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$100 Million. This Is The Moment.
I’ve been covering lacrosse for a long time. I’ve watched this sport fight for every inch — for TV time, for sponsorship dollars, for the right to sit at the table with leagues that have a hundred years of head start.
Last Tuesday, the Premier Lacrosse League raised $100 million in a Series E financing round.
Read that again. One hundred million dollars. The largest capital raise in the history of professional lacrosse.
This wasn’t a press release. This IS a turning point.
Who’s In
The round was led by Ares Management — one of the biggest alternative investment firms on the planet, $644 billion in assets under management — and Joe Tsai, the co-founder of Alibaba, owner of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty, and a Yale lacrosse player who has been the PLL’s largest shareholder since their Series A in 2019.
That combination alone tells you something. Ares doesn’t invest in sports on a whim. They own a piece of the Miami Dolphins. They’ve put $225 million into Inter Miami. They back League One Volleyball. This is a firm that’s made a deliberate strategic bet on emerging sports leagues, and they just decided professional lacrosse is worth a very large check.
Tsai, meanwhile, has been in this from the beginning. He played the game at Yale in the 1980s. He’s watched this thing grow from a startup founded by two brothers with a vision into a real professional sports operation. The fact that he keeps writing checks — Series A all the way through Series E — tells you he believes in where this is going.
And then there’s the rest of the room: ESPN, which took a minority equity stake last year and doubled down here. David Blitzer of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment — the guy who owns the 76ers and the Devils. Actor Glen Powell, whose Lacrosse Kid moment apparently stuck.
Rob McElhenney, Tony Cavalero, country singer Warren Zeiders. The celebrity investor list is a mile long.
When Hollywood and Wall Street are both writing checks to the same lacrosse league? That’s not a trend. That’s a cultural shift.
What The Money Is For
Mike Rabil didn’t raise $100 million to throw a party. Here’s where it’s going:
Expanding the season. The PLL wants to move earlier into the spring — getting games on the calendar before the NCAA tournament starts, building a longer runway for storylines, stars, and fan engagement. More games means more opportunities to build the habits that turn casual watchers into real fans.
Media and content. Scripted and unscripted content on YouTube and other platforms. The PLL has always understood that it’s not just a sports league — it’s a media company with a lacrosse league attached. That investment is about to get serious.
Youth development. NFL Flag-style community youth programs. Local leagues. Camps and clinics. This is the long game — building the next generation of fans who grow up watching the PLL the way kids in Ohio grow up watching the Browns.
The Women’s Lacrosse League. The WLL launched in February 2025 and is already running a real season alongside the PLL schedule. This money accelerates that.
Franchise ownership. Here’s the one that’s going to change the sport structurally. The PLL currently owns all eight of its teams — a single-entity model that gave the league control and stability in its early years. Paul Rabil told CNBC this week that they plan to begin selling franchises to individual owners by 2028 or soon after, with a goal of expanding from eight teams to sixteen. Local owners. Rooted in communities. The model that every major American sports league runs on.
That’s not small. When the PLL starts selling franchises, it changes what professional lacrosse looks like in this country forever.
The Olympic Moment
None of this happens in a vacuum. The timing is deliberate.
Lacrosse returns to the Olympics at LA28 — for the first time in 120 years, with women’s lacrosse making its Olympic debut. The first allotment of tickets sold out in 48 hours. The infrastructure is building. The eyes are coming.
Paul Rabil is 40 years old and knows exactly what he’s doing.
“The first allotment of tickets sold out in 48 hours for lacrosse,” he told CNBC. “There’s good hype building.”
Good hype is an understatement. This is the most visible moment professional lacrosse has ever had — or will have until LA28 itself. The $100 million raise positions the PLL to not just ride that wave, but to be the organization that converts casual Olympic viewers into lifelong fans.
The whole play is: Olympic exposure creates casual interest, the PLL converts casual interest into fandom, franchise ownership creates local roots, local roots create generational fans.
It’s not complicated. It’s just hard. And it requires capital.
They now have the capital.
What This Means
I started LaxAllStars because I believed lacrosse could be bigger than the world gave it credit for. I still believe that. Every year I’ve been doing this, the evidence has gotten stronger.
The PLL raising $100 million — from Ares, from Joe Tsai, from ESPN, from a board that includes some of the most sophisticated sports investors in the country — is not just a business story. It’s validation.
Professional lacrosse is real. It’s being taken seriously by people who know what serious looks like. And in two years, when the world tunes into the Olympics in Los Angeles and watches lacrosse for the first time in a century, the PLL is going to be right there ready to catch what comes next.
We’ve all been waiting for this moment for a long time.
Grow the game.
– JB