The PLL Raised $100M by Refusing to Copy the NFL
How building a league from first principles turned lacrosse into an asset class investors want to own.
Most people start a sports league by copying the one above them. The Rabil brothers did the opposite, and just raised $100 million for it.
On June 30, the Premier Lacrosse League closed a $100M Series E led by Ares, a $644 billion asset manager, and Joe Tsai, the Brooklyn Nets owner who’s backed the league since 2019. The PLL and Forbes both call it the largest capital raise in the history of professional lacrosse. ESPN added a minority stake, and the cap table now includes Glen Powell, Rob McElhenney, and David Blitzer’s family office. The league has pulled in more than $200 million since a roughly $3 million seed in 2018. The post-round valuation wasn’t disclosed.
Here’s the part that actually matters. The PLL doesn’t run independent franchises. It’s a single wholly-owned entity that owns all eight teams. Players sign with the league, not a club. Games tour the country instead of anchoring to home cities. When the Rabils started in 2018, the incumbent pro league, Major League Lacrosse, ran the traditional franchise model, and it fought for two decades before the PLL absorbed it in 2020.
The mental model: First Principles.
Most founders reason by analogy. The NFL has franchises, so we’ll have franchises. First-principles reasoning throws out the template and asks what’s actually true on the ground. For a young sport with a thin talent pool and no established local markets, independent franchises spread the product too thin and give away control before there’s anything worth controlling. So the Rabils built the inverse: one entity, full command of schedule, media, and talent, and a tour model that puts the best players on the same field every single week. They didn’t inherit the answer. They rederived it.
It’s the same instinct behind building in regulated markets. At /mkt, the athlete-ownership structure isn’t lifted from someone else’s playbook. It’s built up from what the rules actually permit and what aligns athletes with the value they help create. When the ground is new, first principles beats “how it’s always been done” almost every time.
Now here’s the twist. With the model working, the PLL is openly weighing whether to sell individual teams, the exact franchise structure it rejected, using SailGP as the template. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the whole lesson.
First principles isn’t a religion. You build from the ground up when the map doesn’t exist, and you adopt the conventions once they start adding leverage instead of stealing it. The mistake was never the franchise model. The mistake would’ve been running it on day one because everyone else did. Get the structure right for where you actually are, not where the incumbents ended up.
That’s the quiet reason smart capital showed up. Not because lacrosse is having a moment, but because the people running it think from scratch.
Disclaimer: This post is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment, financial, legal, or tax advice, and it’s not a recommendation or solicitation to buy, sell, or trade any security, contract, or instrument, or to participate in any prediction market. Valuations, volumes, and funding figures reflect public reporting and third-party estimates that vary by source and change over time; past performance and private valuations are not indicative of future results. Regulatory status referenced here is described generally and is subject to ongoing litigation and change. /mkt is referenced only to illustrate how regulated-market infrastructure is built, and nothing here is an offer or solicitation with respect to any security.
If you want the mental models behind breakdowns like this, my book, Mental Models: How to Think, Act, and Win, is on Amazon now.
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