RedBird, FSU Trustee Launch College Sports Investment Fund

RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital are launching a college sports-specific investment fund, one that could lend as much as $2 billion to athletic departments across the country.

Led by RedBird founder Gerry Cardinale, Collegiate Athletic Solutions (CAS) is hoping to cash in on a college sports industry in upheaval, with athletes on the verge of more robust compensation and schools seeking new funding sources to stay competitive. The structure of CAS, according to multiple people familiar with its plan, is to lend upfront money and operational expertise to athletic departments in exchange for a share of additional revenue generated under their partnership.

Weatherford Capital, headquartered in Tampa, Fla., is run by brothers Will, Sam and Drew Weatherford, the latter of whom played football at Florida State and is a member of the school’s board of trustees. FSU has been negotiating for more than a year with another investment firm, private equity giant Sixth Street, on a potential capital infusion for the Seminoles. A spokesman for Weatherford said FSU is aware of his work with CAS and that he would recuse himself from decisions involving private capital and Seminoles athletics. The university’s spokespeople did not respond to an email seeking comment.

CAS, meanwhile, is raising money and is already in talks with a number of other universities, said the people, who were granted anonymity because the details are private. The new venture plans to initially partner with five to 10 athletic departments, offering $50 million to $200 million to each.

Representatives for RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital declined to comment.

CAS is one of a number of institutional funds looking to finance and profit off the increased commercialization of college sports. Legal, financial and legislative upheaval has combined to create “one of the most potentially transformative opportunities I’ve witnessed in my 30-year career in sports,” Cardinale wrote in an introductory email to Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt late last year.

“We have done a tremendous amount of work to position ourselves as a thoughtful impact partner for you and your team as you evaluate the changing landscape,” he said later in the email, which Sportico obtained via an open records request. “Drawing on both (a) our collective experience of building cutting edge sports businesses (e.g., On Location, OneTeam Partners, and Legends Hospitality) to generate more revenue for your department and (b) our expertise in partnering/operating teams and leagues (e.g., AC Milan, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, XFL, etc.), we should be a fairly unique partner to programs like yours.”

Both Weatherford and Cardinale have been at least vaguely telegraphing the premise behind their new venture for months. Last August, Weatherford posted a column on LinkedIn titled, “Amateur Collegiate Sports is Dead…Act Accordingly,” in which he argued that instead of “rest(ing) on the laurels of the traditions” of what college sports once was, the industry’s stakeholders should “celebrate” the “multibillion-dollar national treasure” it has become and “commercialize the asset” for their benefit.

In early January, Cardinale told the The New York Times that Michigan’s football team might be worth $1.5 billion and implied that the Wolverines were an undervalued asset. The week prior, on Jan. 2, a Delaware LLC called Collegiate Athletic Solutions Platform was formed, according to the state’s Division of Corporations database. The CAS website is currently password protected with a landing page that says “coming soon.”

The company has one employee publicly listed on LinkedIn—Newman Delany, the son of former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, who is identified as a senior vice president. Jim Delany is currently an advisor to the Big Ten as well as a partner at The Montag Group. The Delany family has also been a significant donor to the University of North Carolina, both Jim and Newman’s alma mater.

In a March email sent to Texas Tech’s Hocutt, Newman Delany requested a number of different pieces of financial information for CAS to develop a “tangible TTU-specific analysis as the foundation for a constructive discussion.”

That data included three years of itemized profit-and-loss statements from the athletic department; three to five years of itemized profit-and-loss projections; details on any future revenue pledged to existing projects or liabilities; a detailed breakdown of debt obligations; and a finance schedule for upcoming capital expenditures, including ROI estimates for those projects.

In response, Hocutt sent an email to deputy athletic director Jonathan Botros, the Red Raiders’ CFO and COO, asking if he had “concern in sharing this type of general information.” A Texas Tech spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about the current status of these talks.

CAS’ approach is different from traditional private equity, or even private credit. The group does not plan to take an equity position in any athletic department’s commercial venture, nor does it intend to secure fixed payments in return for the upfront capital. Instead, a source said, the deals will be structured with returns tied to new revenue generation.

RedBird’s sports portfolio includes Italian soccer team AC Milan, Fenway Sports Group, YES Network, the Alpine F1 Team and the UFL. The firm has $10 billion under management, and recently closed its fourth fund with more than $3.28 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Founded in 2015, Weatherford Capital has raised more than $1 billion since its inception. The group’s portfolio is mostly technology and financial companies, though it invested in IMG Academy in 2023 when the company was sold by Endeavor for $1.25 billion.