Marques Colston is the greatest receiver in the New Orleans Saints’ history — the franchise’s all-time leader in receptions, receiving yards, and touchdowns, and a Super Bowl XLIV champion who went from seventh-round pick out of Hofstra to legend. Nick Edwards is a former MMA fighter. Together, they run Champion Capital, and their newest venture, the Champion Fund, might be the most interesting thing happening in sports business right now.
Here’s the problem they’re solving: Sports has become one of the world’s hottest asset classes, but the people who actually create the value — the athletes, the fans, the coaches, the parents buying $500 bats and Fatheads — own none of it. “All of those people drive the equity to a very, very small select group — the 1 percent that owns it,” Colston told me. “Sports is as universal, as ubiquitous as it gets. We saw an opportunity to create a vehicle to allow those very same folks to actually have ownership in it in a way that is not tokenized. It’s not season-ticket-holder-plus. It’s true equity — a true vehicle that allows you to build wealth on your terms, on your timeline, whether you’re investing $500 at a time or $5 million at a time.”
Their solution is something I confess I’d never heard of before our call: an interval fund. It’s an SEC-registered investment vehicle — there are roughly 150 of them in the U.S., collectively holding more than $100 billion in assets — that can hold private assets while accepting money from everyday, non-accredited investors. No 2-and-20 structure like a typical private fund; it operates on a management fee, like what you’d see in a retirement account. And because it’s registered with the SEC, your neighbor can invest right alongside the institutions. In fact, Edwards told me the fund’s very first investor is a C-suite executive at SpaceX — yet that investor is treated exactly the same as the fan who puts in $500.
Rather than betting on one team and hoping for a Wrexham story, the fund spreads every dollar across five buckets: teams and clubs (including a stake in Ipswich Town FC, which the fund entered before the club’s promotion to the Premier League), sports venture (ticketing and fan-engagement technology), media and content, sports-adjacent real estate and hospitality, and co-investments alongside other proven fund managers. Think ETF construction, applied to private sports assets — with brands in the portfolio like Fathead and allocations to emerging concepts like F1 Arcade.
Beyond the fund itself, three lessons from our conversation stood out for any entrepreneur:
Being first is brutal — and worth it.
Nobody had ever combined institutional-grade private sports assets with non-accredited access before. It took Colston and Edwards nearly two years of regulatory grind to get approved. “Brutal is the nice way to say it,” Edwards said. If what you’re building is genuinely new, expect the process to be your moat.
Constraint builds credibility.
The two can’t hype projected fund sizes or drop investor names — the SEC is always watching. Instead of chafing at the rules, they’ve turned compliance into their pitch: The scrutiny is exactly what makes the fund safe enough for everyday investors. Ask yourself what constraint in your industry could become your selling point.
Don’t let your old identity define your new business.
“People automatically default to this being a fund for athletes,” Edwards told me. “That’s completely wrong. Marques and I have both been out of sports longer than we competed.” They spent a decade as operators and investors before launching this — the athletic careers opened doors, but the reps built the business.
The retirement stereotype of the broke ex-athlete is real, and it’s exactly why talking to these two was so refreshing. They sat on every side of the sports value chain — product, operator, investor, parent — and then built the vehicle they wished existed. Now the fans get to come along.
Me? I still can’t afford a minor league baseball team. But for $500, I can finally own a piece of the game I love. So can you.
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