Private Equity Isn't Waiting on College Sports' Revenue. It's Waiting on Congress and Something It Can Own.

At the University of Michigan's sport business conference this week, a panel of investors and executives said private equity will not fully commit to college sports until there are clear rules and a predictable governance structure. The demand for capital is not the problem. Schools have needed money badly since the House v. NCAA settlement was approved in 2025 and they began sharing revenue directly with athletes. Nor is the appeal of the asset. Apollo Sports Capital's chief strategy officer called college sports a very attractive asset class, pointing to long-term revenue from sponsorships, media rights and ticketing.

Three legal facts shape what an investor can actually buy. First, a college athletic department is usually a department of a nonprofit university, often a public one. There are no shares to sell. That is why the money that has come in so far has arrived as loans, like the private-credit fund launched by the consultancy Elevate, whose executive said plainly that his firm takes no equity position, or through a separate company a school creates, like the University of Utah's Crimson Brand Partners, which began with about $200 million from Otro Capital.

Second, the athletes' status is unsettled. If college athletes are treated as employees, the cost structure and the legal exposure of every athletic program change. Third, the federal law that would settle much of this, the Protect College Sports Act, has passed the Senate but has not become law.

The usual explanation is that college sports do not yet produce reliable enough revenue to attract private equity. The reporting points the other way. The investors in the room called the revenue attractive. What they are missing is a rulebook.

The first problem is ownership. Private equity makes money by owning something that grows and then selling it. A public university's athletic department is not something a university can sell a piece of without running into state law, its tax-exempt status and its own mission. So investors are offered substitutes: loans that earn interest but miss the upside, or stakes in a separate commercial company that licenses a school's brand and rights. Utah's lawyers reportedly spent months making sure that structure protected the university and stayed within tax rules. That is a lot of legal work to get a minority stake in a business the school still controls.

The second problem is the labor question. An investor pricing a long-term stake needs to know whether the players are employees, whether they can bargain collectively, and whether the antitrust lawsuits that produced the House settlement will keep coming. Congress is the only body that can answer all three at once, which is why the fate of the Protect College Sports Act matters more to these investors than any single school's balance sheet.

The counterargument is that capital is flowing anyway, through credit deals and company structures like Utah's, and that waiting for Congress could mean waiting forever. That is fair, and some investors will keep doing those deals. But they are not the deals private equity was built for. Until the law tells investors what they can own and what the players are, college sports will keep getting lenders, not owners.

The schools, for now: investors want in, and the schools decide the structure. Congress, ultimately: the rules investors are waiting for can only come from federal legislation. Athletes, quietly: their legal status is the single biggest variable in the price.

The revenue isn't the problem. A public university's athletic department has no shares to sell, and athletes' legal status is unsettled. Until Congress acts, college sports gets lenders, not owners.

Watch whether the House takes up the Protect College Sports Act after the midterms, whether more schools copy Utah's separate-company model, and whether any power conference sells a stake in its media business, the deal investors most want and schools have so far resisted.