The FIFA World Cup is Not a Global Soccer Tournament. It is a Master Class in Asset Monetization.
- Ariel Steinlauf
- 8 hours ago
- 9 min read
Pre-Game
I am not a sports guy.
What can I say, for the entirety of my childhood and teenage years I could not get behind any one team with such fervor that would make me change weekend plans or TV viewing habits. Don’t get me wrong, I played sports (not particularly well, I might add), it just didn’t make the cut onto my adult weekly schedule.
But once every four years, even I have to make an exception to the rule and become, at least for a few short weeks, a sports guy. The FIFA World Cup — what the French call simply le Mondial — is that exception. It is the best soccer (ahem… football to most of the rest of the world) played at the peak of human capability. This summer, for the first time in over 30 years, it arrives in North America. 48 nations, 104 matches, and a global audience that makes the Super Bowl seem like a Friday Night Lights episode (believe me – no disrespect).
And since the World Cup is here, and since I have been ever curious about what guitarist John Mayer likes to call “the thing behind the thing,” I started thinking about the business that is FIFA.
When the World Cup comes to town, the economic story practically writes itself. FIFA projects $40.9 billion in combined GDP impact across North America this summer, with individual host cities expecting between $500 million and $3.3 billion in direct economic activity. Think of it as the Taylor Swift Eras Tour on steroids: when the soon-to-be Mrs. Kelce played 6 nights in Los Angeles, she generated $320 million in local economic impact. In the July 2023 Beige book, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia — not an institution known for its concert reviews — credited her shows with driving the city's strongest hotel revenue month since the onset of the pandemic. The World Cup will do something similar across 16 cities and 3 countries, for almost 6 weeks. That's the most common story. But it's not the interesting one.
Yes, the World Cup is the apex of soccer tournaments, but more importantly it is the most fascinating example of an IP rights business in the world. What FIFA built contains a lesson that most PE investors have not yet applied to their own portfolios.
Possession
Let me state the central fact plainly: FIFA does not own a single stadium, player, or ball.
On May 21, 1904, seven football administrators sat in a back room at 229 Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris and agreed to establish FIFA - an organization to "promote the game of Association Football, to foster friendly relations among National Associations." Importantly, they stated in their founding document that “only the represented National Associations would be recognized, and only FIFA could organize International Matches.”
With that clause, FIFA gave itself the right to organize the World Cup and with it the right to collect any associated revenue stream. That is the entirety of the asset. The infrastructure, the talent, the turf — all of it belongs to someone else. FIFA shows up, presents the rights, and collects a projected $11-13 billion. Roughly two thirds of that amount comes from just two categories: broadcast rights and marketing rights. The ninety minutes of play, the stadiums, the standing-room crowds — these are the delivery mechanism. The rights are the product.
This did not happen by accident. It is a business model built — consciously or otherwise — on three questions that most companies never think to ask of themselves.
1. What do we actually own that others cannot replicate?
For FIFA, the answer is organizing authority. The globally recognized right to crown a world champion, every four years, in perpetuity. The moat around that business got wider with every national football association that joined (today: 211) to the point where no competing tournament can replicate it. The Champions League is spectacular; it is also a local club competition. The Copa América is legit; it is also regional. The World Cup is the only event the entire planet accepts as definitive. That convening authority is not a trademark or a patent. It is something closer to sovereignty. And it is non-replicable by design.
2. What are all the channels through which that right can generate revenue?
Broadcast rights. Sponsorship. Ticketing. Hospitality. Merchandise licensing. Gaming — until recently, a $150 million annual deal with EA Sports that was, by FIFA's own accounting, its single largest commercial relationship. The answer keeps expanding because the underlying right is not tied to any particular distribution channel. It does not matter whether fans watch on broadcast television, a cable package, or a streaming platform that did not exist four years ago. The right sits upstream of all of it.
3. What new platforms exist, or are emerging, that would pay to access what we own?
FIFA's broadcast rights fees grew by ~24% from the 2022 cycle to the 2026 cycle. Not because the underlying sport changed. Rather, a new class of bidder — streaming platforms needing live content to anchor subscriptions — entered the market and repriced an existing asset upward. FIFA did nothing except be positioned correctly when the market expanded around it.
Now let’s put this into the language of a portfolio review. What rights (IP) does your portco actually own? What are all the monetization paths from those rights? What platforms — new distribution channels, new regulatory environments, new technologies — are emerging that would pay for access? This is not an IP audit in the legal sense, the kind performed by outside counsel before a close. It is an IP audit in the revenue growth sense. It is a question management teams need to start asking with more urgency and frequency.
Hat-trick
The FIFA model is the pure-play: own the rights, monetize the rights, repeat every four years. Simple. Elegant. FIFA is also structured as a Swiss Verein (read: non-profit) and its meager $100 million EBITDA-equivalent doesn’t even begin to capture the model’s true potential. There is another way.
In 2010, Ted Leonsis recognized the value of the same thesis and built Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE). What he assembled over the ensuing 16 years is a lesson in applying the same underlying logic at the franchise level.
Leonsis started with one asset: the Washington Capitals, an NHL franchise, bought in 1999. That was the anchor. But instead of running it as an operating business, he treated it as a platform, then asked a slightly different question than the one FIFA answered:
Which revenue streams flowing around this franchise are currently being captured by other parties?
The answer came in layers.
First, venue ownership. Capital One Arena captures the live event economics — ticket revenue, premium seating, naming rights, concessions — which he previously had to share with a landlord. He already owned 36% of it. In 2010, he bought the rest.
Second, more franchises. Leonsis bought the WNBA’s Washington Mystics in 2005, and in 2010, the NBA’s Washington Wizards. Every team generated incremental revenue against infrastructure MSE already owned. A game night that would otherwise go dark became a revenue night.
Third, media rights: why get paid a fraction of the ad revenue when you can own a whole regional sports network? In 2016, MSE acquired 33% of NBC Sports Washington. In 2022, it bought the rest. The rebranded Monumental Sports Network now redirects broadcast value away from outside distributors and onto MSE's own balance sheet.
Fourth, adjacent revenue streams — sports betting partnerships with sportsbook operator William Hill (now part of Caesars Entertainment), data licensing, concerts, eSports, and non-sports programming — all running on the same physical and relationship infrastructure, on nights when no one in the building is keeping score.
Here’s the PE translation. The arc of buy-and-build bends toward horizontal expansion:
Same Business + More Locations = More Customers = More Revenue
MSE is a vertical expansion story. Leonsis was not buying businesses. He was reclaiming revenue streams from parties who had been monetizing his IP without his participation. The Capitals', Wizards’ and Mystics’ brand, community, and convening authority generated the demand. Other parties collected the proceeds. He changed that arrangement, one layer at a time, each adding a rights capture, not merely an asset acquisition.
That distinction is worth a moment of reflection.
The Pitch
Before answering the next logical question — should I be looking for sports franchises to buy? — let’s spend a second understanding what makes them such exceptional assets.
The first thing is structural scarcity. As my father-in-law liked to say: “buy land, because God ain’t making more of it.” Sports franchises — similarly, but not exactly like land (sorry, Fred) — possess something almost no other asset class does: legally enforced supply constraints. Major League Baseball has 30 teams. The league controls expansion. And at time of writing, the MLB commissioner ain’t making a 31st team. This scarcity means franchise values appreciate independent of operating performance, on timescales that embarrass most investment theses.
Take the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys for an example. When Jerry Jones acquired the franchise in 1989, he paid $140 million. In 2025, after a 36-year hold period, that investment compounded at 13.4% annually to reach $13 billion — before any operational improvement you could credit to active management – and still better than the S&P 500 by about 200 bps over the same period.
The second thing is the problem that extended hold period creates. Those timescales are fundamentally incompatible with conventional fund structures. No PE fund holds anything for 36 years. The asset compounds. The fund exits. The investor watches the next buyer capture the majority of the appreciation.
Joshua Kushner's answer to this structural mismatch is Thrive Eternal — a permanent capital vehicle built on the explicit thesis that certain cultural assets – like the SF Giants – require a different kind of capital to capture their full potential. That argument deserves its own treatment. But that is another story that should be saved for another time.
The Home-Grown Player
When I joined American Express in 2011 the company just finished celebrating its 160th birthday. Over that period of time, it has evolved from a transporter of high-value goods and currency to a global lifestyle brand disguising a diversified financial services powerhouse.
Undergirding the several transformations Amex has gone through over the decades is the continuous ability to ask – and answer – two questions: what business are we in? And what businesses could we be in?
In 1958, the answer to the latter question helped the company become a major player in the emerging charge card business. Thirty years later, in 1988, the answer to the latter question made American Express Shearson an unsuccessful player in the biggest LBO of that time (remember Barbarians at the Gate?). Amex lost that deal to KKR, shed Shearson and Lehman, and focused on its core – the closed-loop network.
Amex is a unique business because it functions as both card issuer and payment network. It holds complete visibility into both sides of every transaction — the cardmember (because membership has its privileges) and the merchant. That dual-sided data is not incidental to the business. It is an asset. Specifically, it is the kind of asset that no competing institution, analytics company, or brand advertiser can replicate regardless of how much capital they deploy against it. At scale — and Amex processes 20%-24% of all U.S. credit card spending by purchase volume— it is, in every meaningful sense, proprietary.
For most of Amex's history, that asset was used the way most companies use their best assets: as operational infrastructure. Internally. To detect fraud. To calibrate benefits. To understand where cardmembers spent. It was not a commercial product. It was overhead.
And so, my team was tasked with the following question: how might we monetize Amex’s transaction data while retaining privacy and security? The answer to that question yielded a patent that allowed partners to co-locate their customer data alongside Amex's transaction data, in a privacy-preserving environment (what we now call a Data Clean Room), and use the combined dataset to build audiences they could not otherwise reach. This patent laid the foundation for Amex Advance – an anonymized, highly targeted audience-building platform – and more recently to Amex Ads.
Post-Game Analysis
FIFA doesn't own a stadium. It owns the right to fill one. Based on that right, it built an empire generating $13 billion. MSE built a flywheel of related assets valued at $7.2 billion based on its ownership of unique franchises. Amex leveraged and monetized its proprietary assets to enter new businesses.
Every portfolio company you own has built something unique over years of operation: data, processes, relationships, brand, institutional knowledge, proprietary methods. Most of that accumulated value is being used the way Amex used its transaction data before someone asked the right question — as operational overhead, not as a commercial asset.
So here is the question I want to leave you with. Not as a philosophical provocation, but as a practical one you can take into any portco meeting this quarter.
When did someone last look at this business and ask not what it sells, but what it owns? When did someone map every revenue stream that currently flows to a third party because of capabilities, relationships, data, or brand that your portco built? And when did someone ask which new platforms, distribution channels, or regulatory environments would pay for access to those assets if they were properly packaged?
The answer to this question can be the linchpin of your value creation plan.
