Professional sports has become a private-asset class. The people who play the games, and the fans who pay for tickets and broadcasts, have mostly been left on the outside of that trade.
Marques Colston is trying to change the entry price. In an interview published Thursday by Canal Street Chronicles, the former New Orleans Saints wide receiver discussed The Champion Fund, the SEC-registered investment vehicle he co-founded to give athletes and everyday investors a way to buy into private sports assets. Fortune, which first detailed the product in June, reported that investors can get in for as little as $500.
“It’s one investment that gets you access to the entire basket that is sports,” Colston told Fortune. “You don’t have to be a company picker. You don’t have to be the expert to go out and find the deal.”
From the Saints to a registered fund
Colston spent 10 seasons with the Saints and was part of the team that won Super Bowl XLIV. He told Canal Street Chronicles he has been out of the game for 11 years and described the fund as “a culmination of the last 15 years of kind of making my way around the sports ecosystem and the sports business world in a bunch of different seats.”
The fund’s website lists Colston as a founder and portfolio manager, a co-owner of three Arena Football League franchises, and a former registered representative who held Series 7 and Series 66 licenses at Janney Montgomery Scott. His co-founder is Nick Edwards, a former mixed martial artist, Fortune reported.
Fortune reported in June that the four major U.S. leagues were worth close to $500 billion combined and that the average NFL team was worth about $7 billion. A J.P. Morgan Asset Management note cited by Fortune found that by August 2025, nearly one in five teams across the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL had some private-equity backing.
Colston’s argument is that fans should have a turn. After he retired in 2015, he told Fortune, he realized that the fans, the players and the coaches “have no ownership in it. So it just continues to get funneled to a select few ultra-high-net-worth owners.”
How the fund is built
The Champion Fund is an interval fund, a type of registered closed-end fund designed to hold assets that do not trade on an exchange. The fund’s website says it is organized under the Investment Company Act of 1940, calculates a net asset value daily, and invests across five categories: sports technology, teams and leagues, media and services, real estate and hospitality, and thematic funds. Its current holdings, as listed on the site, are a position in Sports Illustrated Tickets, a minority stake in English soccer club Ipswich Town, a stake in memorabilia company Fathead, and a limited-partner position in Emerging, a venture fund. The fund says the Ipswich stake was established before the club earned promotion to the Premier League for 2026-27.
The fund does not offer daily withdrawals. Its legal disclosures say it will offer to repurchase 5% of outstanding shares at net asset value each February and August, beginning in August 2027. If more shares are tendered than the offer covers, redemptions can be prorated. Shares sold back within 545 days can face an early repurchase fee of up to 2%. The legal page states that the investment involves a high degree of risk, including the possible loss of capital, and that the fund is newly organized and does not publish target returns.
Because the holdings are private, they have no ticker price. Fortune reported that the prospectus says assets are valued at “fair value” using estimates the fund’s board approves — estimates the filing called “necessarily subjective.” That figure also sets management fees and the price an investor would receive in a repurchase. The fund’s legal disclosures list a 2.90% management fee and say total annual operating expenses are capped at 4.90%, excluding acquired fund fees and expenses, through April 1, 2027. Fortune, citing the prospectus in June, reported total annual expenses of 5.75% and noted that a typical index fund charges well under 0.1%.
What Colston is telling athletes now
In Thursday’s interview, which Canal Street Chronicles said was conducted Tuesday, Colston told young athletes to “start way before you think you need it.” The hardest lesson after football, he said, has been that “not all access is great access.”
For anyone building a portfolio, his rule was narrower: start in industries you already understand. “Investing is hard and it’s the diligence pieces of it, the monitoring of your portfolio, all of those things are difficult,” he said. Sports became the place he returned to because, as he put it, he understands it “from the business side, from running it.”
The ownership gap
A registered fund with a $500 minimum is an attempt to put a retail door on a market that has been reserved for billionaires and, more recently, private-equity firms. Whether it is a good door depends on an investor’s time horizon, tolerance for illiquidity and willingness to pay fees far above an index fund. MBQ Magazine does not provide investment advice.
What the product does make clear is the distinction Colston is trying to teach: watching the game, betting on the game and owning a piece of the business are not the same thing. The first two have always been open. The third has not.
Sources: Canal Street Chronicles, Tina Howell, Nov. 12, 2026; Fortune, Eva Roytburg, June 20, 2026; The Champion Fund website and Legal & Disclosures page, accessed Nov. 12, 2026. MBQ Magazine does not provide investment advice.
