We closed twice and seen promotion success twice.

If you've spoken with Colin or me over the past year, you've heard the thesis more than once: buy well-run clubs sitting that lack the resources to grow from a local-run club to a one with national and continental potential via promotion. We back the basketball operation with the kind of data infrastructure we built at ESPN and the Kings and let sporting success do the heavy lifting on enterprise value. It's a thesis that only means something once it survives contact with an actual season. This month, it did — twice.

Essen wrote its own headline

ETB Miners Essen dropped a single game across the entire playoff run — closing out the semifinal series in two games before sealing the ProB championship outright — and punched their ticket into the BARMER 2. Basketball Bundesliga ProA for the 2026/27 season for the first time in the club's history. It is the single largest jump in national profile a lower-division German club can make in one summer — a full tier up, into a league with vastly greater media exposure, sponsorship density, and player pathway value.

Palmer: from principle to signature

Nearly in parallel, the deal we've been building with Palmer Basket Mallorca converted from a memorandum of understanding into a signed strategic alliance. Club president Vicenç Palmer first confirmed the agreement at the season-close press conference that hands sporting planning and full control of the club to Sage while preserving the club's Mallorcan identity and Grupo Palmer's role as lead sponsor. Regional outlets were quick to draw the parallel to RCD Mallorca and Atlético Baleares — foreign ownership has already reshaped football on the island; Palmer is now the first club to bring that model to Balearic basketball, and Palmer told COPE Baleares directly that the American group "already has a general manager" lined up and will bring a meaningful capital contribution to the project.

The market is moving favorably to our advantage, not away

The loudest conversation in European basketball right now isn't about promotion economics — it's about NBA Europe. The NBA and FIBA's plan for a 12-to-16-team league, launching October 2027 with franchise fees reportedly in the $500M–$1B range, has pulled in more than $1 billion bids from sovereign wealth funds, private equity, and multi-club operators. It's also made some people nervous — it's a concern we've heard a few times from prospective LPs — that a league skimming the continent's biggest cities and richest owners could starve everything underneath it: the Primera FEBs and ProAs where we actually play.

The data so far says the opposite is happening. Neither of our deals happened in a vacuum, and the clearest proof point sits in Palmer's own league. Movistar Estudiantes — a Madrid institution playing in the same Primera FEB as Palmer Basket — just changed hands: Diego Megía, founder of Taula Capital Management, agreed to buy the club's reference shareholders out for roughly €6.6M, on top of a committed €15M capital increase to fund a push to Liga Endesa, putting total capital into the club near €22M. It beat out a competing bid of €28.8M from an IFM Investors executive and a private wealth advisor — 2Playbook reported both camps were explicit that the prize was Euroliga participation, underwritten by a future arena and a €30–50M annual budget once there. That deal closed in the same weeks NBA Europe was fielding billion-dollar bids for its top tier — capital didn't skip Primera FEB waiting to see how NBA Europe shakes out, it showed up anyway, at a valuation multiple of where we just closed in the same league. Our acquisition of Palmer Basket was finalized at a fraction of the Movistar Estudiantes sale price. If anything, NBA Europe is doing what a rising tide usually does: raising attention, and money, at every level under it.

The broadcast market is confirming the same story from a different angle: with LaLiga+ shutting down, potential replacements include Movistar Plus+ and DAZN. Industry coverage is now framing the league as a relatively inexpensive way for a broadcaster to reclaim national basketball presence. Rights value and ownership value tend to move together. We didn't need either tailwind to underwrite Palmer, but we're glad to have both.

Why this matters for the fund

Two clubs, two countries, two very different paths to the same outcome: a step-change in league position and league economics. Essen validates the sporting side of the underwriting — our operational involvement, including taking the sporting director function in-house, is already showing up in cost discipline heading into a tougher league. Palmer validates the origination side — we can still find, negotiate, and close family-run European clubs before the broader capital market notices them. That combination is the whole fund thesis in miniature.

One more result worth flagging, even though it isn't a portfolio club: Frayles de Guasave, a CIBACOPA team in Sinaloa, Mexico, that we've supported pro bono with our analytics work, finished runner-up in the 2026 CIBACOPA championship, falling to Astros de Jalisco in the final. Frayles did it while running the smallest budget in the league — the same underlying argument we make to every club we do put capital behind: the gap between a well-run analytics operation and a well-funded one is smaller than people assume. We don't have an equity stake in Frayles, and we're not going to pretend otherwise, but it's the cleanest live demonstration we have of what the basketball side of Sage actually does before a dollar of capital shows up.

We're not slowing down. We're in active discussions with a club on the French Riviera playing in the second tier of French basketball, and conversations with several capital partners continue to progress. If you've been following Sage from the sidelines, or if we spoke a few months ago and the timing wasn't right, this is the moment the pipeline is moving fastest — and the window on this round won't stay open indefinitely.