James Blake’s $100k pickleball bet 'paid off'—the franchise is now worth millions.

James Blake and Marc Lasry's foray into Major League Pickleball started with a $100,000 investment in 2021. Over the last two years, their stake has seen a remarkable appreciation, mirroring a growing trend in sports investing. With icons like LeBron James and Tom Brady entering the pickleball arena, this indicates a cultural transformation.

In 2021, pickleball was often mocked as a retiree pastime, and a hedge fund billionaire invested in a little-known team. Two years later, that investment was being touted as a big winner, and it's no stretch of the imagination. Former tennis star James Blake and Avenue Capital Group co-founder Marc Lasry bought a Major League Pickleball team (the one now known as the Milwaukee Mashers) for $100,000 before the league launched in 2021, and in May 2023 Lasry told Bloomberg it was worth $10 million. That figure is Lasry's own estimate, not a Forbes valuation, and it's a jump that, for a particular breed of American investor, is hardly surprising.

The $100,000 bet that didn't stay small

James Blake, a former world No. 4 tennis player, was no stranger to competitive sport, but it was the move he made in conjunction with Lasry when he bought a pickleball ownership stake that has become much more noteworthy. Lasry, who had agreed to sell his 25% stake in the Milwaukee Bucks in a deal valuing the team at about $3.5 billion, told Bloomberg Television that upstart leagues like pickleball may offer a higher rate of return than NBA teams, and he put the value of the team he and Blake bought at $10 million. That's a self-reported number from the investor himself, and it hasn't been independently verified. An MLP official said in 2022 that team values had already reached seven figures, and The Dink, a pickleball outlet, reported in 2024 that MLP challenger-level teams were expected to sell for roughly $15-20 million. Both are estimates rather than completed sales of this team.

Why this isn't just a Lasry-Blake story

LeBron James, Tom Brady, Gary Vaynerchuk, Drew Brees and Ryan Serhant have all joined the fray in one way or another, buying stakes in MLP teams (James through his family office with Maverick Carter and others, and Brady in an expansion team alongside Kim Clijsters), helping turn pickleball's image from a retirement-community pastime into a celebrity investment club. This is partly a matter of capitalizing on culture, but it's also a matter of hard numbers.

Aerial view of a pickleball court. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

According to the

Sports & Fitness Industry Association's Topline Participation Report, pickleball has been America's fastest-growing sport for three consecutive years as of the 2024 report, and participation grew 223.5 percent over three years (51.8 percent from 2022 to 2023). When one sport explodes in popularity, early owners of its teams and leagues reap the rewards of buying in at ground-floor prices before the elevator even starts moving.

A pattern bigger than pickleball?

Zoom out a bit, and it's easy to see the Blake-Lasry deal as more than just a curious piece of trivia, but rather a sign of what's to come for the financial landscape of sports. According to a CFA Institute analysis, private equity firms invested more than $55 billion into sports-related assets between 2019 and 2024, spanning franchises, leagues, media-rights platforms and fan-engagement businesses, and more than 74 North American professional teams now have some level of private-equity involvement. Smaller leagues, such as Major League Pickleball, can fit into this wave of investment because entry costs are lower.

The part you should question

There's a healthy degree of skepticism that comes with talking about a single owner's personal valuation of a franchise, and to claim that a company is worth $10 million doesn't necessarily mean it can be sold for that price. Sports franchise values can be generous in interviews, and while the popularity of pickleball is certainly a tangible fact, a sport's overall popularity and a specific team's resale value are two very different concepts. MLP has already undergone ownership and structural changes since 2021: it merged with the PPA Tour in 2024 into a single holding company backed by a $75 million investment, and The Dink reported that the Mashers and one other team sat out the 2024 season and were bought out by the newly formed United Pickleball Association. Bloomberg later described Lasry's stake as a past investment.

James Blake. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

That points to a lesson about exits: a paper valuation only becomes a return when a stake is actually sold, and the price of the Mashers' reported buyout does not appear to have been made public, so the $10 million figure remains a claim rather than a realized gain. For every millennial reading about LeBron's pickleball team, the reality is that most can only afford to dream of buying one themselves. But it's still an invaluable reminder that the market for undervalued sports assets appears to be getting more competitive. And it's hard not to appreciate the irony of a sport invented in 1965 in a backyard on Bainbridge Island, Washington, catching the eyes of financiers and finding itself discussed alongside NBA returns. Whether this is the beginning of a lasting legacy or just a flash in the pan, the Blake-Lasry deal is a great reminder of how the smartest money in the American sports world rarely goes chasing the biggest leagues, but also sometimes finds itself in the ones nobody else has seen worth investing in yet.