Company Overview
On June 30, the Premier Lacrosse League closed a $100 million Series E, the largest capital raise in the history of professional lacrosse. Ares Management funds and billionaire Joe Tsai led it.
Plain English on what the PLL is. It’s a professional men’s lacrosse league, eight teams, the best players in the world. Founded in 2018 by brothers Paul and Mike Rabil off a roughly $3 million seed round. Paul was an All-American at Johns Hopkins and one of the most decorated players the sport has produced. Mike is a former Dartmouth football player and the operator of the two. Mike is CEO, Paul is president and chief creative officer.
Keep this in mind about the founders: before the PLL, professional lacrosse in America was Major League Lacrosse, a struggling, conventionally structured league. The Rabils didn’t join it. They built a competitor, then acquired it, merging with MLL in 2020. They don’t take the field as it is.
The round brings total funding to more than $218 million per PitchBook. The cap table now includes Ares, Joe Tsai Sports, ESPN, Arctos, The Chernin Group, The Raine Group, CAA, and Blue Pool Capital. Ares’ Jim Miller, co-head of its Sports, Media and Entertainment group, joins a board that already includes Tsai, Arctos’ David O’Connor, Raine’s Colin Neville, Chernin’s Mike Kerns, and CAA’s Mike Levine.
The celebrity layer got the headlines: ESPN made a subsequent minority equity investment, and the round drew Glen Powell, Rob Mac (formerly McElhenney), country singer Warren Zeiders, and actor Tony Cavalero. Powell joins as a creative advisor to help launch the first PLL and WLL teams in Texas.
A person familiar with the deal told Bloomberg it values the league at more than $500 million. The Rabils declined to confirm any valuation, saying only that it’s up since the 2022 Series D. Treat the $500 million as reported and unconfirmed.
