The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own.

By Jennifer Saba and Jeffrey Goldfarb

NEW YORK, March 3 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Everyone loves an underdog in sports, including investors it would seem. One group of them recently injected $100 million into a women’s volleyball league, helping it join the ranks of dodgeball, pickleball, lacrosse and other popular pastimes that money managers want to turn into big business through broadcasting and betting. The real competition, however, is to capture the spare time of prospective viewers. Because of the limited supply, there will be few winners among the second-string.

Oil wildcatter Jerry Jones used $140 million of his fortune in 1989 to buy the Dallas Cowboys, the National Football League franchise known as “America’s Team.” Now worth some $11 billion, according to a CNBC tally, it’s the first squad with an 11-figure price tag. The returns from owning teams in the National Basketball Association, National Football League, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League have beaten the S&P 500 Index .SPX and U.S. Treasury bonds over the past two decades, according to the Ross-Arctos Sports Franchise Index. The NBA increased in value by a cumulative 2,000% from 2000 to 2023, per Goldman Sachs – nearly double the NFL’s growth rate. The bank reckons that marquee sports teams are now so expensive that many of the world’s nearly 3,000 billionaires are priced out.

The numbers help explain fresh investor interest in more peripheral athletics and activities. Success will largely hinge on parlaying passionate players and fans into TV viewers and gamblers, while securing corporate marketing deals too. The NBA netted $76 billion over 11 years, or triple the amount of its previous contract, for the rights to air games on Walt Disney’s DIS.N ESPN and other networks and streaming services. Consultancy PwC projects that sports-related sponsorship will reach almost $110 billion by 2030, or 70% more than in 2021. The U.S. gaming industry said Americans wagered some $150 billion legally on sports in 2024, 24% more than a year earlier.

These total addressable markets are tantalizing. There are also creative ways to champion sports oddities. Wrexham AFC, a once-obscure Welsh soccer team, became an international sensation after actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought it and chronicled their ownership escapades in a documentary series.

In the United States, financiers have been kicking around many ideas for women’s sports. In November, League One Volleyball, known as LOVB and pronounced “love,” received $100 million from Atwater Capital, a buyout shop started by women, alongside fund giant Ares Management ARES.N and venture firm Left Lane Capital. It also signed a deal with ESPN, helping build its business model as both a professional league and operator of 58 youth clubs to develop new players and followers. More than 92,000 spectators packed a 2023 match in Nebraska. Rival leagues are also attracting investors, with another $100 million of funding committed to Major League Volleyball, whose backers include pop star Jason Derulo, part owner of the Omaha Supernovas.

Such rivalries might help build awareness, but they also can balkanize a fledgling sport. Pickleball, a largely unknown game until recently, has become a sensation with about 14 million Americans picking up paddles to hit a big plastic ball on a miniature tennis court. Star football quarterback Patrick Mahomes and basketball legend LeBron James are two of its many celebrity investors. In the crush to capitalize on the boom, however, the Professional Pickleball Association and Major League Pickleball squared off in a nasty battle to woo players. After the financial realities set in, the leagues decided to merge last year with $75 million of funding from a consortium led by private equity firm SC Holdings.

These so-called emerging sports are in a long and tortuous race. In addition to the big four U.S. pro leagues – football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey – there are college-level versions that capture well-heeled audiences and dollars. Then there’s tennis, golf, soccer, Formula 1 and NASCAR, which have built their own fanbase over the years. Other onetime novelties, such as rodeo and mixed martial arts, have also broken through to various degrees, dangling hope to other up-and-comers. Professional women’s soccer and basketball are on the rise, too. Meanwhile, the NFL is championing flag football as it contends with yet another new offseason challenger, United Football League, which airs on Fox and other media outlets.

Other quirky events abound. A professionalized version of cornhole, the backyard beanbag-tossing game that has overtaken bowling in popularity, fills time on ESPN. A big-league dodgeball competition, once exclusively reserved for school playgrounds and gymnasiums, raised money from backers including Tom Austin, who co-founded sneaker brand And1. The Premiere Lacrosse League counts Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai and merchant bank Raine among its investors. Technology developer Infinite Reality paid $250 million last year to buy a drone-racing league funded by real estate mogul Stephen Ross’ RSE Ventures, John Malone’s Liberty Media FWONA.O, WWE and others.

One problem for all these new ventures is that sports often rely on superstars to generate viewership and financial returns. Even casual fans will be familiar with Stephen Curry, Lionel Messi or Travis Kelce. The last volleyball player to gain anything close to fame was Gabrielle Reece three decades ago. Ben Johns and Mark Richards, the respective pickleball and cornhole champs, are not household names just yet.

More importantly, there is only so much time for fun and recreation. American men on average already devote 5.6 hours a day to leisure and sports, the biggest chunk after sleeping, with 2.9 of those hours spent watching TV, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found. For women, it’s 4.8 hours and 2.5 hours, respectively, which may explain why investors are targeting them more aggressively. And yet there are also movies, concerts, books, viral-video apps and other diversions competing for attention, which puts even greater importance on finding new and younger devotees still deciding what to do with their downtime.

As it stands, the NFL accounted for 72 of the 100 most-watched U.S. shows last year. Cable-TV bundle subscribers keep unplugging and video-streaming budgets are shrinking. Those trends make life even harder for new sports ventures. Despite the abundance of money, they’re mostly playing a losing game.

Follow @jennifersaba and @jgfarb on X

(Editing by Liam Proud and Pranav Kiran)

((For previous columns by the authors, Reuters customers can click on SABA/, GOLDFARB/jennifer.saba@thomsonreuters.com, jeffrey.goldfarb@thomsonreuters.com))