When billionaires want to buy a sports team, they call these bankers at Goldman Sachs, Inner Circle Sports, and more

Colin Neville, The Raine Group

Working as a sports banker often means rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. In his 15 years at Raine, a TMT-focused boutique bank in New York City, Neville has worked with the likes of the soccer superstar David Beckham, the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and the Alibaba cofounder Joe Tsai. He advised Ballmer on his 2014 purchase of the Los Angeles Clippers and Tsai on his $3.3 billion acquisition of the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center in 2019.

Neville is also well versed in the soccer world. Most recently, he led the team representing the UK soccer team Manchester United in its $1.65 billion minority-interest sale to Jim Ratcliffe, which closed earlier this year.

He’s also been a key player in the huge growth of Inter Miami, a new Major League Soccer team. After Beckham and his investment team hired Raine to find investors for the franchise, Neville tapped Jorge Mas, a billionaire construction CEO he had formerly represented in a failed bid to buy the Miami Marlins baseball team, to come on as a coowner in 2018. Since then, Inter Miami has raised $150 million from Ares Capital (marking the first institutional investor in the MLS), started plans for a $350 million stadium project, and added the soccer star Lionel Messi to its roster — a move that shot the team into the spotlight and is expected to double its profits.

Raine also helped find a buyer for Chelsea FC in 2022 after the UK placed sanctions on the team’s owner at the time, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Neville and his team had just 90 days to find a new buyer for the club, a period Neville described as the most intense of his career.

“It was around the clock in every single time zone, and we basically barely had a chance to breathe during that process,” he said

In the end, Neville’s team — Garrett Gomes, Ari Zelman, Andrea Pascual, and Teddy Kleinman — met the deadline with a record-breaking offer from Todd Boehly, a former banker who coowns the LA Dodgers, to buy the team for $3.2 billion.

“Everyone was uncertain — the staff was uncertain, the players were uncertain, the fans were freaking out,” he said. “The press in the UK around football is like nothing you’ll ever experience. So it was just a high-pressure situation with big stakes, and we wanted to do right by all the different stakeholders. So we did our best on that. We’re pretty proud of the outcome.”

Neville also advised Fanatics, a sportswear retailer, in its $1.5 billion capital raise from the NFL and MLB in 2022 and was an advisor to the sports betting and gaming company DraftKings, including on its 2020 deal to go public via a special-purpose acquisition company. He also advised the UFC on its record $4 billion acquisition by the sports and entertainment company Endeavor, as well as its $21 billion merger with the WWE last year.

Neville, who played lacrosse at Yale, was interested in film and the arts as a student. But he eventually discovered that he was more interested in the business behind the movie magic, and he landed a role as a general M&A analyst at Bank of America in 2007.

“I started six months after the program had started, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” he said. “I didn’t know what EBITDA was; I could barely use Excel — the learning curve was incredibly steep. But I’m the type of person that embraces challenges, and I’m pretty driven in those situations.”

Networking and connections led him to join Raine as an associate, and he started out focusing on media and entertainment. He said the sports sector has grown tremendously since he started at Raine, particularly in the past several years.

“We’ve seen just an outpouring of new money, institutional money into the sector,” Neville said. “I think there will be some mistakes made, as in any market that capital flows into, but I think it’s a good thing overall because, for our business, we help connect the dots.”