NFL Holds the Line on Private Equity as MLB Quietly Matches NBA's 20% Cap

Major League Baseball owners quietly voted this summer to raise the league's private equity ownership ceiling from 15% to 20% per team for a single firm, a change that was never publicly announced and only surfaced this week through Front Office Sports reporting, which cited a source familiar with the matter. The move brings MLB into direct alignment with the NBA's approach to institutional capital in franchise ownership.

The mechanics matter as much as the headline number. Under the revised MLB rule, a private equity firm cannot own more than a team's controlling owner, who is separately required to hold at least 15%. So a firm's effective ceiling floats with the concentration of control at the top — the same design the NBA uses, where a 19%-owning controlling partner caps outside PE investment at 19% rather than the full 20%.

MLB's move was first flagged publicly by Forbes contributor Maury Brown, and Front Office Sports subsequently confirmed the details. The quiet nature of the change — no press release, no formal announcement — is itself notable in a sport that has been more cautious than others about publicly embracing institutional capital even as it has steadily loosened restrictions behind closed doors.

The NBA, for its part, continues to be the most permissive of the major North American leagues on this front. Beyond the 20% single-firm cap, the league recently increased the number of teams a single PE firm can invest in from five to eight, and it revised its rules to let a firm and its own executives invest in the same team simultaneously — a change made in part to accommodate Josh Kushner's Thrive Eternal investing alongside his own Lakers purchase, according to Bloomberg's reporting on the matter.

The NFL sits at the opposite end of the spectrum and, per Front Office Sports sources, has no near-term plans to change that. When the league's owners voted 31-1 in August 2024 to permit private equity investment for the first time — with only the Bengals dissenting — they capped any single firm's stake at 10% and restricted purchases to a short list of approved firms, initially just four.

Multiple sources told Front Office Sports this week that NFL owners feel no urgency to revisit that 10% ceiling even in the wake of MLB's move, though they acknowledged the limit could eventually rise. The NFL declined to comment on the record about any future policy change. Seven NFL teams, most recently the Seahawks and the Falcons, have already brought on PE investors under the existing rules.

The divergence matters because ownership caps are the single biggest lever leagues have over how much institutional money can flow into their franchises and on what terms. A 20% ceiling with an eight-team portfolio limit, as the NBA now allows, lets a firm build a genuine cross-league sports platform; a 10%, four-firm-approved-list regime like the NFL's keeps private equity firmly in a minority, single-team, almost passive role.

That gap is already shaping where PE capital is flowing. Apollo Sports Capital has been reported to be positioning for eventual NFL entry despite the league's restricted approved list remaining closed to new entrants, according to Sporting Goods Intelligence Europe — a sign that firms are jockeying for position in the league with the strictest rules precisely because franchise scarcity there is most acute.

MLS and the NHL already allow the same 20% single-firm ceiling as MLB and the NBA, meaning the NFL is now the clear outlier among the major U.S. leagues in restricting outside capital. With franchise valuations continuing to climb across every league and controlling owners increasingly needing liquidity options short of a full sale, the pressure on the NFL to eventually loosen its stance is unlikely to disappear even if owners feel no rush today.

For institutional investors building sports-focused funds, the practical takeaway is that baseball has just become a marginally more attractive vehicle for deploying capital at scale, narrowing what had been a clear NBA advantage. Expect fund managers to recalibrate allocation strategies across leagues as the rules continue to diverge rather than converge.