Lacrosse Just Got Its Biggest Wall Street Moment Yet

Inside the $100 Million Bet That Ares, Joe Tsai, ESPN and Hollywood Are Making on the PLL’s Olympic Future

recall

• The Largest Check in Pro Lacrosse History
• Who’s Actually Writing the Checks
• Hollywood Buys In
• Where the Money Is Actually Going
• The Women’s Lacrosse League Gets a Bigger Seat at the Table
• Why Texas, and Why Now
• The Long Game: From Startup League to Olympic Runway
• Why Institutional Money Suddenly Loves Emerging Leagues
• What Happens Next

Professional lacrosse has never seen a capital raise like this one. The Premier Lacrosse League confirmed the closing of a $100 million Series E financing round on June 30, a deal the league is calling the largest single capital raise in the sport’s history. The round was led by funds managed by Ares Management, through its Sports, Media and Entertainment group, alongside Joe Tsai, the businessman who owns the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty and who has backed the PLL since its earliest days as a league.

The financing arrives at a moment the PLL itself has framed as pivotal. Co-founder and CEO Mike Rabil pointed directly to the sport’s return to the Olympic program at the 2028 Los Angeles Games as the backdrop for the raise, describing an opening to introduce lacrosse to a far larger audience than the league has ever reached. That framing matters for how the money is being deployed: this isn’t emergency capital for a league in trouble, it’s growth capital for a league betting its next four years will be its biggest yet.

It’s also, notably, a round with participation from ESPN — not just as the PLL’s longtime broadcast partner, but now as an equity holder. ESPN made a minority equity investment as part of the transaction, a structure that ties the network’s commercial interests directly to the league’s growth for the first time, on top of the existing rights agreement that already puts PLL and WLL games on ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN+.

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— Premier Lacrosse League (@PremierLacrosse) July 1, 2026

The scale of the round also sets it apart from typical sports-league fundraising. A $100 million single close is a figure more commonly associated with established professional franchises than with a league that only launched in 2019, and the PLL’s ability to command that kind of check from an institutional heavyweight like Ares — a firm managing hundreds of billions of dollars across its broader alternative-asset platform — suggests investors are increasingly treating emerging sports leagues less like niche passion projects and more like scalable media companies with defensible long-term upside.

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The lead names on the round carry serious sports-business weight. Ares Management has become one of the most active institutional investors in professional sports over the past several years, and Jim Miller, Co-Head of Ares Sports, Media and Entertainment, will take a seat on the PLL’s Board of Directors as part of the deal. Miller framed the investment as a bet on the league’s underlying fundamentals — media rights, live events and fan engagement — rather than a speculative swing on lacrosse’s Olympic moment alone.

Tsai’s involvement is less a new bet than a doubling down. He first backed the PLL in 2019, and his continued presence as an investor gives the round a credibility signal that extends well beyond lacrosse circles, given his ownership stakes across the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty. Other institutional names in the round include Carolyn Tisch Blodgett’s Next 3 and David Blitzer’s Bolt Ventures, alongside a longer list of smaller strategic investors.

The Raine Group served as financial advisor to the PLL on the transaction — notable given Raine is also listed among the league’s existing investor base, alongside Joe Tsai Sports, The Chernin Group, Arctos Sports Partners, Brett Jefferson Holdings, Creative Artists Agency and The Kraft Group.

Miller described the fundamentals driving the investment in fairly plain terms: tremendous momentum, world-class athletes and a deeply engaged fanbase, paired with what he called exciting opportunities across media rights, live events and broader fan engagement. That’s language institutional sports investors have increasingly applied across a range of growth-stage leagues over the past several years, but it’s a notable vote of confidence when it’s backed by a board seat and a nine-figure check rather than just a press-release quote.

A determined lacrosse player winds up for a pass as defensive pressure closes in during an intense outdoor match.

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The round’s most attention-grabbing names, though, aren’t financiers. Glen Powell and Rob Mac — the actor formerly known as Rob McElhenney, who filed last year to legally change his surname — both joined as investors, and their involvement goes beyond a passive stake.

Powell, who played on a club lacrosse team in high school, will join the PLL as a Creative Advisor, working alongside founders Paul and Mike Rabil on storytelling, brand strategy and creative development. He’s framed his role explicitly around Texas, his home state, where he’ll help the league plant its first PLL and WLL franchises.

Mac brings a different kind of credibility: as co-chairman of Welsh football club Wrexham A.F.C. alongside Ryan Reynolds, he’s already lived through — and helped narrate, via the FX docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham” — what it looks like to turn a scrappy sports property into a global media story through ownership, storytelling and sheer persistence. That’s precisely the model the PLL appears to be borrowing.

Rounding out the entertainment contingent are country artist Warren Zeiders and actor Tony Cavalero, both joining as investors alongside Powell and Mac. Paul Rabil, the PLL’s co-founder, president and chief creative officer, described the entertainment-industry participation as a direct lever for the league’s brand and storytelling efforts going forward, not simply a marketing gesture.

The pairing of Powell and Mac in particular gives the round a built-in cross-promotional logic. Powell has spent the past several years becoming one of Hollywood’s most bankable leading men, while Mac has spent the same stretch proving, through Wrexham, that a struggling sports property can be rebuilt into a global fan phenomenon through consistent, honest, behind-the-scenes storytelling rather than traditional advertising. Having both in the PLL’s ownership group at once gives the league two very different playbooks for turning a growing but still-niche American sport into something with mainstream cultural pull.

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The PLL has laid out four specific priorities for the new capital: expanding media distribution and original storytelling, growing sponsorship and commercial partnerships, deepening investment in the Women’s Lacrosse League, and broadening access to youth lacrosse to make the sport more affordable and available.

That youth and grassroots piece connects to work the league has already been doing — including its “Unleashed” platform, which the PLL launched in 2020 to expand training access for girls and women in the sport, and international exhibitions the league has run in markets like Japan in recent years.

Speaking to Sportico about the round, Paul Rabil suggested this could be the league’s last major capital raise for the foreseeable future, saying the priority now is stabilizing the business with this money rather than continuing to seek new rounds absent a clear, specific growth opportunity — the kind that would more likely come through M&A than another equity raise.

women

Part of what makes this round distinct from the PLL’s earlier raises is how directly it’s tied to the Women’s Lacrosse League, the PLL’s sixes-format women’s property that debuted in 2025. The WLL plays a condensed, six-on-six version of the sport with shortened shot clocks and no specialized attacker or defender designations — the format that will also be used when lacrosse returns to Olympic competition at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

The WLL currently fields four clubs — the Boston Guard, New York Charging, Maryland Charm and California Palms — and is broadcast domestically on ESPN, with select games airing on ESPN2 and the full slate streaming on ESPN+. Maybelline holds naming rights to both the league and its championship series, while Lexus and Whirlpool serve as primary sponsors.

By making the WLL a named, explicit priority for this round’s proceeds, the PLL is signaling that the women’s league isn’t a side project riding on the men’s league’s infrastructure — it’s a growth engine in its own right, and one the league expects its Texas expansion to eventually include, alongside the PLL’s own new franchise there.

 

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The WLL’s launch was itself the product of a crowded and previously unstable market for women’s professional lacrosse. Two earlier attempts at building a women’s pro league — the United Women’s Lacrosse League, which folded after three seasons, and the Women’s Professional Lacrosse League, whose 2020 season was scrapped by the COVID-19 pandemic — both preceded the WLL’s 2025 debut. A third competitor, Athletes Unlimited’s lacrosse property, suspended its own activities around the same period the WLL announced its inaugural four teams, leaving the PLL-backed league as the only remaining traditional-format option for elite women players in the U.S. That consolidation gives this round’s WLL-specific funding priority added weight: it isn’t just growth capital, it’s an attempt to make sure the league that survived stays durable.

stance

Texas is where the round’s Hollywood contingent and the PLL’s expansion ambitions most directly intersect. Powell’s stated priority as Creative Advisor is helping bring the first PLL and WLL teams to his home state, and the league has been explicit that Texas represents new geographic ground for a property that has, since transitioning from a touring model to a home-market structure ahead of the 2024 season, concentrated its franchises in markets like Maryland, California and the Northeast.

The timing lines up with the sport’s broader Olympic runway. Lacrosse’s return to the Games at LA28 gives the PLL and WLL roughly a two-year window to expand their footprint, media reach and commercial partnerships before a global audience gets its first exposure to the sport in generations. A new market as large as Texas — with no existing PLL or WLL presence and a built-in youth and college lacrosse pipeline — fits squarely into that timeline.

transition

The PLL’s origin story is itself part of why this round is being read as a milestone. Paul Rabil spent eleven years as one of the top players in Major League Lacrosse before co-founding the PLL with his brother Mike in 2018, explicitly to push for better wages and more professional infrastructure than MLL offered its athletes. The league launched with six teams in 2019 and has since raised more than $200 million across its funding history, according to Sportico’s reporting, with this Series E representing roughly half of that cumulative total in a single round.

The shift from a touring league to permanent home markets in 2024 was itself a bet on long-term fan development over short-term flexibility, and this round reads as a continuation of that same logic — trading a leaner, scrappier growth model for institutional capital and mainstream entertainment-industry backing at the exact moment the sport’s global visibility is about to expand.

Along the way, the league has picked up a string of industry recognitions that its current investors are effectively betting will keep compounding: the Sports Business Journal named the PLL its 2020 Sports Breakthrough of the Year and later recognized it as a 2023 Best Place to Work in Sports, while Front Office Sports listed the league among its 2021 Best Employers in Sports. Those are workplace and business-press honors rather than attendance or ratings figures, but they speak to the same underlying story investors are buying into now — a league built with enough institutional discipline to survive a launch during a global pandemic and grow into a nine-figure financing round six years later.

extent

The PLL’s raise doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It lands amid a broader wave of institutional capital moving into growth-stage sports properties, driven by a simple thesis: live sports remain one of the few categories of content that hold up against the fragmentation of streaming and social media, making them unusually resilient bets for investors used to chasing scale in more crowded media categories. That logic has been driving up valuations across leagues, teams and related businesses well beyond lacrosse, particularly as U.S. sports calendars stack up toward a run of global spectacles — the ongoing FIFA World Cup, the Super Bowl in 2027, and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 — each of which offers a moment of outsized international exposure for any property that can position itself in front of it in time.

For a firm like Ares, the PLL investment fits a pattern of treating sports leagues less as one-off trophy assets and more as an emerging asset class in their own right — one where early institutional positioning ahead of a marquee global moment, in this case lacrosse’s Olympic return, can compound in value as media rights, sponsorship and ticketing revenue scale together. Tsai’s own framing of the deal leaned on similar logic: he described the PLL as one of the most exciting growth-stage scaling stories he’s seen, citing the league’s trajectory across media reach, sponsorship credibility and fan engagement as evidence the underlying business, not just the sport, was worth backing again.

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For now, the practical changes are narrower than the round’s headline figure might suggest: Jim Miller joins the board, Glen Powell takes on his creative advisor role, and the league’s four stated funding priorities — media, sponsorship, the WLL and youth access — become the framework against which the next several years of PLL and WLL growth will be measured. Texas franchises for both leagues are the most concrete near-term marker to watch, alongside however the league chooses to build out its LA28 storytelling push over the next two years.

Both the 2026 PLL and WLL seasons are currently airing across ESPN platforms and ABC, giving fans an immediate way to watch the product this capital is meant to grow — well before any Texas expansion or Olympic exposure materializes.