Loyd & Co. Acquires a Minority Interest in a Major League Pickleball Team
Loyd & Co. Team · August 2025 · Investment News
Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America by participation, and its franchise economics are still being written. We acquired a minority interest in a Major League Pickleball club to own a piece of the story.
The Fastest-Growing Sport in America
Over the past several years, pickleball has grown from a backyard pastime into the fastest-growing sport in the United States by participation, with tens of millions of players spanning every generation. Its economics have followed: dedicated venues are being built, leagues are professionalizing, and media interest has arrived ahead of the infrastructure that usually precedes it.
Sports follow a familiar arc — from recreation, to community, to media asset — and pickleball is moving through that arc faster than any sport in modern memory. The window in which franchise ownership is priced for what the sport was, rather than what it is becoming, does not stay open long.
The Transaction
Loyd & Co. has acquired a minority interest in a Major League Pickleball club — a franchise in the league's top tier, competing in Miami, one of the most dynamic sports markets in the country. The position is deliberately a minority one: we invest as owners with conviction, not as activists with a timetable, and we respect the league's governance and the club's operating leadership.
Miami is the right city for this franchise. Its sports culture rewards arrival, identity, and community — and pickleball, more than any other professional sport, is played by the same people who watch it. That closed loop between participant and fan is the foundation of the asset.
"Scarcity is the asset. There are only so many professional franchises in America — and almost none in a sport growing this fast."
Sports as an Asset Class
Professional sports franchises have quietly become one of the strongest appreciating asset classes of the past two decades, powered by scarcity — there are only so many — and by the migration of media value toward live events that must be watched as they happen. Institutional capital has taken notice, and the inflow is now measured in the hundreds of billions.
Within that class, early-stage league franchises occupy a special position. The owners who bought into established leagues a generation ago bought what became generational assets. The same mathematics is being repriced today in the leagues still being built — where entry prices reflect the sport's past and enterprise values are being written by its future.
The Franchise Playbook
We underwrote this position the way we underwrite any operating business: the league's structure and expansion discipline, the club's market and venue economics, sponsorship and media trajectory, and the quality of the operating team. Franchise value is built on revenue — ticketing, partnerships, venue, and media — and protected by the scarcity of the license itself.
What distinguishes the strongest franchises is not the roster in any given season; it is the relationship between the club and its city. That relationship is what compounds. Miami Pickleball has the market, the identity, and the operating leadership to build it.
Patient, Selective, Long-Term
This position fits a thesis we hold across every asset we touch: ownership of scarce, community-rooted enterprises, held long enough for their value to be recognized. It also reflects the perspective our athlete partners bring — an institutional understanding of what sport is worth, earned rather than theorized.
We will hold this position the way we hold the rest of the firm: patiently, with respect for the operating team, and with every intention of owning it when the story of pickleball's franchise economics is finished being written.
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