#195 💰 New Fund Alert: $1B Sports & Media Fund

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A BlackSun is rising over sports investment as the new fund secured $1 billion for its first sports and media private equity fund, with plans to grow the vehicle to $7 billion. We’ve missed these new fund announcements but also know one is never far away.

This week's feature looks at a shift that's been accelerating with gusto: creators becoming broadcast partners. We break down what they're handing over, why, and where it likely ends up.

Creators: Sport's Newest Broadcast Partner

Four years ago, FIFA gave a Brazilian streamer the rights to show 22 matches from the 2022 World Cup for free on YouTube. An experiment that became CazéTV.

Built around streamer Casimiro Miguel by Brazilian sports media company LiveMode, the channel broke YouTube viewing records during that tournament and kept going with FIFA more events and rights from FIFA.

This summer, CazéTV became the only broadcaster in Brazil with the rights to show all 104 matches of the 2026 World Cup. Globo, the country's dominant football broadcaster for decades, carried 55. It is an extreme example of how quickly the relationship between sports rights holders and creators has changed.

For most of the last ten years, that relationship ran one way. Creators made shoulder content: reactions, interviews, challenges and analysis around the sport. When they wanted footage the rights holders controlled, the answer was usually a takedown notice. The compromise was a licensed highlights package, tightly bound and safely away from anything live. That boundary has been moving ever since.

• What They Are Handing Over

Earlier this month, Men in Blazers (MIB) streamed a live football match on its YouTube channel for the first time, carrying Tottenham against Hoffenheim to around 10,000 concurrent viewers. British-American broadcaster and Founder of MIB Roger Bennett had forecast 3,000. The audience is small. The detail underneath it is not.

"Tottenham came to us," Bennett said. "The Premier League teams want to own and speak to this fanbase in new and quite thoughtful ways." It started with matches nobody else was bidding for. The Bundesliga handed 20 live Friday night games each to Gary Neville's The Overlap and Mark Goldbridge's That's Football in the UK, sold alongside Sky, Amazon and the BBC.

Then the broadcast itself. The NBA commissioned an alternate telecast in April with Enjoy Basketball, the brand co-founded by YouTuber Kenny Beecham, running a Pistons game on the NBA App and League Pass.

Then the feed. In March the Bundesliga hired an agency, Creator Sports Network, to go and find creators to stream its matches in Canada. Three were selected, and their first simultaneous broadcasts on YouTube and Twitch covered Leipzig against Dortmund.

Then the contract. The NRL's new seven-year deal with Foxtel, Nine and Sky NZ is worth A$5.3 billion from 2028, and chief executive Andrew Abdo pointed to "the way in which modernisation has occurred in terms of content creators and clubs being able to access footage."

• Why They Are Bothering

Robin Austermann, who runs Bundesliga Americas, put it plainly. "It's imperative we look beyond conventional linear or even OTT platforms as exclusive broadcast partners." The league's Canadian fanbase is up 83% since 2018/19.

For broadcasters the logic is sharper still. DAZN is letting KSI stream matches for Dagenham & Redbridge, the club he co-owns, and has struck a similar arrangement in Portugal. Give away one free match a week on a creator's channel, and anyone who wants a second has to subscribe. Creators are not necessarily replacing a broadcaster. They can be an acquisition channel for one.

• The Money Question

Ampere Analysis looked at European creator rights deals and found "little to no money changing hands."

The Bundesliga made an estimated £8 to £10 million from its UK broadcast deals with Sky, Amazon and the BBC over the same period it gave those 40 matches away for close to nothing. Set that against the Premier League's UK domestic rights, which run to £6.7 billion across four seasons.

The audiences are modest too, and contested. Ampere found The Overlap averaging around 14,000 viewers across its Bundesliga streams, and when YouTube carried the NFL's Brazil game, executives at Fox and ESPN questioned whether Nielsen's count meant anything without accredited methodology.

For most rights holders, then, this still looks like the Spurs friendly. Marginal inventory, modest numbers, no fee worth reporting. But CazéTV shows what can happen when the experiment works.

• From Creator to Broadcaster

The 2022 World Cup was the beginning, not the exception.

CazéTV went on to carry the Women's World Cup, Club World Cup and other FIFA competitions. In May it took LaLiga rights in Brazil through 2032. In July it bought exclusive WTA Tour rights from ESPN. This month it began weekly Premier League and Champions League coverage in Brazil and Portugal.

Four years after being given 22 World Cup matches as a digital experiment, the creator-led channel had built a portfolio of premium sports rights and become the only broadcaster showing every match of the world's biggest sporting event in Brazil. Few creators will make that journey. But rights are only part of what is changing.

• The Creator Gets A Credential

In May 2025, Infantino (in)famously showed up on an iShowSpeed stream from his Los Angeles base, where they did backflips, and Infantino unveiled the official FIFA Club World Cup trophy and handed over a match ball.

This summer, FIFA launched its first global creator program around the World Cup and struck Preferred Platform agreements with TikTok and YouTube. Selected creators covered the tournament with premium Insider Access courtesy the powers at FIFA.

TikTok's 30 Creator Correspondents were given access to training sessions, press conferences, team bus arrivals, warm-ups and matchdays. YouTube assembled a global creator cohort representing more than 350 million subscribers, with access around the tournament and FIFA's archive.

The footage itself became more accessible too. For the first time, FIFA allowed official media partners to livestream the first ten minutes of every match on their YouTube channels, with selected games available in full. Historic matches and other footage from FIFA's digital archive were opened up for creators and fans.

And the audiences followed. More than 1.7 billion unique viewers watched World Cup-related content on YouTube during the tournament, including 550 million watching on television screens. Official YouTube broadcasts of the final peaked above 27 million concurrent viewers. On TikTok, official broadcaster livestreams generated 465 million unique views.

The experiment got a lot bigger, quick. And is clearly going nowhere. Creators aren't replacing broadcasters. Most don't have the capital, infrastructure or audience to do so, and the economics of these deals remain largely unproven.

But the old division where broadcasters got the game and creators talked about it division is disappearing. Now they are an increasingly integral part of the broadcast stack.

Top News From The World Of Sports Tech & Biz

• 🎾 The US Open approved credentials for close to 100 content creators, almost doubling its creator access as the USTA expanded its social media and cultural reach around the tournament.

• 📺 Men in Blazers’ Tottenham-Hoffenheim broadcast tripled its own viewer projection after 10,000 people watched the preseason match on its YouTube channel, with CEO Roger Bennett eyeing more live games.

• ⚙️ SportsTech Japan outlined its mission to bring innovation to sport through technology and create new value for athletes and fans worldwide, while emphasizing high performance, strong individual discretion and a professional sports team-like work culture.

• 🏏 Dream11 completed its pivot from fantasy sports to a global sports engagement platform, dropping all real-money contests after India’s 2025 Online Gaming Act and shifting toward content, live streaming, stats, commentary, community features, experiences and social contests.

• 🏈 DAZN added NCAA college sports to its platform, explaining subscription pricing and features for football and basketball coverage.

• 🏀 Abu Dhabi secured the first Euroleague Basketball SuperCup, a new competition opening the European club basketball season at Etihad Arena on Yas Island on 18 and 19 September.

• 🏐 LOVB Los Angeles announced Intuit Dome as its inaugural home venue and unveiled brand launch, Select-a-Seat and Fan Fest events ahead of its 2026-27 professional women’s volleyball debut season.

• 🏀 FIBA agreed an exclusive immersive live rights deal with L1VE for the FIBA 3×3 World Tour, Women’s Series and World Cup, adding a ticketed social presence platform that let fans experience live events through immersive headsets.

• 🏈 The Big 12 banned professionals from returning in all sports after the conference unanimously approved the rule change.

• ⛳ LIV Golf informed many employees that their roles would end in early September as it scaled back operations following the end of PIF funding and worked toward a reimagined LIV 2.0 with a new lead investor.

• ⚽ UEFA prepared a potential Swiss criminal complaint against FIFA president Gianni Infantino and possibly other FIFA officials over alleged criminal mismanagement linked to the proposed World Cup sell-off plan.

• 📺 Main Street Sports sued Comcast and Charter over underpaid licensing fees as the company continued winding down its regional sports networks portfolio.

• 💸 BlackSun secured $1 billion for its first sports and media private equity fund, with plans to grow the vehicle to $7 billion.

• 💸 Reach Capital closed $265 million Fund V to back early-stage founders applying AI to major challenges across learning, health, and work.

• 💰 Unrivaled surpassed its $100 million Series C fundraising target in a round led by Ten Pillars Sports Fund, backed by UC Investments, at a new league valuation of $650 million.

• 💰 Swish Basket raised $3.2 million in pre-seed funding led by Aristagora VC to scale its AI-powered basketball tracking platform globally.

• 💰 Paralo raised $360k (£270,000) in pre-seed funding to develop a new operating system for golf clubs and streamline the sport’s fragmented technology stack.

• 💰 Ginastee raised $120k in pre-seed funding led by Koinz Capital to grow its social wellness platform for fitness creators and influencers.

• 🤝 DAZN agreed to acquire EverPass Media for an undisclosed amount, combining DAZN’s global sports reach with EverPass’ U.S. commercial distribution platform and technology.

• 🤝 SI acquired Magnifi for an undisclosed amount, adding AI-powered video capabilities to its FanOS platform while accelerating its product roadmap and global sports market expansion.

• 💸 Robert Wood Johnson acquired a strategic minority stake in Aston Martin Aramco for an undisclosed amount and was set to join the company’s Board of Directors as Vice Chairman.

• 💸 Arctos Partners agreed to buy a minority stake in the Atlanta Falcons at a reported $10.6 billion valuation.

• 💸 Tim Finchem and his wife donated $13 million to help launch a new PGA Tour charity strategy ten years after he retired as commissioner.

• 🤝 American businessman Marc Stad purchased a controlling interest in the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx for an undisclosed amount.

• 🤝 Former Bayern Munich players Thomas Mueller, Mats Hummels and two other former Bayern players completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Portuguese club Estrela da Amadora for an undisclosed amount as part of an investment group.

• 🤝 NFL owners approved the sale of the Seattle Seahawks from the Estate of Paul G. Allen to the Khosla family in a unanimous vote in Atlanta, moving the transaction closer to completion.

• 💸 DraftKings closed a $700 million term loan and $750 million credit facility.