The Sports Tech Boom Is Here — And Athletes Are Perfectly Positioned to Benefit

When I first started playing professionally, the most sophisticated technology on our sideline was the coach's cell phone. Today, the NFL is deploying Azure AI for real-time game analysis, youth sports facilities are being acquired for millions, and a single sports data company just raised $1 billion in a Series E round. I'm not telling you this to make you feel nostalgic — I'm telling you because there has never been a better time for athletes to take their insider knowledge of sport and put it to work as an investor.

Capstone Partners recently released their March 2026 Sports Technology M&A Coverage Report, and it's full of signals that any athlete-turned-investor needs to pay attention to. The sector is valued at roughly $27 billion today and is projected to hit $139 billion by 2032. M&A deal volume held steady through 2025 and is building momentum into 2026. Private equity add-on transactions surged 44% year-over-year. Equity financing deal value hit $8.6 billion in 2025, with early 2026 already outpacing last year's pace.

This isn't speculative. The money is already moving. The question is whether sports tech athletes are moving with it — or watching from the sidelines again.

Why Athletes Have an Edge in Sports Tech Investing

Here's what the investment banks and private equity firms don't have that you do: lived experience.

You've worn the wearable.

You've used (or refused to use) the analytics platform.

You've sat in a locker room where a new performance tool was introduced and immediately knew whether players would actually adopt it or quietly ignore it.

When Catapult Sports — a wearable performance tech company — talks about 'outsized revenue growth supported by investments in sports infrastructure,' I understand exactly what that looks like on the ground. I know which coaches care about load management data and which ones toss the GPS vest in the corner. That kind of ground-level pattern recognition is genuinely rare in investment rooms, and it's something every former athlete carries with them whether they realize it or not.

The Capstone report identifies five categories that investors are most excited about right now: youth sports, sports data and analytics, AI integration, wearables, and fitness. I'd argue that athletes have deep intuition in every single one of those categories — because we've lived inside them.

The Youth Sports Opportunity Is Massive — and Personal

One of the biggest themes in the Capstone report is youth sports. GTCR just acquired LiveBarn, a youth sports streaming platform, for $400 million. AI camera company Pixellot raised $35 million specifically to expand youth and amateur sports streaming. Club management software CourtReserve pulled in $54 million in PE growth financing. These aren't small bets — they're institutional capital making serious long-term plays on the professionalization of youth athletics.

As someone who grew up in youth soccer and built a business around developing young athletes, I find this part of the report particularly compelling. The same forces that are making parents spend more on travel soccer, club volleyball, and private goalkeeper training are creating enormous demand for tech platforms that help manage, stream, analyze, and monetize that participation. And unlike a Silicon Valley investor trying to model a market they've never experienced, former athletes already understand the parent anxieties, the coach dynamics, and the player motivations that drive purchasing decisions at the grassroots level.

The Transition Years Are the Learning Window

When I was transitioning out of professional soccer, I didn't think of myself as someone with investment insight. I thought of myself as someone who needed to figure out what came next. That's a pretty common headspace for retiring athletes — and it often causes us to undervalue what we actually know.

The transition years — that uncomfortable window between competitive sport and whatever comes next — are actually one of the richest learning opportunities available to a former athlete. It's the time to get an MBA or take investment courses (I did the former). It's the time to start connecting your sport-specific knowledge to business frameworks. It's the time to build a network in the sports business world before you need it.

The Capstone report notes that private equity firms and family offices are increasingly building investment theses specifically around sports — complementing the venture capital that has long dominated sports tech funding. That is a door opening for athletes with the right knowledge base and network to walk through. But it doesn't open automatically. You have to build toward it.

What the M&A Data Actually Tells Us

A few data points from the Capstone report that I think deserve more attention than they'll get in the mainstream sports business press:

Sports tech M&A multiples are elevated and rising. The average EV/EBITDA multiple from 2023 to early 2026 is 11.2x — up from 10.5x in the prior period. Capstone's Sports Technology Index is also outperforming the S&P 500 Consumer Discretionary benchmark on an EV/EBITDA basis. This is a sector where acquirers are paying premium prices because they believe in long-term growth.

KKR just paid $1.4 billion to acquire Arctos Partners — the only institutional firm approved for multi-team ownership across all five major U.S. leagues. That deal alone signals how seriously global institutional capital is chasing sports sector access.

When KKR enters a market, the market has already matured past the early-adopter phase.

PE add-on transactions — where a private equity firm acquires a company to bolt onto an existing portfolio business — surged 44% year-over-year in 2025. This is important because it shows sponsors are actively trying to build out the capabilities of their existing sports tech platforms. That creates real opportunities not just for investors, but for founders and operators building in the space.

How to Start Positioning Yourself Now

I'm not going to pretend that reading one industry report and immediately writing a $500K check into a sports tech company is the right move. Investing well takes time, relationships, and reps — just like any other skill. But here's what I'd suggest for athletes who are serious about building toward this:

Start reading the landscape regularly. Reports like this Capstone Partners release are publicly available and give you the same data that advisors and PE associates are working from. Build the habit of following sports business news — The Athletic, Sports Business Journal, and Axios Sports are good starting points.

Identify where your specific sport expertise overlaps with the hot categories. If you played in a youth sports ecosystem, lean into that. If your career involved wearables and performance monitoring, that's your lens. Investors value conviction built on real experience.

Build your network before you need it. The sports investing world is still small enough that relationships matter enormously. Attend sports business conferences. Connect with founders building in your areas of interest. The deal flow comes through people, not job boards.

The Window Is Open — But It Won't Stay That Way Forever

The sports technology sector is in a growth phase right now — projected to grow nearly 5x over the next six years. The M&A market is active, valuations are strong, and institutional capital is piling in. That combination creates opportunity, but it also means the window for getting in before the crowd fully arrives is narrowing.

Athletes spend years developing domain expertise in their sport. The best transition I've seen — and experienced personally — is when that expertise gets redirected into business building and investing in the same ecosystem that built you. The Capstone report makes it clear that institutional money has already figured this out. Now it's your turn.

If you're navigating the transition out of professional sports and thinking seriously about sports investing or entrepreneurship, I'd love to connect. Catch me on LinkedIn. Subscribe to the blog for more content on athlete transition, sports business, and building beyond the game.