Colston, the famous underdog receiver of the New Orleans Saints, and former mixed martial artist Nick Edwards have launched the Champion Fund, an investment fund built so that anyone—not just the Mark Cubans of the world—can buy into sports for as little as $500. The idea is to give regular people a stake in an industry they love—and have paid into their whole lives, but have never owned—with buckets in teams, sports technology, real estate around stadiums, and other private deals, including a stake in the English soccer club Ipswich Town.

The idea began a little after Colston retired in 2015, when he realized that after all the value he’d created for the ecosystem “there is no more value to extract,” he told Fortune exclusively. The fans, the players, the coaches, “have no ownership in it. So it just continues to get funneled to a select few ultra-high-net-worth owners.”

A ballooning industry

Over the last decade or so, the sports industry has gone from sizable to Herculean. The four major leagues are now worth close to $500 billion combined, and the average NFL team is worth about $7 billion. Measured by average team value, the leagues have beaten the S&P 500 since 2014 on the back of a ballooning industry through extended TV deals, sponsorships, stadium revenue, and fans who keep finding new sports to love—down to high-speed sailboat racing, which Edwards cited as an example. Of the 100 most-watched U.S. broadcasts in 2024, 80 were sporting events.

But only a few groups have reaped the profits: Traditionally, it’s been the richest of the rich like billionaires Cuban or Steve Cohen. But over the last five years, private equity firms have eyed minority stakes in professional teams. Initially resistant, the leagues opened up to PE one at a time—MLB in 2019, the NBA and NHL in 2021, and the NFL only in 2024, which caps a single firm at 10% of a team. By August 2025, nearly one in five teams across the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL had some private-equity backing, according to a J.P. Morgan Asset Management note.

Meanwhile, regular fans turned their love into sports betting, which has drawn ire from senators and critics for its addictive qualities and its house-favoring odds. Edwards and Colston were agnostic about betting, but pitched the fund as an alternative.

“Instead of sitting there swiping on DraftKings, or putting $500 on a parlay, you can have some meaningful ownership,” Edwards said. Rather than picking winners, an investor buys one diversified basket. 

“It’s one investment that gets you access to the entire basket that is sports,” Colston said. “You don’t have to be a company picker. You don’t have to be the expert to go out and find the deal.”

How the fund works

The way the fund works is more like a mutual fund than a bet on any one team. An investor puts in $500 and gets a share of the whole portfolio, which Colston and Edwards manage across their “buckets.” It’s structured as an interval fund, a kind of registered fund designed to hold things that don’t trade on an exchange, like private companies.

So how, then, would you know what a share is worth? Because the holdings are private and have no market price, the prospectus says they’re valued at “fair value” using estimates the fund’s board approves—estimates it acknowledges are “necessarily subjective.” That same estimated value sets two things at once: the fee the managers collect, and the price an investor would receive when cashing out. 

“It’s a real-time calculation based on market trends, what’s actually happening with that asset, and hard revenue numbers,” Edwards said. “They’re not fluffy valuations.” 

What you can’t easily do is get back out. Because the fund holds private, illiquid assets, it doesn’t let investors withdraw on demand the way a normal mutual fund does. Instead, the prospectus says the fund will offer to buy back shares just twice a year, and the first of those windows won’t open until August 2027—more than a year after the fund began taking money. Even then, it’s only obligated to repurchase 5% of shares, so if a lot of people want out at once, not everyone gets out. The filing describes the investment as illiquid and suitable only for people who can leave their money untouched for a long time. 

It is also not the cheapest fund. The founders cite a 2.9% management fee, but that’s not the full cost. The prospectus lists total annual expenses of 5.75%, against well under 0.1% for a typical index fund. The filing says outright that it charges more than most comparable funds. And the fee doesn’t go entirely to Colston and Edwards: The manager of record is a fintech firm called Sweater, and the founders’ firm is a subadviser paid out of Sweater’s cut.

Still, the two founders maintain they are building the firm to be friendly to the average sports lover and their Dad.

“We want this to be the largest retail-investor-friendly platform in the country,” Edwards said. “We’re gonna keep driving this sucker for a long time.”