Press Coverage June 15, 2026

No Longer Sidelined, Private Equity Firms Bet Big On Sports

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Mark T. Wilhelm

Mark T. Wilhelm, a partner in Troutman Pepper Locke’s Corporate Practice Group, was quoted in the June 15, 2026, Law360 article, “No Longer Sidelined, Private Equity Firms Bet Big On Sports.”

  • Troutman Pepper Locke LLP M&A partner Mark Wilhelm said it’s too soon to tell how the rest of the market will react and whether other schools will follow suit.
  • “Either Utah is a trailblazer and a lot of schools feel they are going to have to do something like this to keep up, and we are going to see a massive wave of these deals in the next 24 months or, in the alternative, schools will say, ‘What Utah did was new and innovative, but we prefer a different model,'” Wilhelm said.
  • Wilhelm said schools may feel they are better off acting together with other members of their conferences. They may also shy away from a similar deal if their state governments frown on these types of agreements.
  • Adding to the challenge is the fact that athletic departments are set up as nonprofits, and the vast majority of them lose money. Private investment requires a return, and Wilhelm noted that an investor can’t pump money into Ohio State University and then merge it with the University of Michigan football team to create a bigger conglomerate.
  • “What the challenge is for institutional investors is finding the asset that is going to appreciate in value over time,” Wilhelm said. “Right now, there is a struggle to see what those assets are.”
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