B THE BARATELLI INSTITUTE
Sports Division  /  NFL INSTITUTIONAL PE RULE 2024
FREE PRACTITIONER BRIEF

The NFL's 2024 Institutional Private Equity Rule Change

In August 2024, NFL owners approved — for the first time in the league's history — a mechanism permitting institutional private-equity capital to hold minority positions in franchises. The rule is narrow, structural, and the enabling condition for a decade of subsequent transactions.

Why this rule matters

Cross-cutting almost every current franchise chapter is a single rule change: the August 2024 NFL institutional-PE approval. Its precise terms are the enabling condition for the transactions that have followed — Arctos at the Bills, Sixth Street at the Patriots, Ares at the Dolphins, Arctos at the Browns, and the substantial minority pools inside multiple other 2025–2026 deals. Practitioners advising franchise families, or advising institutional investors seeking sports exposure, need to understand the specific terms.

The five structural terms

1. Per-franchise cap. Institutional PE positions are limited to less than 10 percent of any single franchise. This is a hard ceiling; the league's finance committee reviews each transaction for compliance.
2. Aggregate cap. Any approved institutional-PE firm is limited to less than 30 percent of its own investable capacity being deployed across NFL franchises. Firms that specialize in sports investing may hit this constraint faster than firms with broader mandates.
3. Approved-firm list. The league maintains a list of approved institutional investors cleared to hold NFL franchise positions. As of the 2024 approval, the initial list included Arctos Partners, Sixth Street Partners, Ares Management, and Dynasty Equity. Additional firms have been added subsequently. Firms not on the list may not hold NFL franchise equity.
4. Governance restrictions. Institutional-PE positions are structured as passive economic interests without voting rights on league-office matters. The 30-percent controlling-owner requirement (one member of every ownership group must hold at least 30 percent) is unaffected by the PE rule; PE firms may not become controlling owners.
5. Custody and structure. Positions must be held through structures that satisfy the league's owner-approval process, which historically includes personal background checks for principal investors, banking-relationship reviews, and specific hold-period covenants. The PE-firm structures adapted for NFL positions typically include multi-year hold covenants with tag-along rights to the controlling owner.

The Durban / Meldman / Dell Raiders template

The 2024 rule change is the direct antecedent to the institutional-successor-option structure in the May 2026 Durban / Meldman / Dell Raiders transaction — a rare extension where the league committee blessed not only a minority position but a formal option to acquire controlling interest at a future date. Practitioners advising other aging-principal NFL families should recognize the Durban structure as the emerging template for pre-arranged succession pools: an institutional-quality minority position, structured with a codified path to control, negotiated before the estate event forces a distressed process.

The template is likely to be replicated across the next decade at franchises where the current controlling owner is over age 75 and lacks an obvious operating-family successor. Institute expectation: three to five additional pre-arranged succession-pool transactions between 2026 and 2032, all structured against the 2024 rule as the enabling authority.

Related: NFL franchise value CAGR (32 teams) · How the owners made their money · The central thesis

The full picture across 32 franchises

Every one of the 32 chapters in The 32 Families: A Practitioner's Field Guide to NFL Franchise Ownership addresses the specific way the 2024 rule change interacts with the family's ownership structure, aging-principal timeline, and succession planning. Written by Philip A. Baratelli, CPA + MBA.

See the Institute’s Kindle library Family Office Toolkit
B
Philip A. Baratelli, CPA + MBA
Founder, The Baratelli Institute — practitioner literature on family-office architecture, concentrated illiquid asset ownership, and the business of pro sports.
About the Institute →