When the celebrity-filled investor group featuring Ryan Reynolds, Rob Mac, and Eva Longoria acquired Colombian soccer club La Equidad in January 2025, they picked up a small, family-run operation that hadn’t had much success in nearly four decades of existence.
Things have changed significantly. The club, which plays in Colombia’s highest level of football, Categoría Primera A (also known as Liga Dimayor), finished last out of 20 teams last year. This year, following a rebrand, the club—now called Inter Bogota—is currently tied for first place.
The new ownership group also includes three-time Cy Young winner Justin Verlander and his wife, model and actress Kate Upton, former NBA pro Shawn Marion, and longtime sports investors Sam Porter and Al Tylis. They purchased the club from La Equidad Seguros, a Colombian insurance company that had owned the team since its 1982 inception. Financial details were not disclosed, but it’s rumored the group paid around $30 million for the club.
Porter—a former executive for MLS team D.C. United who also co-owns Club Necaxa in Mexico with the same group and is a minority shareholder in Wrexham—tells Front Office Sports the prior owners ran the team “in a very mom and pop sort of way.”
“We saw an opportunity to buy a club from an owner who owned it as sort of a marketing vehicle and make it into a full, proper football club in the same way that Necaxa is, or Wrexham is,” says Porter, who separately serves as chief strategy officer for the recently launched dedicated sports division of Apollo Global Management.
Wales-based Wrexham has been promoted three straight times and now plays in the second-tier EFL Championship, meaning the team is just one level away from the Premier League. The club’s success has dramatically increased its value; the group with Reynolds and Mac bought the team for roughly $2.5 million, a deal that was completed in 2021. In June, reports said a minority stake was up for grabs at a $475 million valuation.
“The Wrexham story is an inspiration,” Inter Bogota president Nicolas Maya tells FOS. “We are getting their best practices, but we need to adapt their story for a different context.”
The Restructuring
In addition to the rebrand—which included a stunt where one of Inter Bogota’s new jerseys was launched into space—Porter says the new owners have overseen a major restructuring of the team. They hired a new coach, new sporting director, a CEO, and support staff, and brought in an analytics team. There’s been significant roster turnover, and they also “connected the recruitment and scouting team” with Necaxa to build a pipeline that can support talent development for both teams.
The new owners have also poured money into improving the fan experience at games. While Inter Bogota does not own its home stadium—the more than 9,000-seat Estadio Metropolitano de Techo is owned by the city—the group has updated season ticket packages, added new food offerings, upgraded the ticketing app, and begun having halftime entertainment.
Maya says that last year, the average attendance for most home games was about 1,000 people. This year, through five home games, they are averaging between 4,500 and 5,000.
“We sold 1,700 season tickets this year,” Maya tells FOS. “Last year, which was the best number in club history, we sold 350.”
Porter tells FOS the group has also invested significantly in the women’s Inter Bogota team, saying it’s important for fans to feel like the owners will invest in the “people around the club on both the men’s and women’s side.”
The Celebrities
The celebrity owners allow the experts to operate the clubs, but they are very supportive and get involved as necessary.
“They are very aware of what the club’s doing,” Porter says. “We’ll get text messages after a win of ‘wow, what a match.’
He says there is a “continual conversation of how we can leverage the value of each club to help each other,” and that “these guys are very into it. They love the sport.”
The Goal
It remains to be seen how Inter Bogota will finish this season, but the hot start has the ownership group optimistic about the future. “I knew we’d be better, but never imagined we’d be fighting for first place,” Maya says.
According to Porter, heading into this season, the expectation was to be competitive, develop young players, and “put together a good foundation.”
For now, Inter Bogota is in first place, but Porter understands that continued success is not guaranteed. “In football, that’s fleeting,” he tells FOS. “So we would like to sustain that, but match to match, you’re just hoping for the best out of your players.”
