If you look at the group of private equity firms approved by the NFL Tuesday, you’ll notice one of them is not like the others.
Among a clutch of titans synonymous with private equity and more than two trillion dollars in assets—Blackstone, Carlyle, Ares among them—Dynasty Equity sticks out. It’s a relatively new firm—it only made its first investment 11 months ago—and has a relatively paltry $343 million in assets under management, according to a regulatory disclosure filed two weeks ago. Yet it’s one of seven PE firms permitted to invest in NFL franchises, a privilege at least three other better-capitalized and better-known firms missed out on.
Credit a long association with the NFL by Dynasty’s majority owner Don Cornwell with setting the firm apart from other, much bigger, contenders.
While some of the approved PE firms probably needed to take pains to present themselves to the league—it’s a good bet Luxembourg-based CVC and Carlyle Group, which has just one sports investment (NWSL’s Seattle Reign) in its entire $435 billion portfolio, had to explain themselves—probably no one involved on the PE side is better known to the NFL than Cornwell. Even Curtis Martin, the Pro Football Hall of Fame running back whose firm Ludis is part of the league-approved consortium with Dynasty, has less of a connection with the league, having started playing for the NFL in 1998.
Cornwell’s relationship with the NFL goes back further, fully 30 years, even though he founded Dynasty less than three years ago with billionaire Jonathan Nelson, best known for cofounding PE giant Providence Equity.
Cornwell declined to comment for this profile through a spokesperson. However, the executive has been a frequent speaker on television and on panels including with market data provider Bloomberg, think tank Milken Institute and during Sportico’s annual Invest in Sports conferences. Those appearances, along with publicly available information on the Dynasty website and LinkedIn, provide at least a partial view of a man who arguably is now the most influential banker with the NFL.
“Part of having a successful career is finding the right seat, and I got really lucky where I found a seat where I got to work with a ton of people that taught me, that mentored me,” Cornwell said in 2018.
One of those seats came in 1994, just two years after graduating from Harvard, when Cornwell landed a job with the NFL, working as a senior analyst on topics including new media and franchise relocation. He left that job in 1996 to get his MBA from Stanford, but found himself working with the league again during a long career at Morgan Stanley, where he rose to the level of managing director and led the bank’s global sports investment practice.
In his 15 years at Morgan Stanley, Cornwell advised the Wilson family on the sale of the Bills to Terry and Kim Pegula, and led a recapitalization for the Rooney family that allowed them to buy out some family members from the Steelers.
Indeed, the need for NFL family owners to find ways to provide exits for shareholders is a driving reason behind Tuesday’s approval of PE investment. Cornwell also worked with MLB, the NBA, the Texas Rangers and as an advisor to a large shareholder in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, among many other sports and media transactions.
In 2015, Cornwell made another fortuitous career move, leaving the comfort of the Wall Street megabank to become the eighth employee of PJT Partners, where he continued advising sports teams and leagues on financing and ownership issues. Though he left PJT to launch Dynasty, he remains a member of the board of directors of the now $5 billion (market cap) business. PJT acted as an advisor to the NFL during its recent PE firm vetting process.
The shift from advisor to investor occurred in early 2022, when Cornwell and Nelson formed Dynasty. In various interviews, the executive explained that the opening of sports betting, streaming and even the nascent moves toward PE investment in teams and leagues changed the growth prospects of sports franchises.
“It used to be, as you said, it was a wealthy guy who at best broke even but loved owning a team, and they went up in value because there was scarcity value and some tax reasons,” he told a Bloomberg video interviewer in 2021. “Now you have all those aspects but also disruptive, innovative technologies … [and] now I can actually point to some real growth that’s based on secular changes that are happening with the way we all interact with the thing we love in sports.”
Cornwell and Nelson have been deliberate in making deals. The 21-person firm has just two known investments: an equity stake in Liverpool FC, which Dynasty acquired with an investment between $100 million and $200 million, and equity in the Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy golf league TMRW Sports, as part of its venture capital fundraise of $75 million from at least 14 firms, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.
Access to the NFL likely means Dynasty’s dealmaking accelerates, especially since the league appears to fit in well with Cornwell’s philosophy of what PE offers teams and leagues.
“I see three reasons why private equity exists in sports now and what we’re focused on,” Cornwell said during a December Milken Institute conference in Abu Dhabi. “No. 1 is just buying a team—these are large checks … you need more capital. What we will see over time is individuals will still buy these teams, but they will be backed by institutional capital.”
No. 2, he said, is cash flow issues with family ownership groups. “Many of these owners are not wealthy. They are wealthy because they have this one piece of paper, but the rest of their lives they don’t actually have a lot of liquidity.” The opportunity to provide a willing buyer to owners while investing at a “rational” price is an opportunity for PE, he explained.
“The third thing, and this is the most fun thing about what I am doing, is that the world of entertainment and the consumption of entertainment is changing. … A lot of the owners, especially in North America, who are in their third or fourth generation, may not be as sophisticated, and they need help.”
(This article has been corrected in the 11th paragraph to indicate PJT’s market cap is now $5 billion.)
