The closed agreement between the not only matters to the station and the 33 clubs of the block. With an eye on potential loss considered small and returns above inflation, Life Capital Partners, investor of LFU, still see a “favorable wind” in the sports market with high recipes and margins.
The purchase of participation cost about R $ 2 billion, captured through Sports Media, whose partners are Life Capital Partners, a fund of XP Investimentos and Livemode. For the 2025 to 2029 cycle, LFU negotiated an average annual revenue of $ 1.7 billion with Record, Youtube, Prime Video and Grupo Globo.
High margin thesis and box
Life Capital has been attracted to a “extremely limited” loss potential and a history of returns higher than transmission rights inflation. Although it does not open the projection of return on investment, the manager evaluates that, by the values negotiated, they must be higher than the most optimistic scenario calculated.
Founder and Managing Partner of Life Capital Partners, João Leitao attributes to this asset class a unique and unusual behavior in most portfolios: “It is highly cash generating, we do not have Capex [despesas em capital, como estrutura física] To do, 90% margin ”.
Part of the evaluation by Life Capital Partners is shared by investors around the world. This Monday (17) that, according to the Bloombergmust be at least $ 1 billion.
“The recipe is very large. People love sports, it’s one of the segments that won’t be disrupted by technology in the sense that we don’t want to see machines playing, we want to see human beings, ”says Leitao. “At the same time, when entering a league, an extremely unique property is bought.”
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For the coming years, the perspective of a unified league among all clubs in the Brazilian Championship would help boost a revenue from international transmissions that today represent 1% of the revenue of the Brazilian Championship, even far from neighboring tournaments such as Argentine.
Livemode, transmission rights management agency, represented LFU in the negotiation. It is the result of a split between Brazilian soccer elite clubs and features teams such as Vasco, Botafogo, Cruzeiro, Internacional, Athletico-PR and Corinthians’ latest arrival.
On the other side is Libra, represented by teams such as Flamengo, Sao Paulo and Palmeiras, whose rights were negotiated with Globo in full. After divergences about the distribution of revenue in a league, the groups divided into blocks that negotiated their economic rights separately. Now, even if the idea of unification is resumed, a new round of transmission rights negotiations would have only resulted after 2029.
