News

‘Weird’ Cordillera Dives Into Sports With Pro Triathlon Purchase – Sportico

admin March 18, 2025

                        By  <a class="c-link  lrv-a-unstyle-link" href="https://www.sportico.com/author/brendan-coffey/"             >   Brendan Coffey</a>                      <br>Sports Finance Reporter<br>     San Francisco-based fund Cordillera Investment Partners specializes in what it calls weird investments, owning marinas and developing almond orchards as well as more complex deal-making involving the carbon markets, federal tax credits and corporate litigation finance. Now the $1.6 billion (assets) firm is aiming to direct hundreds of millions of dollars into sports.<br>   &ldquo;We invest in things like whiskey and wireless spectrum licenses&mdash;things that march to the beat of their own drummer,&rdquo; Cordillera co-founder Chris Heller said on a video call. &ldquo;As it relates to sports, it&rsquo;s an area we find very interesting because of the potential non-correlation&rdquo; to other assets. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re not Arctos, Blue Owl, RedBird&mdash;we&rsquo;re focused on the weirder, nichier part of sports.&rdquo;     <div class="admz" id="adm-inline-article-ad-1">                     <div class="adma boomerang" data-device="Desktop" data-width="300">                  <div style="min-width:300px;min-height:275px;"     class="pmc-adm-boomerang-pub-div ad-text"   data-priority="10" >    <div id="gpt-sprt-dsk-tab-midarticle-uid0"      class="adw-300 adh-250" data-is-adhesion-ad="">         <script type="application/javascript">

        blogherads.adq.push(function () {
                            blogherads
                .defineSlot( 'medrec', 'gpt-sprt-dsk-tab-midarticle-uid0' )
                            .setTargeting( 'pos', ["mid-article1","btf","mid","mid-articleX"] )

.setTargeting( ‘viewable’, ‘yes’ )
.setSubAdUnitPath(“ros/mid-article”)
.addSize([[300,250],[620,366]])
.setClsOptimization(“minsize”)
;
});

Over its 11 years of operations, Cordillera has touched sports at times, mainly specialty financing. Now the firm is seeking to shift assets into equity investments in teams, leagues and associated businesses that it believes can meet its investments goals. In the long run, Heller says Cordillera “would like to deploy 20% to 40%” of its assets in and around sports.
Later Tuesday the firm will announce the first investment of its new focus, a $10 million infusion into the Professional Triathletes Organisation, a London-based body that runs triathlons globally. PTO was founded by triathletes and venture capital billionaire Michael Moritz in 2020 to professionalize the sport, creating the T100 Triathlon World Tour as part of a strategy to move run-bike-swim competitions more mainstream. Warner Bros. Discovery and health-tech focused private equity and venture capital funds Divergent Investments and Eckuity have previously invested in PTO as part of what S&P Global Market Intelligence tallies as $30 million of fundraising rounds.
Sports has gathered interest in recent years among institutional investors in part because of the sector’s lack of correlation to other asset classes. That is, when other assets like bonds rise or fall, sports tends to not move in as much synchronization with them as other investments do. That non-correlation is key to Cordillera’s investment strategy. “The idea that we can really find things that have idiosyncratic risks to them,” Heller said. “That doesn’t mean we what invest in don’t have risks; we’re trying to have them be different risks than what other people have in their portfolio.”
It’s the reason the fund counts apple and cherry packers, data center real estate and concert tour financing among its current portfolio. The clients it manages funds for—endowments, foundations and large family offices—care less about the annual return of the fund and more about its promise of safe harbor when the stock market craters, or booms. The client mandate for the firm is: “’Cordillera, you are my diversifier. If the S&P is up or down, I can look to you guys to have nothing to do with that,” Heller said. “We think over a full cycle we’ll compete for sure. We just grind it out in our own way.”

PTO is a prime example of what Cordillera seeks to do in sports. It’s not one of the established leagues, like the NFL or Premier League, where teams fetch premium prices that aren’t going to offer the returns the fund seeks, but it’s also not a startup venture whose business model is predicated on too many what-ifs. PTO is in a sweet spot of having some revenue in place from sponsorships and an established, revenue-generating business, while having a path toward significantly increasing cash flow. One way is gathering hosting fees for T100, a global circuit of nine races with the top 20 men and top 20 women triathletes in the world as competitors. Hosting fees paid by cities have been used to great effect by Formula One and UFC, for example.

PTO can also raise revenue from growing registration fees from participants in open triathlons, like the way a marathon generates its income. Media rights are nice, but not a core part of how the fund is looking at equity sports investments, according to Heller. “Either they’re in place, or we don’t need them.”
The fund would prefer to provide lending against established sports media deals, as it has been doing for about five years, rather than equity investments. Leagues whose pitch centers on media rights they don’t yet have are too speculative.
Heller also says the fund is focusing on new formats and new leagues with established sports—of which PTO is one. Cricket, rugby and sailing are three sports he mentions, and he name-checks soccer’s Baller League and golf’s TGL as examples. Cordillera is also interested in owning teams, mainly in the realm of new formats and new leagues, but also in women’s sports for its broad tailwinds and related businesses heavily focused on sports, from law firms to consultancies to talent representation. The sports side of the fund will expand Cordillera’s operations in specialty finance, with soccer transfer receivables a likely area.
And while Heller takes pains to note Cordillera isn’t a mainstream PE firm buying franchise equity as its central business model, the group is open to mainstream sports investing, mainly discounted minority stakes in franchises in the four major North American leagues and the trendy idea of buying a low division European soccer team and managing it up the promotion ladder. Just because others are doing it doesn’t mean there isn’t still opportunity, he explains. But when Cordillera feels a strategy has gotten so popular that capturing upside becomes too difficult, the fund will cut and move on.
“The reason for starting Cordillera was that ‘alternative assets’—private equity, hedge funds, natural resources, real estate—are just not that alternative anymore,” Heller said. “Today, whether you’re a high net worth individual, insurance company, pension fund, you’ve got some exposure to all of those. That doesn’t make them bad, it just means they are much more highly competed today than they were, [and] the correlations among those have increased significantly. We really think about our business as just going back to the basics of truly alternative investments.”

Related Stories

US sports stars Ben Shelton and Trinity Rodman share romance on social media – Olympics

Kendall unveils crackdown on benefits aimed at saving £5bn by 2030 – BBC.com

Rejection, non-league and pushing trolleys: Burn's rise to England – Yahoo Sports

You may have missed

US sports stars Ben Shelton and Trinity Rodman share romance on social media – Olympics

Kendall unveils crackdown on benefits aimed at saving £5bn by 2030 – BBC.com

Rejection, non-league and pushing trolleys: Burn's rise to England – Yahoo Sports

Trump’s Department of Justice seeks to oust judge who challenged deportation flights – The Independent