When the Buss family sold a majority stake in the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers last year to private equity billionaire Mark Walter at a $10 billion valuation, it appeared to be a spectacular windfall for a franchise the late Jerry Buss bought in 1979 for $67.5 million.
But in the context of a half-century of a booming economy, that performance isn’t so remarkable, billionaire wealth advisor Peter Mallouk points out. The compound annualized return of the Lakers investment comes out to 11.5%, compared with 12.4% for the S&P 500 Index from 1979 to 2025 (including dividends)—meaning the same $67.5 million could have instead grown to $16 billion, even if it wouldn’t have come with the thrill of courtside seats to the Showtime Lakers and 11 NBA championship celebrations.
“If you were evaluating it purely as investment,” says Mallouk, the 56-year-old CEO of Overland Park, Kansas-based Creative Planning, “you could have performed better with a lot more anonymity, a lot less hassle and a lot less drama just placing a trade in a Fidelity or Goldman Sachs account.”
It’s a surprising statement from a man who owns a piece of the Kansas City Royals and recently spent hundreds of millions of his own cash to acquire a majority stake in Major League Soccer’s Sporting Kansas City at a roughly $700 million valuation. But Mallouk, who joined Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires earlier this year, says he “didn’t really look at it from an economic perspective” when the opportunity arose to buy Sporting KC. And with an estimated net worth of $16.1 billion—ranking him No. 18 among the world’s richest sports team owners—he can afford to invest for the love of the game and his hometown.
It’s just not necessarily advice he would give to his clients at Creative Planning, a 43-year-old firm that over the last two decades he has built into one of America’s largest financial planning businesses, with $700 billion in assets under management or advisement.
The son of immigrants from Lebanon and Egypt, Mallouk grew up going to Royals games with his family in the 1970s and 1980s—the team’s heyday, featuring Hall of Famer George Brett. After earning dual law and business graduate degrees from the University of Kansas, he began doing estate planning work for several wealth management businesses in the area, including Creative Planning. In 2004, when it had only around $30 million in assets, Mallouk bought the firm.
A plain-spoken tycoon who appears more comfortable in a Kansas Jayhawks sweatshirt than in a buttoned-up Wall Street office, Mallouk gradually set his sights on nationwide expansion, positioning Creative Planning as a comprehensive one-stop shop for investment management, insurance, and tax and estate planning. The firm crossed $100 billion in assets under management in 2021 and accelerated its growth in 2023 with the purchase of Goldman Sachs’ investment advisory business for an undisclosed sum. Today, it has 104 offices in 44 states.
Creative Planning sold minority stakes to private equity firms General Atlantic in 2020 and TPG in 2024, with the latter deal valuing the business at about $16 billion, but Mallouk remains the majority owner.
He and his wife, Veronica, joined the Royals’ ownership group in 2019 as another local businessman, John Sherman, took control, and he first acquired a minority stake in Sporting KC in 2022. But with several major professional leagues recently changing their rules to allow in private equity funds, including the NFL in 2024, sports ownership is no longer limited to billionaires like Mallouk—investment firms such as Arctos and RedBird Capital Partners have pooled together capital from “mere” multimillionaires to buy stakes in teams.
The appeal is obvious. Although stocks may have outperformed the Lakers over the Buss family’s 46 years in charge, sports teams have won out in other time periods. For instance, NFL teams are about 17 times more valuable than they were in 2000, according to Forbes estimates, with the league’s 32 franchises now carrying an average enterprise value of $7.1 billion. NBA teams did even better in the same quarter-century, appreciating by a factor of 26 on average, while average NHL and MLB team valuations were up 15 and 11 times, respectively. All of those figures outpaced stocks—each dollar invested in the S&P 500 in 2000 would have been worth $7.50 by the end of 2025.
The disparity highlights one key advantage of investing in sports teams. While the dotcom bust and the Great Recession produced negative returns in the stock market over a full decade between 2000 and 2010, franchise valuations tend to be insulated from macroeconomic trends and often continue to appreciate even during broader economic downturns.
Still, Mallouk encourages his high-net-worth clients to use caution before diving into the space—at least more than he showed.
“This is a different asset class than stocks and typical private equity, where everyone’s on the same page and everyone wants wealth maximization—that’s not the case here,” he says. “Sometimes you have people that have already made all the money they want to make, and they’re in this for other reasons.”
Mallouk recommends that clients invest in traditional private equity funds first—which he views as more diversified with a higher expected return—before adding a sports fund to a portfolio. If they have checked that box and still want something that is not directly correlated to the stock market as risk protection, sports might be worth it. They just shouldn’t expect a team to perform better than a stock index fund over the long term, Mallouk warns, especially considering the 2% annual management fees and 20% performance fee (after an 8% hurdle) that most private equity funds charge.
If investors still aren’t scared away, Mallouk suggests sticking with the most established firms in the sector, including TPG and Apollo in addition to Arctos and RedBird. “They’re going to have more credibility with conferences and leagues, and they’re going to get better deals,” Mallouk says.
Sports teams’ valuations are ballooning at a time when revenue is growing fast thanks in large part to lucrative media rights deals, a trend showing no signs of slowing for the major North American leagues as both traditional networks and streaming companies with massive budgets bid against one another for prized live content. The NBA, for example, reportedly secured $76 billion for its 11-year package with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video in 2024, and the NFL guaranteed itself at least $125.5 billion over a decade with its agreements signed in 2021.
Private equity has also begun to make some investments in college programs and conferences to get a slice of media rights income streams. The University of Utah reportedly landed at least $100 million from Otro Capital in a deal that was finalized in June, two months after the Big 12 Conference approved a five-year agreement with RedBird and Weatherford Capital that came with a $12.5 million capital infusion and up to $30 million in credit for each of the league’s 16 schools. Mallouk expects every major conference to follow suit as they try to keep up in college sports’ accelerating arms race, even if they might later come to regret giving up a portion of their media revenues, the way that some European soccer clubs have been hamstrung by similar deals in recent years.
“Just like a credit card, you don’t tend to think about 10 or 20 years down the road,” says Mallouk. “I think the cost-benefit analysis for the people making decisions is going to encourage them to sell stakes, and I think we’re going to see it happen in spectacular fashion very soon.”
The sustained media rights bonanza would seem to suggest that sports teams will continue generating high returns, but revenue growth is only part of the reason valuations are soaring. Billionaires are also simply willing to pay more for the privilege of owning a team. On average, Forbes values teams in the four major North American leagues at 10.1 times the previous season’s estimated revenue, compared with a multiple of 2.9x in 2000.
“Right now, this is the toy to have, but who knows what the toy to have 30 years from now will be?” says Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance and valuation expert at the NYU Stern School of Business. “You’re completely at the whims of what billionaires think is the best trophy asset to buy.”
The roughly $700 million valuation in Mallouk’s purchase of Sporting KC was 8.6 times the team’s estimated $81 million in 2025 revenue, similar to most of its MLS peers’ multiples but much pricier than top-level European clubs typically go for. Mallouk, whose parents were rabid soccer fans, indicates he is treating the team as more of a passion project than an investment.
His deep pockets are bringing a glimmer of hope to a team that has posted lackluster results since its last MLS Cup championship in 2013, finishing in last place in the Western Conference last year and sitting in the cellar again midway through this season. Sporting KC has the second-lowest player payroll in the 30-team league, according to figures released by the MLS Players Association, but Mallouk insists he is prepared to change that.
“There is a subset of owners that doesn’t care that much about profitability, and speaking for myself, being born and raised in Kansas City, I love Kansas City, and I love live sports,” he says. “I’ve met with everybody, and they know the checkbook is wide open.”