When Mark Walter, founder of investment firm Guggenheim Partners, bought the bankrupt Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012, many thought he'd overpaid. The $2.1 billion was almost double what anyone had ever spent for a sports team, and he had to outbid billionaire hedge funder Steve Cohen to get it.
Few would quibble with the price now. That amount has since been eclipsed nine times in deals for sports franchises, including the $2.4 billion Cohen paid for the New York Mets in 2020, while the Dodgers have gone on to become Major League Baseball's most perennially competitive team.
The Dodgers purchase was "a forerunner in financial engineering and institutional money being put into sports team ownership," said Marc Ganis, co-founder of consulting firm Sportscorp.
Of the deals since completed at a higher price than the Dodgers, six were led by individuals with a background in finance as sports teams have become one of the hottest investments around.
The resulting surge in values — the Dodgers are now worth $6.3 billion, according to a valuation by Sportico — helped power Walter to a personal fortune of $12.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 64-year-old's sports portfolio includes stakes in the Premier League's Chelsea football club, the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Sparks basketball teams, auto racing groups and the Women's Professional Hockey League, which together total more than $3.7 billion, according to the index.
A representative for Walter confirmed his wealth was at least $12 billion.
Biggest Asset
His biggest asset remains Guggenheim Partners, the $335 billion investment adviser that was a pioneer in raising permanent capital through insurance relationships. Walter founded the firm in 1999 along with partners including Peter Lawson-Johnston II, a descendent of mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim.
Walter, who is Guggenheim's chief executive officer, also controls nine insurers with total adjusted capital of more than $4.7 billion at the end of 2023. His economic stake in them is worth roughly $900 million, according to Bloomberg's wealth index.
His financial resources have put the major-market New York Yankees — who face off against the Dodgers in baseball's World Series starting Friday — in the unfamiliar position of underdogs.
This marks the fourth time the Dodgers are in the Series since Walter bought the team, while it's the first appearance by the Yankees in that span.
To be sure, these Yankees are no longer the same dominant team that went to the playoffs 13 straight years in the 1990s and 2000s and won five championships. With their willingness to pay for talent in a way that's straight out of the Yankees' playbook, the Dodgers have supplanted them as the league's most well-resourced club, with the Mets also making a case for that title.
