Blackstone Eyes $300M Cricket Deal

Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, is exploring a $200M–$300M investment in an Indian Premier League cricket team.

The firm would invest through its fund for wealthy individual investors, targeting one of two IPL franchises currently for sale valued between $1.3B and $2B.

The IPL is the world's most valuable professional cricket league, making this a landmark entry into sports for Blackstone.

Financial firm Mesirow arranged a $40M private bond to help the new professional women's soccer franchise build a practice facility.

The debt is creatively funded by naming-rights payments from healthcare network CommonSpirit Health.

Backed by prominent owners like Peyton Manning, the team has already sold over 50K tickets for its first home game.

The 16 opening games averaged 9.8M viewers across four major TV networks, a 6% increase from last year’s previous record.

Primetime evening broadcasts drove this massive audience, drawing a historic 12.5M viewers as fans watched top-ranked teams.

Preliminary play-in matches earlier in the week also broke historical TV ratings, attracting 7.5M total viewers before the main event began.

The streaming platform will broadcast over 350 regular season games annually through sports network SPOTV, up significantly from just 54 games last year.

Amazon Prime members in Japan can watch these live baseball games and a 24-hour highlights channel at no extra cost to their subscription.

Major League Baseball is currently surging in popularity across Japan as fans tune in to watch local superstar players like Shohei Ohtani.

Ad agency group WPP Media found women's sports ads outperform non-sports TV by 20% on average, with some brands seeing nearly 3x the impact.

Advertiser spending on women's sports jumped 69% in 2025 to $127M, as these audiences skew higher-income and include hard-to-reach cord-cutters.

Athlete-driven, authentic creative works best – one sportswear brand saw a 426% engagement lift when athlete-led ads aired in women's sports.

The bankrupt league will repay athletes $4.9M and increase vendor payouts from 1.5% to roughly 15% of their total debt.

League founder and Olympic champion Michael Johnson agreed to return a disputed $500K payment to help fund the vendor settlement.

The track league previously racked up over $40M in debt against just $2M in revenue, forcing this restructuring to resolve unpaid bills.

The unsigned jersey from a World Baseball Classic tournament sold through Major League Baseball's auction site, shattering Ohtani's previous $250K jersey record.

Eclipsing the $1M mark is rare for unsigned gear, signaling massive collector demand for the Japanese baseball star's sports memorabilia.

This marks his second item to top $1M this week, following a rare $2.16M trading card shared with American baseball star Aaron Judge.

The legislation targets prediction websites like Polymarket and Kalshi, which lawmakers accuse of acting as unlicensed sportsbooks under federal protection.

Sports wagers dominate these platforms, generating $1.2B in weekly trading volume on Polymarket and $2.6B on Kalshi.

The proposed federal ban follows recent moves by multiple US states to block these platforms for violating local gambling laws.

Former football star Mark Gastineau sued sports network ESPN for $100M to punish them for broadcasting an embarrassing confrontation with a rival.

The judge noted Gastineau surrendered his image rights for a mere $10K interview fee, granting film producers absolute control over the footage.

The court ruled the public argument was newsworthy, demonstrating that famous athletes cannot easily censor embarrassing moments captured by media companies.