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Former NBA and NHL executive Dave Checketts called Real Salt Lake, the MLS team he cofounded in 2005, the “worst investment I made.”
In a recent episode of Portfolio Players, Checketts described to Front Office Sports the difficulties of generating profit in an emerging league. He mentioned that Real Salt Lake struggled with a sparsely-filled stadium in its heyday, fielding just around 16,000 every year at the University of Utah football’s Rice-Eccles Stadium that seats over 45,000 people.
After the MLS club moved to the 20,000-seat America First Field in 2008, attendance optics were no longer a struggle, as Checketts said the venue is “full all the time.”
However, the sports investor notes that the team “still is a ways from making money.”
Checketts also said MLS’s deal with Apple TV shows that Americans are still more interested in watching European men’s soccer. The deal, initially worth $2.5 billion for 10 years, will end three years early under re-negotiated terms that will pay the league an extra $50 million.
“The Apple TV deal is not like having all of the Premier League games,” Checketts said. (NBC owns the U.S. rights to Premier League games and airs them across their broadcast, cable, and streaming properties in a six-year, $2.7 billion deal.) “Americans watch European soccer. And then when you ask people who their teams are, they don’t say the Chicago Fire typically, they’re going to say Arsenal or something in Europe.”
The 2025 MLS playoffs averaged 711,000 viewers on Apple TV, while 4.6 million watched the MLS Cup between Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami and the Vancouver Whitecaps. By comparison, April 19’s Manchester City-Arsenal match averaged 2.6 million viewers and was NBC’s most-watched Premier League match ever.
Checketts is a minority owner and investor in Burnley, which played in the Premier League this past season but was relegated to England’s second division after finishing 19th.
During Checketts’s time with Real Salt Lake, the team won the 2009 MLS Cup. In 2013, he sold the club to Dell Loy Hansen, who owned it until 2020 when he sold the team following allegations of racism. The team operated without a defined owner in 2021, before it was sold to current Jazz and Mammoth owner Ryan Smith and Guardians and Commanders minority stakeholder David Blitzer in 2022.
Smith and Blitzer sold the team to former Jazz owner Gail Miller in 2025 for $600 million alongside the NWSL’s Utah Royals. During the 2025 regular season, it averaged an attendance of 19,776, ranked 20th out of 30 teams.
Real Salt Lake remains Checketts’s only MLS investment. Throughout his career, he owned the NHL’s Blues, and also served as the president of the NBA’s Jazz and Knicks.
“I think these startup leagues and getting to a place where you’re actually generating positive cash flow, being able to not only build stadiums but build other things that make your club successful—it’s gotten a lot harder,” Checketts said. “And the media deal is really what drives success and stability.”
