Being a fan doesn’t have to feel like this

Governance seems like an issue for company founders and board rooms. It seems like a lot of paperwork and legal forms. But actually, it’s deeply entwined with our everyday lives – including the teams we love to cheer for and despair over. 

In sports, it’s often said that the greatest competitive advantage you can have is a good owner, and the greatest disadvantage is a bad owner. Governance is the difference between the two. It’s why so many sports fans tear their hair out when the bad ownership of their team makes yet another boneheaded trade. It’s why whole sports leagues are run for the benefit of the team owners, as if they alone are the stakeholders that matter in the game despite the fact that not a single one of them invented the game they’ve bought into. As Derek Thompson recently put it, wealthy owners who make deals like the recent $12.5 billion LA Lakers sale are essentially “flipping a sports team.” He goes on:

On another podcast about the Lakers sale, Pablo Torre explains why he thinks the current level of sports investing has all the hallmarks of a bubble. Once again, he pinpoints the problem with focusing on owner benefit versus fan satisfaction: “There are ways to break the public trust. I think there is a disregard for the customer that can jeopardize the customer’s affection for you.”

(If baseball is more your sport, “Will Private Equity Ruin the Yankees?” notes the same trend. “Owners not only get access to more money, they get to learn how to cut costs from the most ruthless to ever do it. Who better to learn from about maximum wealth extraction than the PE industry? In the case of the Yankees, the Steinbrenner family can maintain its principal ownership ‘while also taking advantage of insights…There’s a massive knowledge transfer here.’ The danger is that while these insights might be great for owners, they could be terrible for fans and employees.”)

There are alternatives

In the 1990s, unable to compete with teams and leagues being funded by “broadcasters, then private investors, and finally oligarchs, corporations and nation states,” and watching everything from game attendance to player performance drop off while bad behavior in the stands rose, the Svenskelitfotboll (SEF), which is in charge of Sweden’s professional soccer leagues, “harnessed the country’s most obvious strength, the fans. In the face of considerable skepticism, the authorities “touched hands” with the supporters…and set about designing a league they wanted to watch, and watch live.” A law that required 51% of all sports team ownership be designated for fans was passed in 1999. Then the SEF created a web of trust between fans, players, and police. Negotiating “limits on behavior…they persuaded the police to adopt a more conciliatory approach rather than ‘treating all fans as potential hooligans.’” 

The new focus and collaboration has brought not only success to Sweden’s soccer teams, but a huge increase in attendance and tripled revenues over the last ten years. Once an outlier for its issues, now, “almost alone among Europe’s mid-tier league, Swedish soccer is a picture of health.” By investing in their greatest resource – people who love soccer – they’ve reaped profit of all kinds, and used that wealth to express their values in many ways: “Everything Swedish soccer has become has been constructed by, and for, the people who go to watch it in stadiums…the absence of corporations, sovereign wealth funds and ‘multiclub projects’ from the ranks of club owners; sustained investment in women’s teams; an unofficial ban on holding training camps in authoritarian states; a rule stating that the league has to give at least two months’ notice before moving games for television.” This simple insight – that centering the fans is the way to make soccer more valuable – was and is the key to sustainable success. When the focus is on doing what’s right rather than on how to make money, financial gains inevitably follow.

A few more examples, old and new

Germany's Bundesliga soccer league runs under the “50+1” rule, which requires that members hold the majority of voting rights in each club, preventing a takeover by outside investors no matter how much capital they inject. In 2024, massive fan protests forced the German league to abandon a proposed €1 billion sale of an 8% stake in its media-rights business to a private-equity firm. After they wielded this power, the season produced record league-wide revenue of €5.87 billion and a record Bundesliga profit of ~€115 million, with all 18 clubs posting positive equity. As the authors of a paper looking at its effects note, “Bundesliga offers an important strategic lesson: preserving community identity can also be good business.”

Closer to home, we have the Green Bay Packers and their astonishing 99.4% season ticket holder renewal rate. The team operates under a fan/community-ownership model with no controlling shareholder. Instead, more than 530,000 shares are owned by more than 5 million people. Because they don’t throw off dividends and can’t be resold, the shares function instead as a web of loyalty that has resulted in a season-ticket waitlist of more than 130,000 people (again – 99.4%!) and an unbroken sellout streak dating back to 1959. The team was valued at $6.65 billion in 2025, up from $6.3 billion the year before, and reported $654 million in revenue (a 7% jump), and $83.7 million in operating profit (up 39%) despite being the NFL's smallest media market. 

It’s possible to build this way from the ground up right now, resetting expectations and governance norms on the way to incredible success. That’s exactly what Jesse Cole and his wife Emily did when they transformed a college summer baseball team into the Savannah Bananas. Known as “baseball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters” the team has exploded in popularity (including induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2023). Their company, Fans First Entertainment, now has six teams and its own league. I’ll let you enjoy hearing from Jesse and seeing some clips of this incredible entertainment below. But I’ll leave you with Cole’s ethos for success: “We’re not trying to create short-term profits. We want to create long-term fans. I’m not focused on the next quarter, I’m focused on the next quarter-century.”

That’s the power truly good governance can have in every aspect of our lives.

What it feels like to experience the Savannah Bananas

For more of their story, Masters of Scale's Jeff Berman interviewed Jesse Cole right before a game at Anaheim Stadium.

On a personal note, I’m heading to London for the UK leg of my book tour this week for events with companies, founders, and leaders. Stay tuned for a future newsletter with highlights from these conversations.