Negotiating Sports Franchise Acquisition: Tim Browne, Sports Law for Barnes and Thornberg

Here’s your unexpected piece of sports business trivia for the day. According to Arctos, which is a major player in sports private equity, professional sports franchise values have compounded at a rate 13.0% per year for the last sixty years.

So it turns out that this whole sports ownership thing can actually be pretty lucrative. Which is why it’s currently boom times for teams looking for investors, and for the folks who help put together these kinds of deals.

It’s also why Tim Browne’s phone rang two or three times during our podcast recording.

After a decade as the an in-house counsel at the NBA, Tim is now a sports and entertainment lawyer for Barnes and Thornberg in Nashville TN. While there, he’s helped ownership groups purchase teams, helped land expansion franchises, and pulled apart contracts having to do with every aspect of team operations and revenue.

In our conversation, we dive into Tim’s sports law career, which began with legendary NBA commissioner David Stern sitting in on his first interview with the League. We look at the increasingly complex issues surrounding mammoth sports transactions, the advice he gives to prospective ownership groups, the legal turmoil surrounding NIL contracts in college sports, and much more. And as a parting gift, he’ll even give you the best piece of negotiating advice he’s ever received.

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

The Sports Business Conversations podcast is a production of ADC Partners, a sports marketing agency that specializes in creating, managing, and evaluating effective partnerships between brands and sports. All rights reserved.

YOUR HOST

Dave Almy brings over 30 years of sports marketing and sports business experience to his role as host of the "1-on-1: Sports Business Conversations" podcast. Dave is the co-Founder of ADC Partners.

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