The sports sector is a major international growth market that is at the forefront of digital development and consumer engagement, providing stakeholders with both significant development and return opportunities as well as increasingly more complex and sophisticated challenges.

Our global, cross-practice sports sector team combines a real passion and understanding of the sector and its specific requirements and pressures (including increased regulatory scrutiny) with exceptional multi-jurisdictional expertise across all areas of corporate/M&A, finance and banking, capital markets and equity financing, commercial, technology and media, crisis management, data protection, IP, dispute resolution, regulatory and compliance investigations, real estate, restructuring and insolvency, anti-trust, employment and tax matters. This puts us in a unique position to be able to provide our clients with a full and seamless end-to-end service in order to help them successfully navigate the most complex and high-profile matters arising in the sector.

Technological innovation is also rapidly transforming the sports sector, including through the development of eSports and the increased monetisation of sports data. Together with our dedicated Fintech and Technology sector teams, we are able to provide clients with an unparalleled multi-jurisdictional depth of legal, commercial and regulatory expertise.

Our clients include corporates, financial sponsors and high-net-worth individuals as well as sports teams, clubs and governing and regulatory bodies, who we act as trusted advisors to in relation to a full range of matters, including:

• M&A and investment opportunities (including investments in clubs/teams and competitions and acquisitions of media and television rights)
• debt and equity financing and securitisations
• a variety of commercial matters that affect individuals, teams and bodies within the sector (including sponsorship, branding, image rights, IP, data protection and events planning)
• dispute resolution and reputation management
• a wide scope of regulatory and anti-trust matters (including large-scale investigations and governance and compliance reviews)
• real estate transactions (including stadium development/expansion and financing)