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Unrivaled Sports Partners with Real Salt Lake as Part of MLS Club's Acquisition

🥎 The business of youth sports

Author

Kyle Scott
April 22, 2025

This is Buying Sandlot — the only newsletter that focuses solely on the business of youth sports.

A special welcome to the hundreds of new subscribers - including some BIG DAWGS in the space - who have come to us by way of LinkedIn.

In the email today:

⚽️ Unrivaled Enters Utah as Part of Real Salt Lake Sale

Ryan Smith continues to make moves.

The Utah Hockey Club owner, who also owns the NBA's Utah Jazz, has sold his stake in MLS' Real Salt Lake to Miller Sports and Entertainment (MSE)— the former owners of the Jazz.

They will take over the soccer club along with the NWSL's Utah Royals FC, the Real Monarchs of MLS NEXT Pro, the RSL Academy and real estate holdings.

Smith had the right to acquire a controlling stake in the club, according to a report, but opted to focus his efforts on the city’s hockey and basketball teams.

Unrivaled Sports boss David Blitzer, who co-owned RSL with Smith, will remain a minority shareholder— and Unrivaled will play a part.

On Instagram, Unrivaled wrote:

“We’re excited to partner with Miller Sports & Entertainment, Real Salt Lake, the Utah Royals, and the Salt Lake Bees to create inclusive, elevated, and inspiring youth sport experiences for hundreds of thousands of young athletes in Utah!”

Nestled in the press release is the youth sports nut:

MSE will also partner with Unrivaled Sports, a David Blitzer-backed network of premier youth sports venues and programming, led by CEO and Chairman Andrew Campion, an RSL Club investor, that enables athletes to develop the building blocks for success. Utah currently has over 190,000 kids participating in youth soccer, baseball and basketball. RSL’s Junior Recreation Program extends to nearly 100,000 active youth players in partnership with Utah Youth Soccer Association.

“Our family’s investment in and commitment to youth sports cannot be overstated,” said Steve Miller. “We remain grateful to promote health and wellness and the value of participating in sports for the rising generation.”

Utah is currently the fastest-growing state in the nation and is ramping up to host the 2034(!) Winter Games in Salt Lake City— which will invariably bring increased youth participation in all sports.

And Unrivaled clearly wants to play ball there.

But so does Smith.

Just two weeks ago, he announced that his Smith Entertainment Group will donate up to $10M toward as many as 20 new hockey rinks in Utah while making the NHL team’s soon-to-open practice facility accessible to the public.

My take:

Seeing a bit of a trend with vertical integration of pro leagues and teams down the chain to the youth level.

As we discussed previously (and will again in a section in this email), the NBA is highly interested in mimicking the tightly-integrated European model of youth development.

Historically, soccer has done this the best of any sport, and the MLS and RSL serve as great examples of a more mature academy-to-pro pipeline.

We’re even seeing the NFL with flag football and, I suspect, MLB begin to explore more sustained efforts toward youth development.

And yes, these opportunities are beginning to take up more space in press releases. Follow the money.

đź’¸ New Investment Firm Alert: Cynosure | Checketts Sports Capital

More like Utah get me $1.2 billion

Lots of Utah in this newsletter, so running back this image from our newsletter last week— because I love it.

David Checketts and the Eccles family - which have deep ties to Utah, including a key role in Larry Miller acquiring the Jazz in 1985 and in bringing the previous Olympic Winter Games to the region in 2002 - have announced a $1.2 billion investment fund in sports, focusing on the following areas:

  • Professional and collegiate sports teams

  • Sports leagues and governing bodies

  • Stadiums, arenas and other sports facilities

  • Sports technology and innovation companies

  • Media rights and broadcasting ventures

Prepare your pitch decks accordingly— perhaps with some mountains in the background or something.

If you would like to advertise in Buying Sandlot, a list of available dates is here.

🏀 Luka Doncic Foundation Partners with Jr. NBA and Jr. WNBA for Youth Development

As we were just saying, the NBA is leaning heavily into the Euro model of player development— specifically with a focus on quality coaching at the youth level.

The Luka Doncic Foundation announced a partnership with the Jr. NBA and Jr. WNBA that will begin testing the foundation’s Total Hoops Approach, which includes the following principles:

1) Development with purpose

2) Team-first mentality

3) Trained and incentivized coaches with the Positive Coaching Alliance

4) Development continuity

5) Freedom to play— focus on freestyle playing vs. structured drills

6) Documented developmental guidelines

7) Embracing mistakes— basically, tolerating and encouraging learning through error (I love this and need to remember it the next time my 9-10 rec second baseman doesn’t get the cutoff from right field)

8) Life beyond basketball— character development outside the game

👨‍🦰 Parents Behaving Badly

A city councilman in Cincinnati claims gun violence at youth sporting events in the city is attributed to illegal wagering on the contests.

Scotty Johnson, a former Cincinnati cop, alleged bets as large as $5,000 are being placed on youth games.

His comments came during a joint meeting between City Council and Cincinnati Public Schools to discuss youth sports safety.

The school district, which leases its facilities to many youth leagues in the city, has reported gun violence, theft and vandalism at events.

Cincinnati Police said they are aware of youth sports betting and it may have ignited violence in some cases, but they do not believe the issue is widespread.

Youth sports betting issue is not widespread— seems like a zero tolerance policy is best here?

đź“° Can Youth Sports Save Local Journalism?

We feel confident this will be the first time someone mentions youth sports and Meet The Press in the same newsletter item.

Chuck Todd, who moderated the iconic public affairs program for just shy of a decade, left NBC News earlier this year. He is now working on a startup news venture that is light on details but apparently will be focused on youth and high school sports.

Why? Because he believes there are many opportunities to replace the lost revenues -- see, classified ads and Craigslist -- that have crippled local news organizations over the last two-plus decades. And, he believes, the money made on the sports can help pay for everything else.

"My thesis is I think that youth sports and high school sports are community glue, and I think there is a way to use that community glue to create a revenue stream that can pay for the journalism.

...

Red and blue America all want to see their kids play sports."

Chuck Todd

Our take: Youth and high school sports are undoubtedly big business.

But we are skeptical of this loosely-defined plan for myriad reasons.

Here are 3 of them:

1) You will need a tremendous amount of manpower to sufficiently report on the sports in a community, especially if lower levels are treated the same as high school.

2) Will consumers see enough value in paying for professional content about their children when there will likely be numerous competitors who provide lesser quality content, but for free?

3) The youth and high school sports lifespan is finite and fleeting. Even the most loyal customer may abruptly have no use for the content once their kid stops playing or graduates.

Best of luck to Todd. We are fascinated to see where this goes next.

🤖 WATCH: How AI could shape youth sports

NBC Nightly News — two peacocks, back to back! — examined the possibilities in a recent report.

đź“‹ Job Alert: Youth Sports Marketing Coordinator, Sporting Kansas City

Sporting Kansas City — a MLS club — is seeking a new coordinator for its youth sports program.

From the description:

The Sporting Kansas City Coordinator, Youth Sports Marketing is responsible for building and managing short and long-term marketing strategies for Sporting Kansas City’s Youth Sports department, including soccer programming, leagues, and events.

Would you like to put your open position in front of thousands of youth sports professionals? Pick an available date here.

đź‘Ą Welcome To New Members

We have a problem here: the list of new members since our last send is so long that I need to come up with a better format to welcome everyone. Stay tuned in the next newsletter for a proper introduction.

Would you like to be introduced to the largest growing community of youth sports investors, owners and operators? Take our subscriber survey!

🛜 LinkedIn Introduction

Buying Sandlot has been in soft-launch mode for a bit now, but I suppose you can consider my LinkedIn post yesterday the official launch.

Thanks to all those who commented, connected, and messaged me. I look forward to covering the space and getting to know some of you.

With that being said…

🤳 Follow Buying Sandlot on Social

We’re new— help us build up our social media accounts by following along:

Good game.