SBJ Unpacks: Learfield prepares for next era

Tonight in Unpacks: With its fourth owner in a decade, Learfield prepares for the growth of its multimedia business in college sports — and possibly an evolution beyond the U.S., reports SBJ’s Ben Portnoy in this week’s cover story.

Also tonight:

• RAJ Sports launches Rose City SportsNet for Fire, Thorns
• OneCourt launching home version for blind, low-vision sports fans
• The Show 26 enjoys series’ second-strongest debut
• Op-ed: December will define MLB’s next decade

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour discusses the big changes at NASCAR in the wake of Jim France stepping down as CEO, the success of the NFL Draft for Pittsburgh, Miami’s interest in Michael Yormark as its next AD and more.

If you’ve talked to Cole Gahagan in recent years, you’ve likely heard a familiar refrain: Learfield is no longer just a multimedia rights company.

It’s in technology. It’s in ticketing. It’s in data. It’s in NIL — a full-service operation built to adapt to college sports’ rapidly evolving business model.

“We are a data-centric media and technology company that powers the business of sports and entertainment,” Gahagan, the company’s president and CEO, said. “Period.”

Learfield’s short-term future came into focus earlier this month as it announced it is finalizing a sale to private equity firm TPG. The transaction caps 18 months of talks long rumored across the industry and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to customary approvals.

The deal — worth $1.8 to $2 billion, sources said — makes TPG Learfield’s fourth ownership group in the last decade. It is, however, the first time in that stretch the company will operate with just a single majority shareholder — “without a doubt, the biggest advantage,” Gahagan said.

“We see what’s going on in college [athletics] and we’re looking to find a highly diversified way of playing the growth that’s occurring in the industry,” TPG partner Peter McGoohan added. “Learfield, for us, is a fantastic way to play that trend.”

Still, the sale begs two simpler questions: Why is this any more transformative than those of the past 10 years? And what does reinvention of the 54-year-old company actually look like?

“We happen to have a high concentration in college athletics,” Gahagan said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that grows well outside that core in the years ahead. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see expansion beyond just the U.S. borders in the years ahead — but [right now], that’s who we are.”

A brief history lesson is required to fully understand the vision Gahagan and TPG are selling.

Learfield’s previous ownership structure was formed through a 2018 merger with IMG College, a group created in 2007 through acquisitions involving Host Communications and The Collegiate Licensing Company.

More recently, Learfield completed a $1.1 billion recapitalization in September 2023 that cut its debt load nearly in half to about $500 million and added $150 million in new equity.

The company posted record performance following the recapitalization, driven by growth in NIL, content and corporate sponsorships, among other efforts, and currently generates around $1.2 billion in annual revenue. CNBC recently reported Learfield has an EBITDA just shy of $200 million, with a sub-3x leverage ratio.

“Having one partner that you can go to that gets you 85, 90% of the teams is incredibly efficient for us,” said Fanatics founder and CEO Michael Rubin, a close confidant of Gahagan. “And that allows us to work on the big ideas with them and then have them work with all of their collegiate partners, versus us having to go partner by partner to 50 or 75 partners at a time.”

Learfield has staked its recent growth on diversifying beyond its traditional multimedia rights business.

Learfield Studios, the company’s content arm, generated more than 2.4 billion impressions across platforms last year, and the company’s team of 70-plus on-campus content creators is slated to expand past 100. Those efforts have also integrated into NIL asks from clients, where more than half of dealmaking activity includes custom content creation.

In the NIL space specifcially, Learfield has brokered 225,000 agreements, including through its Compass platform — a service used to onboard athletes to the EA Sports College Football video game.

Revenue generated on that front has come essentially through technology service fees that charge companies to manage athlete participation for NIL merchandise programs (what the athletes make isn’t affected by those fees). Learfield also drives dollars by developing NIL infrastructure, like marketing funds and staffing for schools, to assist with dealmaking.

Paciolan, the company’s ticketing platform, too, has continued to invest in AI and been instrumental in the concert business that is driving millions for athletic departments as they look to better commercialize their on-campus venues.

“Obviously schools are interested in the revenue that comes with bringing a big campus concert,” Paciolan President Brendan Lynch said. “We also see the schools not just thinking about the revenue, but also what it means for their student body, what it means for their connections, their alumni and the community at large.

“They know when you bring these events, it brings people into their communities, which is not just a good feeling vibe that they get. It also drives new revenue into their towns, into their P&Ls, and it introduces new names to their file that they can then go on to develop more ticket sales or more fundraising.”

Corporate sponsorships have also become a net positive after being revitalized with new leadership.

Learfield hired Shawn Hegan from the PGA Tour to oversee its previously dubbed “national sales” team. The group has grown more than 20% — up to around 50 employees — driving what those involved describe as significant growth from larger corporate partners through national campaigns that complement local deals.

“You could not possibly convince me that as a consumer, a college sports fan is any less valuable to a brand than a professional sports fan,” Hegan said. “We’re really going to the marketplace in a way now that’s very, very similar to professional sports teams. We’re now competing for dollars that we’re walking into conference rooms as professional sports leagues and teams are coming out of them.”

The company declined to share financial information related to its corporate sales team, but noted the group has been involved in selling 63 on-field logos and six jersey patches over the year-plus that such deals have been allowed by the NCAA.

Further growth has come in balancing longstanding college sports supporters, like Marriott, with newer entrants such as Meta and Google — an effort supported by Learfield’s expanding data capabilities and an ability to provide targeted marketing across 98 of the top 100 Designated Market Areas.

“We’ve been intentional about building our own platforms and ideas within the NCAA or Learfield or school ecosystems, rather than relying solely on a one-off integration,” said Mandy Gill, Marriott’s managing vice president of branding and marketing. “It allows us to build this consistency [with fans].”

For all the recent changes and further innovation to come, thanks to a new financier with solvency, multimedia rights remain a pillar of Learfield’s business.

Such reality creates a unique interplay for a company pivoting toward the future, with a core backed by a unit that continues to evolve.

Clemson, Arizona and Cincinnati are among the schools to have brought their rights in-house. Michigan State, Kentucky and Utah are in the process of creating LLCs to manage their revenue-generating arms, and while all won’t overlap directly with their third-party providers, there’s likely to be pain points.

The business has also changed at the conference level. The Big Ten operates its multimedia rights in-house through Big Ten Corporate Partnerships. The Big 12 and American, which each previously worked with Learfield, brought their efforts in-house since Commissioners Brett Yormark and Tim Pernetti took over the leagues. The SEC and ACC, meanwhile, sell their corporate sponsorships through ESPN/Disney.

“Bringing all the commercial business together in one division gives us the ability to scale things across the conference more effectively,” Pernetti said when launching American RISE Ventures in May 2025.”Whether that’s conference naming rights, playing surfaces, jersey patches or any of those things, it gives us the ability to create more value for the sum of the parts."

While some schools and conferences have moved in-house, many others continue to rely on third-party partners — particularly for the stability of guaranteed revenue.

Learfield’s broader strategy included extending 34 accounts over the last 18 months, 13 of which were Power Four schools. Those renewals include Ohio State, Washington, Texas Tech, TCU, Army, Iowa State, Illinois and Houston. It also pried USC away from Playfly as part of a deal that will kick in this summer.

Each agreement varies in scope, but Learfield has attempted to shift away from massive guarantees toward more revenue-share-centric deals that create upside for both the company and schools, with less downside risk than was at least part of the reason the company had to recapitalize three years ago.

“We’ve evolved the way that we’ve structured deals, and we want a win-win partnership,” Learfield Sports Properties President Kim Damron said. “But we also want it to work for the school and the school’s needs.”

Asked directly about the health of Learfield’s multimedia rights efforts long-term and why that business can sustain and grow, Gahagan pointed to the fractured nature of college sports and the lengthy contracts — often 10-15 years — it has in place with its clients as reasons for optimism.

“We have 365 Division I schools alone in college athletics,” Gahagan said. “In the absence of those leagues or governing bodies that bring those capabilities and resources to the table, in my observation and in my experience, our schools have needed — and now need more than ever — an operation at scale that delivers best practices, that delivers centralized capabilities, [so] that they can continue to do what they have to do on an everyday basis.”

And what if high-major college football, for example, consolidated into a 50-team super league with a central office, not too dissimilar from major professional sports leagues, which have robust groups at the team and league levels to manage multimedia rights?

“What we have seen in this industry for years, if not decades, is new organizations trying to do new things in college athletics without established track records, success and domain knowledge of how to navigate a highly complex fragmented landscape have not proven to be terribly successful in college athletics,” Gahagan said. “Conversely, the operations that have the domain expertise and at-scale capabilities in a highly fragmented space have proven to not only be successful, but necessary to continue driving growth.

“Even if you have a landscape change, a tectonic change in college athletics, I think that the responsibility that would be on the principals running that kind of an operation would be so paramount and significant that it would be unwise not to lean on Learfield to help make that kind of a hypothetical organization successful. And I think anybody stepping into that role would view it the same.”

Gahagan and Damron also dismissed the idea that Learfield pushed partners into early renewals, noting that schools themselves have often initiated those discussions. Ohio State and TCU, for example, approached Learfield in recent months and ultimately secured extensions.

The reasons for early renewals vary, but Learfield and other third-party multimedia rights holders have become more crucial than ever in driving above-the-cap dollars to assist schools with roster construction.

The House settlement, which went into effect in July 2025, created a $20.5 million soft cap to allow schools to share revenue directly with athletes. Third-party NIL dollars created through endorsement deals and marketing agreements, however, do not count toward the cap.

Schools have since charged their multimedia rights holders — namely, Learfield and Playfly — with driving more dollars toward athletes to help keep pace with the hockey-stick-like cost growth of college football and men’s basketball rosters.

“I look at having an MMR partner versus bringing it in-house like selling your house for sale by owner or using a realtor,” said TCU AD Mike Buddie. “If you have an awesome house and you’re sure you can sell it in one phone call, and you have a law degree and know how to write up a buyer’s contract in real estate and you feel comfortable, that might be a good move.

“But short of that, 99% of the people in the world use Realtors because they have the expertise. They do the work. They have the model. They do the heavy lifting for you so that you can go about your business. That’s kind of how I view Learfield. They’re the best Realtor out there.”

TPG, for its part, saw enough in Gahagan’s theory and Learfield’s books to invest billions to take a majority stake and offer an undisclosed amount of upfront cash to accelerate growth.

“We’ve looked at the business multiple times and, for us, this time represents the most compelling period, when you think about the ongoing needs universities have to grow revenue and support student athletes,” McGoohan said. “Learfield is very well positioned to help its university partners continue to grow.”

That TPG is putting major dollars behind one of college sports’ biggest third-party business providers is the latest chapter of private equity ownership of Learfield, not the start, as some response to the sale suggested.

The company has been owned by varying private equity groups for the bulk of the last decade, including Shamrock Capital Advisors, Atairos, Providence Equity Partners, Endeavor, Silver Lake, Fortress, Charlesbank and Clearlake Capital.

TPG was also among four finalists to purchase Learfield during its 2016 sale that included Atairos, New Mountain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners.

“If you’re TPG or Ares or Arctos or whatever, you say, ‘OK, let’s invest in another part of the college sport ecosystem,’” explained David Sunkin, the co-lead of the sports practice at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP, who advised Big Ten schools amid the league’s forays into private equity last year. “It makes perfect sense to go into a company like Learfield that controls so much in the media rights world, because they’re not owned by the taxpayers of California. They’re owned by private individuals that look at it in a more traditional kind of way.”

Learfield’s purchase by a firm like TPG, however, differs from those deals being cut at the school level. TPG sees itself operating more generally, using Learfield as an avenue into a growth space rather than an entrance into its client base.

Take the firm’s work in the music industry as a pseudo-parallel. Instead of investing in record labels where it would be forced to dictate artist signings and day-to-day transactions of that ilk, TPG put its money toward operators like Spotify, where it is more interested in running a business benefiting from the end market growth.

“If we take a step back, we’ve been active investors as a firm across the broader sports, media, and entertainment vertical,” McGoohan said. “We’ve taken a distinct approach where we try and find the best business models to access the thematic growth areas of those end markets without necessarily having to take individual content risks.”

The firm has also said it plans to maintain the current leadership structure, with Gahagan expected to remain in his role “for the long haul.”

“TPG is investing as much in this leadership as they are the company itself,” he said. “My view is we’re only in early innings. We’ve got a whole heck of a lot to do in the years ahead.”

“My view is we’re only in early innings. We’ve got a whole heck of a lot to do in the years ahead.”

—  Cole Gahagan, Learfield president and CEO

There are still logistics to be worked out. How and to what degree schools might feel the impact of the sale figures to be a moving target.

Most administrators contacted by Sports Business Journal for this story suggested the sale stands to have little impact on their day-to-day dealings. “It’s a nothing story,” said one Power Four athletic director, noting that would be the case unless high-level leadership changes were made.

A high-major, non-Learfield administrator posited that the increased pressure to monetize at the top end of the company could hypothetically create a rub where a school might be pushed to sell assets they may not desire to make available.

Gahagan pushed back on the idea, pointing to the existing dynamic it enjoys with clients in which, he says, schools are largely pushing Learfield to sell different and more assets compared to the other way around.

“How our third-party [Learfield] is funded is different, and we recognize that private equity is in the business of making money,” Washington AD Pat Chun said. “I’m sure there’ll be some changes in what Learfield does, but, at the end of the day, our goals don’t change. We’re trying to maximize our revenue streams and things we have aligned inside of our contract with Learfield. We’re motivated to work with Learfield to monetize them.”

These days, every school in America needs more cash. The pressure and price of competing at the highest rungs of college sports have never been costlier.

Learfield is uniquely positioned to help those efforts. TPG is betting billions that it can.

The owners of the WNBA’s Fire and NWSL’s Thorns are rebranding a Portland over-the-air channel into Rose City SportsNet, with a year-round format that turns the station into a female-focused sports RSN.

In late February, RAJ Sports and its owners, Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal, had made Gray Media’s Fox 12 Plus the joint broadcast home for the Fire and Thorns -- with the possibility of eventually morphing into a 24/7 network. Now -- in an ongoing collaboration with Gray -- Rose City SportsNet will not only air Fire and Thorns games, but a pregame, halftime and postgame studio show called Fire Courtside Live. While the network will not air only female sports, there will be other extensive original women’s sports content.

“There is undeniable demand for women’s sports, and for too long, access hasn’t kept pace with that growth,” Bhathal Merage said.

As part of the deal, RAJ Sports will receive a rights fee from Gray along with a separate minimum guarantee from Kiswe, which is launching the Fire’s coinciding DTC app, Fire+. Rose City SportsNet will debut with a telecast of the Fire’s first preseason game on Wednesday against the Storm. That will be followed by a re-broadcast of a Thorns-Wave match.

“It’s groundbreaking,” said Lee Berke, the president and CEO of LHB Sports, Entertainment & Media, who advised RAJ Sports on the package. “You have to take into context everything else that’s gone on. The WNBA labor settlement — it’s just amazing how well it’s been received. It’s an acknowledgement of the level of interest in the WNBA and the business that there is in the WNBA.”

Accessibility tech startup OneCourt spent the last few years bringing play-by-play action to blind and low-vision sports in sports venues. The Seattle company is now taking that effort to at-home fans as well.

OneCourt has officially opened pre-orders for its at-home device, which turns live tracking data into haptics so that fans can feel game play through their fingertips. CEO Jerred Mace said that OneCourt will take a limited number of orders during this initial offer window, targeting a December delivery of these first-generation units.

“People have asked for it: ‘When can I use this at home? I had such a great time in the venue,’” Mace told SBJ. “So obviously, it’s been on our minds and on our roadmap, and we’re finally here.”

OneCourt started appearing in venues though team deployments, launching first in 2025 with the Trail Blazers and activation sponsor Ticketmaster. The company has now worked with double-digit NBA teams, the D-backs and has appeared on big stages like the FIFA Club World Cup and the most recent Super Bowl.

The at-home device features a thinner design, looking more like a handheld gaming device than the thicker, tablet-sized in-venue offering. It will come with three different covers (featuring court/field outlines of baseball, basketball, and football) that are interchangeable and attach with magnets. The at-home unit will connect to a user’s phone via Bluetooth, allowing it to sync with the OneCourt app.

Prices start at $369 for the device. A subscription is required for the device to follow along with MLB, NBA, and NFL games, which OneCourt is offering in three-month (with a device-and-subscription bundled cost of $420) and 12-month ($549) time frames. The tech will be able to pull official data for all games and will not be subject to blackouts. OneCourt expects to close this pre-order window by late June to allow for the manufacturing time of this limited run.

Mace pointed out that the price point is something he’s most proud of, sharing that various communities can often face a “disability tax” regarding the technology needed.

“What I’m so excited about is I think this is something that people can afford,” Mace said. “It’s more like a game console than it is a medical marvel or piece of technology that is so expensive.”

OneCourt was named to the latest cohort of SBJ’s 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies and is a finalist for the Best in Fan Experience Technology at SBA: Tech next month.

Sony’s MLB: The Show 26 enjoyed the franchise’s second-strongest launch since the series’ debut in 2006, per data from market research firm Circana.

MLB: The Show 26 was the top-selling game for March, and it’s already the second-highest selling game of the year behind Capcom’s Resident Evil: Requiem. It was also the bestselling game on PlayStation. It slightly outperformed MLB: The Show 2021’s sales (this was right before the COVID shutdowns of the pandemic era, which featured a number of video game sales records). One big difference: In 2021, MLB: The Show wasn’t on Nintendo platforms.

As for the “why” behind The Show’s debut, several factors are likely buoying its launch. First, it included the College World Series with 11 teams as part of the “Road to the Show” mode, a well-received addition. (My favorite new feature since the Storylines mode chronicling the Negro Leagues debut with MLB: The 23.) It also has a World Baseball Classic mode, another popular addition that’s lifting baseball sales in a number of categories outside gaming. No word yet if cover athlete Aaron Judge goosed sales.

It was also a strong debut for WWE 2K26, which launched as the No. 3 selling game of March (and also trails MLB: The Show 26 on the bestselling game of the year chart). It bodyslammed its Xbox competitors, outselling all other games in March (a platform on which The Show does not appear).

Noteworthy among other sports games, NBA 2K26 remains in the top 10 of monthly sales, coming in at No. 8, with EA Sports FC 2026 clinging to the 10th slot. It’ll be interesting to monitor FC 2026’s performance during the World Cup. While it lacks FIFA branding, major events tend to give sports games sales a lift. Madden NFL 26 finished 20th in sales.

An interesting hardware note: Nintendo’s Switch 2 is the second-fastest selling hardware platform in the U.S. going back to when Circana first started tracking sales in 1995. Through its first 10 months on the market, the Switch 2 is outselling the original Switch — one of the most popular consoles Nintendo ever made — by a 12% margin.

As always, these sales figures paint a good but incomplete picture of the market. Circana doesn’t receive sales figures for Xbox and Switch’s digital platforms, so it’s a safe bet that MLB: The Show’s debut performance is even stronger than it appears.

Major League Baseball entered the 2026 season with genuine momentum. Franchise valuations have climbed sharply, national viewership has shown renewed strength at key moments, and the World Baseball Classic continues to broaden the sport’s global footprint. Post-2022 rule changes have improved pace of play and fan engagement, while ownership groups have invested in player development, ballpark experiences, and market infrastructure. The results are visible.

What comes next will determine whether that momentum compounds — or stalls. Because everything baseball has built, and everything it hopes to build, runs through a single deadline: Dec. 1, 2026, when the collective-bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. ET.

How that negotiation resolves will shape not just labor peace, but the competitive structure, media rights value, and ownership economics of the sport for the next decade. The CBA is not one issue among several. It is the central variable that will determine how each of those other strategies ultimately plays out.

The central economic tension: Cost control vs. market freedom

At the core of the upcoming negotiation is a familiar divide.

Ownership seeks stronger mechanisms to control costs and narrow widening payroll disparities. The current system permits significant divergence: The Los Angeles Dodgers are operating with a luxury-tax payroll approaching $415 million to $430 million, while clubs such as the Miami Marlins sit in the roughly $75 million to $85 million range for tax purposes. That gap raises legitimate concerns about competitive balance, long-term fan engagement in smaller markets, and the sustainability of leaguewide economics.

The players association views any system resembling a hard cap as a fundamental constraint on earning potential in an otherwise open market. MLBPA Interim Executive Director Bruce Meyer has been unequivocal: The union’s opposition to a cap has not changed, though it has signaled openness to a spending floor. Players maintain they should not bear the burden of competitive imbalance created, in part, by how ownership deploys revenue-sharing dollars. It is a principled argument. But the current trajectory is not sustainable.

The widening gap between high- and low-spending clubs is not simply a business inconvenience. It is a structural threat to the product itself. When fans in a significant portion of markets have rational reasons to disengage before the season begins — because their team has neither the payroll nor the structural incentive to compete — the league’s long-term revenue base erodes. That erosion compounds over time in ways that are difficult to reverse.

A well-designed system pairing a meaningful salary cap with a robust spending floor and enhanced revenue sharing offers the clearest path forward. This is not a radical position. It is the structure every other major North American professional league has adopted, and the evidence from those leagues is instructive.

What other leagues demonstrate

The objection most often raised against a salary cap is that it suppresses player earnings. The experience of other major North American leagues suggests a more nuanced reality.

The NFL operates a hard cap tied to league revenue with a mandatory floor that moves in tandem. The NHL has seen sustained revenue growth — hitting a record $6.2 billion last season — under the same structure. The NBA’s soft cap with escalating luxury tax penalties has coincided with historic growth in both league revenue and player compensation, culminating in a $77 billion media rights deal.

The mechanism is consistent across all three: When more teams are competitively viable, the product strengthens, media rights become more valuable, and the revenue pool that determines player compensation expands. Baseball’s luxury tax has not delivered that outcome. It has produced a league of structural haves and have-nots, with observable engagement challenges in lower-spending markets. A revenue-tied cap-and-floor system would not inherently diminish player earnings. It would position the sport to grow them.

The media rights strategy depends on labor stability

Running parallel to the labor negotiation — but ultimately dependent on it — is MLB’s evolving media rights strategy.

Shifts in the regional sports network model have accelerated MLB’s move toward league-controlled distribution. MLB has consolidated local rights for a growing number of teams — now producing and distributing games for 14 clubs, nearly half the league, in 2026 — and is positioning itself to bring a unified national and local package to market when current deals expire later this decade. But that strategy’s success hinges on predictability. Media rights valuations rest on forward-looking revenue models that assume stable operations, uninterrupted seasons, and a competitive product across markets.

A prolonged work stoppage heading into 2027 would inject uncertainty at the precise moment MLB seeks to maximize its next rights cycle. A stable cap-and-floor agreement — one that makes more than a handful of markets genuinely competitive — is the version most likely to strengthen the league’s negotiating position. The media strategy and the CBA are not separate tracks. Each materially affects the other.

Ownership economics turn on what december produces

Franchise valuations now demand institutional capital, with private equity playing an increasingly structural role in ownership groups. Expansion adds further complexity — Nashville remains a leading candidate for a new franchise, with fees expected to exceed $2 billion. A revenue-tied cap-and-floor agreement would improve the ability of ownership groups and institutional investors to model long-term returns with confidence, support franchise valuations, simplify expansion underwriting, and signal that baseball’s governance has matured to match its ambitions. A short-term pact that defers the structural questions introduces uncertainty across the system at precisely the moment investors require the opposite.

The stakes are clear

The outcome of December’s negotiation will set the parameters within which every other strategic initiative in baseball operates — from media rights consolidation to expansion to sustained franchise investment.

A cap-and-floor system tied to league revenue, accompanied by robust revenue sharing, supports competitive balance across all thirty markets, provides the stability the media rights strategy requires, and gives institutional capital the predictability it needs. And as other leagues have demonstrated, players have historically seen compensation rise under such systems, as stronger competitive balance drives broader fan engagement and growing revenue. Dec. 1 is not just a deadline. It is the moment baseball decides whether to build the foundation its next decade requires — or defer that reckoning for another generation.

Mark Salah Morgan is an equity partner, executive board member, and vice chair of litigation at Day Pitney LLP, where he has practiced for 22 years. He serves as outside general counsel to clients involved in professional sports franchise transactions.

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