Thought Leadership
Playing the Long Game: Breaking Down the Blind Spot in the Sports Economy
In our most recent piece, "Playing the Long Game: Breaking Down the Blind Spot in the Sports Economy," we examine where value in the sports economy is being overlooked, and the structural shift that's reshaping the entire system.
The conventional playbook of buying into a professional franchise works, but it misses where value is actually being created. The participation and development layers, youth and college, are where athletes are developed, opportunity is created, and lifelong relationships are formed. Yet they remain fragmented, underinstitutionalized, and largely overlooked, sitting at sub-1% institutional penetration.
What's reshaping the economy is that these layers no longer behave as separate markets. They're stages of a single athlete's lifecycle: youth participation builds the pipeline, college develops and filters it, and the professional ranks are where that journey culminates.
The investors who build the most durable positions in sports will not be the ones who simply bought the right franchise at the right time. They will be the ones who understand that a franchise is the visible endpoint of a system that develops athletes, creates opportunity, and helps shape future leaders.
Investing in Sports in Light of Their Investment in Us
The Weatherford family is steeped in the traditions of athletics, having been raised in a home with nine children who virtually all played DI sports. Our experience in sports at all levels and the values inherent to team play continue to shape not only who we are as individuals but also how we approach our work. We espouse foundational values, such as commitment to relationships, teamwork, process over outcomes, and life-long learning, all of which find their roots at least partially in the indigenous soil of sports.
In short, we owe a great deal of thanks to coaches, teams, parents, and processes that instilled deep-seated beliefs and practices we have now ingrained in our own children, at least in part through the same means: youth sports. As a result, we are thrilled to stand at the precipice of unprecedented growth in an industry we’ve cherished for so long. Through excellent organizations such as IMG Academy, a leader in the sports education market, and many others like them, we hope to have the opportunity to invest in many other companies supporting the echo system that is shaping the hearts and minds of the next generation of leaders.