This Summer's Ultra-Rich Flex: Team Ownership

For the ultrawealthy, boats or jets are yesterday’s toys. We dig into the last bastion of status for a well-moneyed minority.

On a recent Saturday in Los Angeles, a flag football game unfolds at Exposition Park’s BMO Stadium that looks more like a glossy awards show than a light-touch sporting exhibition.

Tom Brady has temporarily unretired (again) and is back on the field. Travis Scott is DJ’ing in the stands for a crowd that includes Kendall Jenner, Hailey and Justin Bieber, and Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. Kevin Hart is on the mic. There are trophies and confetti cannons, and the whole thing is broadcast live on Fox, Fox Sports, and Tubi to millions of viewers.

In the middle of it all—including group shots that pop up all over Instagram in the hours and days that follow—moving easily between the suites, the sidelines, and the cameras, is Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots and one of the most powerful figures in American sports.

It’s hard not to notice Kraft. Not because he stands out—it’s not like he’s wearing a giant fur coat à la Joe Namath, the swaggering 1969 Super Bowl–winning New York Jets quarterback who turned himself into one of the first true sports celebrities. Quite the opposite: Kraft, in a half-zip polo and mirrored sunglasses, looking like a sportier, clean-shaven Santa Claus, fits perfectly into the room of power players.

This is how to flex now. Kraft has become the unlikely muse for the wealthy and status-conscious, because owning a pro team—or owning a part of one, which recent rules in the National Football League, as well as Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, have allowed—has become the ultimate trophy asset for the rich and powerful.

Think about it. An invite to a fashion show? That’s sweet. A free ride on a private plane? It seems everyone has a NetJets account now. (Private jet flights hit a record high of 3.9 million globally in 2025, roughly a 34 percent increase from 2019.) But a walk-on pass to the 50-yard line at a Patriots game? Now we’re talking.

For years, pro teams were owned by familiar names: the Tisches of the New York Giants, the Rooneys of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Fords of the Detroit Lions, the Johnsons of the Jets. But today there are many new (and familiar) faces in owners’ boxes. Last year my friend Karlie Kloss became an investor in the WNBA’s New York Liberty alongside Olivia Walton of the Walmart family and Robin Roberts, among others, joining Clara Wu Tsai, who’s also a partial owner of the Brooklyn Nets. (Still waiting for our courtside date, Karlie!) Kloss’s husband, investor Joshua Kushner, is a minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. A few years ago Natalie Portman helped found Angel City FC, whose cap table reads like a Hollywood call sheet: Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, and Jennifer Garner.

Actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham A.F.C. in 2021 for $2.5 million; it’s now valued in the hundreds of millions, with an FX docuseries on Disney+ to match. LeBron James parlayed a $6.5 million stake in Liverpool F.C. into a position within Fenway Sports Group, whose portfolio includes the Boston Red Sox and the Pittsburgh Penguins. David Beckham is a co-owner of Inter Miami CF.

Even on TV, team ownership has become a saucy plotline. In Ted Lasso, Hannah Waddingham plays Rebecca Welton, a newly divorced owner navigating revenge and redemption through her football club who hires the hapless but effective coach Ted Lasso, played by Jason Sudeikis. In Netflix’s Running Point, Kate Hudson plays a woman trying to corral her siblings in the Gordon family after inheriting a professional basketball team. And in Ballers, Dwayne Johnson plays a former NFL player turned financial adviser whose later seasons revolve around assembling investors to buy an NFL franchise.

So, if it seems like there are more people who can say they’re team owners now than ever before, it’s because there are. In 2021, NBA commissioner Adam Silver opened the door to private equity funds purchasing minority stakes in teams, making it easier for institutional investors, celebrities, and global capital to enter the ecosystem. In 2024, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell followed suit, approving private equity investment. (Major League Baseball, under Rob Manfred, loosened restrictions in 2019.) The result is a new ownership class that’s less top hat and cigar, more group chat and group investment.

Why does everyone suddenly want to be around the world of sports? A few reasons. First, it intersects with something more cultural: the rise of hospitality. Remember lockdown? There we were, on our phones, quarantining, not exactly bragging about our social lives. When the world reopened, people didn’t just want to go out. They wanted to be seen going out. And what splashier way than by appearing in the owner’s box during the finals?

Even as a self-described fashion person, I, too, have been bitten by the bug and regularly seek invites to live sports. My favorite invitation: Met board member Robert Denning and his husband, Charles Porch, the longtime Instagram VP who recently decamped to OpenAI, have JFK Jr.’s old courtside seats at Madison Square Garden, which happen to be next to James Dolan, the longtime, often polarizing owner of the New York Knicks.

The football field and basketball court are among the few stages that can’t be replicated—for now at least. AI may give us a four-day workweek, and it’s already reshaping entire creative industries: Songs can be generated, movies can be synthesized, and influence itself can be engineered. But sports—live, unpredictable, physical—still have to happen in real time. Which means the people who control it don’t just own a team. They own a moment.

Women’s sports may be the most dynamic growth sector of all. Angel City FC launched a new model of celebrity-backed, community-driven ownership, and the WNBA’s surging valuations suggest that what once looked like a niche investment is quickly becoming mainstream. The salary for Caitlin Clark, the Indiana Fever star and number one overall pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft, will increase from $78,000 to $530,000 in 2026 because of a new provision in her salary agreement called EPIC (“exceptional performance on initial contract”), which fast-tracks high-performing players to max and supermax deals.

But let’s get back to that flag football game. Kraft’s hosts are Michael Rubin, the founder of digital sports platform Fanatics (the guy who throws the now infamous Hamptons white party), and Michael D. Ratner, a filmmaker and entrepreneur who co-founded Hailey Bieber’s skin-care brand, Rhode. Together they’re curating the guest list. Controlling the camera angles. Deciding who gets sideline seats and who gets sidelined.

The owner’s box has become a kind of modern salon, a place where money, fame, media, and politics sit side by side, in real time, with the cameras rolling. It’s no longer enough to simply attend.

Who won this game? I don’t remember. But that’s not the point, is it?