Ted Leonsis has one of the more unique ownership setups in professional sports.
Leonsis owns multiple teams in the Washington, D.C., market, including the Capitals, Mystics, and Wizards. And he hasn’t been shy about wanting more.
All of his teams are under the umbrella company Monumental Sports & Entertainment and he would look into buying teams in the D.C. area as a way to continue to combine and share assets.
“I would buy the Nationals or the Orioles or D.C. United and put them onto one platform, put them on one network, have one big dataset, have one CFO, have one HR department,” Leonsis told Front Office Sports in a recent interview. “I mean, that’s what media and tech companies do.”
In 2023, Leonsis made a $2 billion offer to buy the Nationals from the Lerner family, which was before the team settled its longtime dispute with the Orioles-controlled Mid Atlantic Sports Network.
Leonsis was interested in the O’s, too, as he looked into a bid for the team before it was sold to billionaire David Rubenstein in February 2024 for $1.7 billion. Leonsis calls Rubenstein a friend, but says, “That’s a small market, who knows what happens in five years, ten years? Maybe that becomes a part of us.”
Leonsis also said that Dan Snyder beat him to buying the football team now known as the Washington Commanders in 1999. Snyder bought the team for $800 million and sold it under a cloud of scandal in 2023 for $6 billion to a group led by Josh Harris.
D.C. United is currently owned by a group led by investor Jason Levien.
Leonsis is willing to be patient after slowly buying D.C. teams over time from the late philanthropist Abe Pollin, who had stakes in all three teams. In 1999, Leonsis bought the Capitals from Pollin for $200 million. The deal also made him a minority owner in the Wizards. In 2005, he bought the Mystics for $10 million. Five years later, he became the majority owner of the Wizards in a deal for $310 million from Pollin’s estate. Both teams are now several times more valuable.
For now, if Leonsis makes any deals, it sounds likely they will all be domestic. He explored international soccer, but said it didn’t make sense.
“I looked at soccer, it was very in to go to Europe and look at soccer,” Leonsis says. “How many games am I going to go to when the team we were looking at was outside of London?”
