the Blue Jays plus Rogers Centre plus media assets — offered while marketing a stake in that perimeter. It is not a price anybody paid. Label it as management guidance wherever it appears, and do not net it against, add it to, or reconcile it with the C$17.40 billion MLSE inference. The two describe different asset sets measured by different methods for different purposes.

Section 5 — The model marks, set beside the prices rather than replaced by them

A model and a price measure different things. The model asks what a franchise would fetch under normal conditions on a stated methodology; the price records what one specific buyer paid one specific seller under the conditions that actually obtained. Both are useful. Neither supersedes the other, and the discipline is to print both with their own measurement dates.

Sportico NHL marks per its 2025 NHL franchise-value list of October 1, 2025; Sportico Raptors, Toronto FC and Blue Jays figures as printed in its report of July 6, 2026. Forbes NHL marks per The NHL’s Most Valuable Teams 2025, published December 11, 2025; Forbes NBA marks per its 2025 NBA list published October 23, 2025 and updated January 8, 2026. The Forbes column total pairs Forbes’ two major-league marks with Sportico’s Toronto FC figure because Forbes publishes no MLS list; it is a blended total and is labelled as one. All marks are trade-press estimates, not audited financials.

Section 6 — What the price buys that the marks do not cover

To compare the 2026 transaction inference to the model marks, the currency has to be reconciled, and the exchange rate is itself a dated measurement. Sportico’s July 6, 2026 report gives the C$4.35 billion price as US$3.06 billion, which implies a rate of 0.7034 USD per CAD on July 6, 2026. Using that source’s own rate rather than a different day’s keeps the comparison internally consistent:

Every line in this table below the first is derived, and the first is an inference. Nothing here is disclosed by Rogers, Kilmer, BCE, Forbes or Sportico. The bracket is presented as a bracket because the pro-rata gross-up, the choice of mark provider, and the single-day FX rate each introduce range.

So the residual is somewhere around US$1.7 to US$2.0 billion, or roughly 14% to 17% of the inferred whole. The instinct is to read that as the models running low on the Leafs and Raptors. The Institute’s reading is that most of it is composition, and the list of what sits inside the residual is short and concrete:

• The Toronto Argonauts. A CFL franchise with no published mark from either provider. Not zero.
• Scotiabank Arena. Owned outright, not leased. Franchise-value models capture the economics a club derives from a building; they are not a valuation of the building, and the two are different assets with different buyers.
• The real estate and the venue district. Land and development rights in downtown Toronto, held in a structure that has been assembling them for decades.
• Two development clubs and the hospitality operations. Small individually. Not nothing collectively.
• Control, and strategic fit. Rogers is not a financial buyer. It holds the NHL’s Canadian national media rights through 2037–38, and full ownership of the two crown clubs in the country’s largest market has a value to that specific buyer which no franchise model attempts to estimate, because a model prices a typical buyer.

Which of those five carries most of the US$1.7–2.0 billion is not determinable from public disclosure, and this page does not guess. What the residual does establish is that the model marks and the transaction price are not in conflict. They are measuring a franchise portfolio and an enterprise respectively, and the difference between them is roughly the size one would expect a CFL club, an NBA-and-NHL arena, a Toronto real-estate position and a strategic control premium to be worth.

Section 7 — The minority-stake sale is the test, and it is already scheduled

Rogers has said, in its July 6, 2026 release, that it intends to sell a minority stake in the consolidated Rogers sports, media and entertainment assets over the following year. That is the cleanest forthcoming test of everything on this page, and it is worth pre-committing to what each outcome would mean rather than interpreting it after the fact.

If that stake prices at or above the greater-than-CA$25 billion perimeter management has indicated, the C$174.00 million-per-point mark on MLSE looks conservative and the residual argument in Section 6 strengthens — a third-party buyer would be validating the arena, the real estate and the strategic economics that no franchise model prices. If it prices materially below, the more likely readings are that the option mechanism in leg two produced a price above what an open market would pay, or that the consolidated perimeter is worth less than the sum of the marks on the clubs inside it. Either would be informative.

The Institute does not have a prediction and will not manufacture one. The point of writing the test down before the result arrives is the discipline of pre-registration: a hypothesis stated after the data lands is not a hypothesis.

One further scheduled event bears on this page. Sportico published its 2025 NHL franchise values on October 1, 2025 and Forbes published its 2025 NHL list on December 11, 2025. Both 2026 editions fall inside the next fourteen weeks. When they land, the marks in Section 5 will be superseded and this page will be updated with the prior figures retained and labelled rather than overwritten — which is the house rule, and the reason the version stamp at the top of this page lists a source date for every provider separately.

Section 8 — What could not be established

Stated plainly, because a case study that lists only what it found is not reporting its own error bars.

• The value of the TSN rights grant. Neither BCE nor Rogers put a number on the twenty-year content-rights agreement described in the September 18, 2024 release. Without it, the adjustment in Section 4 has a known sign and an unknown magnitude. This is the single largest gap on the page, because it is the one that would let the step-up be stated as a figure rather than a bound.
• Whether either stake carried a control or minority adjustment. The pro-rata gross-up is an assumption. Neither party disclosed an enterprise value, and the per-point inversion described in Section 4 is itself evidence that at least one leg did not trade at pro rata.
• The appraisal mechanism’s terms. That a multiple-appraisal fallback existed and was not invoked is established. The number of appraisers, the averaging convention, and any collar or floor are not public, so the bounds the negotiated price sat inside cannot be reconstructed.
• Scotiabank Arena and the real-estate position, separately. No public valuation of either exists. They are the largest identified components of the residual and the least quantified.
• The Argonauts. No published CFL franchise marks from either provider. Excluded from the model-mark total, which mechanically inflates the residual by whatever the club is worth.
• MLSE’s own financials. MLSE is private. Revenue, operating income, and debt at the MLSE level are not disclosed, so the enterprise-value inferences on this page cannot be cross-checked against a multiple of anything. The per-club revenue and operating-income figures on the NHL and NBA valuation hubs are Forbes estimates, not filed figures.

Section 9 — Sources, methodology, and treatment of estimates

This case draws on primary transaction disclosure and published franchise marks. The primary documents are: BCE Inc.’s news release of September 18, 2024 announcing the agreement to sell its 37.5% MLSE interest for CA$4.7 billion, read in the form filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as Exhibit 99.1 to a Form 6-K on that date; Rogers Communications’ release of July 2, 2025 announcing that the acquisition closed effective July 1, 2025 and that Rogers held 75%; and Rogers Communications’ release of July 6, 2026 announcing the agreement to acquire Kilmer Sports Inc.’s remaining 25% for CA$4.35 billion. Secondary sourcing is Sportico’s report of July 6, 2026, which supplies the USD conversion, the Kilmer ownership composition, the option structure, the grossed-up percentage change, the consolidated-perimeter guidance attributed to Rogers’ chief executive, and the current Sportico marks on the Raptors, Maple Leafs, Blue Jays and Toronto FC. Franchise marks otherwise follow the Institute’s existing NHL and NBA valuation references and their stated source vintages.

The C$12.533 billion and C$17.400 billion implied enterprise values are the Institute’s inferences and are not disclosed by any party. Each is a partial-stake price divided by the stake percentage, which assumes pro-rata pricing with no control premium and no minority discount. That assumption is conventional in trade-press reporting of sports transactions and it is not defensible without qualification; it is qualified here in Sections 3 and 8. Every downstream figure — the per-point marks, the 38.8% step-up, the USD conversion, and the residual bracket — inherits that assumption.

The 38.8% step-up is C$174.00M ÷ C$125.33M − 1, computed on the per-ownership-point figures. Sportico reports the same comparison as a 39% rise in MLSE’s grossed-up value; the small difference is rounding. The Institute’s position is that this figure is an upper bound on portfolio appreciation and must not be reported as an appreciation rate, for the four reasons given in Section 4.

The annualised figure of roughly 20% compounds 38.8% over the twenty-two-month interval between the September 18, 2024 and July 6, 2026 pricing dates. It is arithmetic on the two inferred values and carries every qualification they carry. It is presented to demonstrate the magnitude of the closing-date-versus-pricing-date error, not as an estimate of franchise appreciation.

The exchange rate of 0.7034 USD per CAD is implied by Sportico’s own conversion of C$4.35 billion to US$3.06 billion in its July 6, 2026 report (3.06 ÷ 4.35). It is a single-day rate measured on that date, applied deliberately rather than a later or averaged rate so that the USD comparison in Section 6 is internally consistent with the source that supplied both the transaction conversion and the Raptors, Toronto FC and Blue Jays marks. It will not reconcile to a spot rate on any other day.

Sportico’s Raptors mark is printed here at US$5.22B as it appeared in the July 6, 2026 report after that article’s stated update. The pre-update figure in the same article was US$4.66B. Both are recorded on this page because the article carries one publication date and two values, and a citation to it does not disclose which the citer read.

Forbes and Sportico franchise marks are trade-press estimates produced on undisclosed proprietary methodologies. They are not audited financials, the two providers disagree on every MLSE club for which both publish, and both revise annually. Each mark on this page carries its publication date adjacent to the figure rather than in a footnote, per the Institute’s dating standard.

The blended Forbes column total of US$10.53B pairs Forbes’ Maple Leafs and Raptors marks with Sportico’s Toronto FC figure, because Forbes does not publish an MLS franchise list. It mixes providers and is labelled as blended wherever it appears. It should not be cited as a Forbes figure.

The greater-than-CA$25 billion consolidated figure is attributed to Rogers’ chief executive on an earnings call in April 2026 and describes the consolidated Rogers sports, media and entertainment perimeter — which includes the Toronto Blue Jays, Rogers Centre and media assets that have never been MLSE holdings. It is management guidance offered while marketing a minority stake in those assets, not a transaction price, and it is excluded from every calculation on this page.

The Kilmer stake at 25% follows Rogers’ July 6, 2026 release. An internal Institute research note dated September 10, 2026 stated 20%; that figure was incorrect and is corrected here rather than withdrawn. Kilmer’s approximately 80% Larry Tanenbaum ownership, and Mr. Tanenbaum’s tenure as chair of the NBA board of governors since 2017 with reelection in 2024, are per Sportico’s July 6, 2026 report.

The residual bracket of roughly US$1.7 to US$2.0 billion is the difference between a derived figure and a sum of dated marks from two providers. It is a bracket rather than a point estimate because the gross-up, the provider selection and the single-day FX rate each introduce range, and because the components it is attributed to — the Argonauts, Scotiabank Arena, the real estate, the development clubs and control — have no published valuations individually. The attribution of the residual to those components is the Institute’s editorial reading, not a measurement.

Position disclosure. The author holds no position in Rogers Communications Inc. (TSX: RCI.B; NYSE: RCI) or BCE Inc. (TSX: BCE; NYSE: BCE). Kilmer Sports Inc. and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. are privately held.