Family Fortunes and the Business of Sport

In 1923, Edoardo Agnellis, heir to Italy’s Fiat empire, purchased a modest Turin football club named Juventus. While many outsiders were left nonplussed by the curious gamble, Edoardo saw beyond the pitch. Juventus, he believed, would not only help bind his family’s name in Italy’s cultural fabric, it also had the potential to be a financial engine.

And he was right.

A century later, Juventus, still owned by the Agnellis family, is now valued at over $2 billion.

Over 8 decades later and 6500 kms east of Turin, the tides began turning: for the first time ever, the launch of the Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2008 gave India’s wealthiest family businesses a platform to bid for and own sports teams in a league. With IPL’s regulated framework, families saw both the commercial and the strategic potential of owning, building, and growing a team. Indeed, this franchise-based model turned out to be a success in the country, catalysing the creation of other franchise-based leagues: from football’s Indian Super League (ISL) to kabaddi’s Pro Kabaddi League (PKL), and more recently, women’s cricket with the Women’s Premier League (WPL).

With each league came distinct economics, audiences, and cultural capital, as well as a growing cohort of India’s wealthiest families that was steadily embedding sports franchises into their portfolios. But the asset class is fraught with polarising demands: Fans want trophies, whereas the owners need profit. While those who balanced passion with pragmatism thrived, others learned the hard way that sports ownership is a high-stakes game where emotion and prudent financial management collide.

In this month’s WInsights Digest, we examine how and why sports teams have become strategic financial assets for many business families. We explore success stories, cautionary tales, and the growing appetite among Indian families to claim their stake in the world of sports.

Economic and Structural Tailwinds

Until the 1990s, most sports teams operated as local institutions or community flagbearers rather than commercial engines. Ownership was often a legacy-driven, sentimental affair, and revenues came mainly from ticket sales, concessions, and local sponsorships. Teams were not as profitable, and few were valued beyond the tens of millions. But today, sport has become a hybrid asset that blends cultural influence with enterprise, and successful teams look at valuations in the hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars.

So what changed? Over the past few decades, the economics of sport have undergone a transformation and at the heart of modern sports ownership lies a powerful engine: structural operating leverage.

Since most team expenses are fixed, any increase in media revenues or sponsorship deals flows disproportionately to the bottom line. That means once a franchise covers its base costs, every additional rupee of revenue boosts profitability at a much higher rate.

It’s this scalability that has made sports teams increasingly attractive to long-term capital.

This evolution has been driven by four key forces:

A New Playing Field 

The reimagination of team ownership as a high-growth, multi-revenue business first took hold in the West. India took longer to get there but with the inception of IPL, everything changed quickly. With its franchise-based structure, salary caps, centralised media rights, and revenue-sharing model, India’s wealthiest family businesses were able to access a whole new asset class.