Marques Colston, former NFL Wide receiver Talks the Champion Fund

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Tom Keene** (0:07)
I'll cut to the chase. What if he played for the Giants? The Giants is 11 times bigger than the New Orleans market.
He is the most unsung giant of wide receiver football in the history of the league. There's no one close. I think at Cliff Branch at Oakland, who I knew at Boulder years ago, everybody, you know, blah, blah, blah. Marques Colston joins us now from his New Orleans, the Saints, with all of his accolade over the years, and he's kept it going out of Hofstra, Paul, with his philanthropy as well.

**Paul Sweeney** (0:42)
Marques Colston joins us here. He's the founder of the Champion Fund. Before we get to your fund, Marques, seventh round out of Hofstra?

**Marques Colston** (0:50)
Yep.

**Paul Sweeney** (0:51)
Dude, how did you make 10 years in the NFL and then become like the top receiver for the Saints? How did that happen? Talk about a long shot.

**Marques Colston** (0:58)
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where I think the way that I came in, I was never able to get comfortable, never felt like I had job security. And once you get into kind of that mindset, you just keep striving for the next thing. So 10 years later, I was able to leave pretty accomplished. Awesome story, man.

**Paul Sweeney** (1:15)
Talk to us about the Champion Fund. What is it and what are you trying to accomplish here?

**Marques Colston** (1:19)
Sure. So the Champion Fund is an interval fund. So it's an SEC registered fund. And the mission and vision here is to make the sports asset class accessible to every investor.
You know, over the last decade or so, we've seen more and more news and more and more conversation around the sports asset class and how it's growing. But it's typically been institutional investors only. And what we know, me personally, being the product on the field as a player, transitioning into the investment world, having some ownership and operational experience for about seven years. So I've been able to see this asset class from a bunch of different lenses. And the one thing that you realize is the biggest value catalyst for the asset class itself, the athletes, the fans, the coaches, administrators, they create all the value, but get none of the equity in it. So the Champion Fund is really a vehicle that makes that whole asset class accessible to every investor.

**Tom Keene** (2:14)
How's it been a response?

**Marques Colston** (2:16)
It's been a really good response. Right now, we're out trying to secure those anchor investors, those institutional investors to anchor the fund.
But the concept has been really well received. The portfolio companies that we're in right now really love the concept of being able to get to kind of a distribution network of investors that typically they wouldn't have access to. So it's been well received.

**Paul Sweeney** (2:43)
Where do you guys see value today? Because I mean, the numbers have just gotten so huge.
Like the NFL is not even a billionaires club anymore. It's private equity, it's institutional money, and even the NBA, the value of these franchises. Where do you see value in some of these, maybe other areas of sports that are also growing?

**Marques Colston** (3:01)
I mean, that's where we see the biggest value. We call it the value chains. So the fund itself breaks down across five different, what we call sub-asset classes. So there's the sports teams themselves, which our focus will be typically on those emerging leagues. So think Serie A that's slightly underrated from a media value perspective.
We're looking at sports ventures, which is growth stage technology companies, could be fan engagement tech, could be ticketing technology. We're looking at media and services businesses.
We're also looking at real estate hospitality. That could be sports anchored mixed use, that could be stadium development itself. Then we're looking at fund to funds. So established fund managers that have a track record, have their own thesis. So we've taken the asset class, we see value in all these different five buckets. And what we really believe is the true catalyst for all of the growth and evaluation is the media rights. So as media rights kind of displace and find their way downstream, we see the kind of a high tide effect.

**Paul Sweeney** (4:07)
So it's interesting, one of the leagues that truly experienced explosive growth is the WNBA. And that's been just extraordinary over the last two or three years. They renegotiate their media rights pretty darn quickly here.
How do the streaming services fit in here? I mean, is that going to be a source of media rights growth, do you think, for a lot of these maybe smaller leagues?