Sports M&A Advisory · Lisbon
The Deal Behind
the Game.
Velaris Co. represents buyers and sellers across clubs, franchises and sports assets, from minority stakes to full acquisitions. Based in Lisbon, working across Europe, the United States and the Gulf.
Sports
Lead advisory focus
Buy & sell-side
M&A mandates
Sports & Capital Dinners
Madrid, Riyadh, onward
R² Exchange
Private markets network
What We Do
Find, vet, and match.
A Lisbon-based sports M&A advisory firm. Most of our work is finding the right deals, vetting them, and matching them to the right people.
Originate
Off-market opportunities surfaced through relationships, not listings. Across Europe, the US and the Gulf.
Vet
Every counterparty checked. Identity, capital, track record and a live mandate, before any introduction.
Match
Direct, discreet introductions between capital and owners, through to a closed transaction.
Where We Focus
Four verticals.
Sports M&A
Franchise, team and platform transactions across major and emerging leagues.
Sports Real Estate
Venue, stadium and training-facility opportunities tied to sport.
Entertainment Real Estate
Hospitality and experiential assets at the intersection of culture and capital.
Media Rights & Sponsorships
Broadcast, licensing and brand partnership opportunities.
Deal profile. Established, revenue-generating companies and income-producing assets. Growth equity, buyouts, stabilized to value-add real estate. Not early-stage.
How We Advise
Both sides of the table.
For buyers
Acquire the right asset, on the right terms.
- —Off-market access to franchises, clubs and sports assets
- —Valuation guidance, deal positioning and negotiation support
- —Discreet, thesis-aligned introductions to actionable targets
For sellers
Run a confidential process that reaches real buyers.
- —Confidential sell-side advisory with qualified capital only
- —Positioning and preparation for institutional-grade diligence
- —Direct routing to active capital through the network
The intake forms are confidential and are an intake step, not a standing commitment. Answers inform the Scope of Work once a mandate is agreed.
The Network
Live demand, not a list.
Every contact is verified one by one, through a conversation, never a form. Sourced through the R² Exchange network.
0+
Verified network contacts. Name and email on file, spanning the capital side and the club side.
0+
Capital-side contacts
Principals at PE, venture and buyer-operators
0
Funds with a live mandate
Capital sources verified individually
0+
Club-side contacts
Presidents, CEOs, commercial leads
R² Exchange network file, September 2026. Full sourcing notes and confidence ratings shared under NDA.
The Investors
The capital side.
- Institutional private equity
- A multi-sport platform of ~$15B AUM with positions across US and European franchises.
- Sovereign-backed capital
- A dedicated sports investment vehicle with live positions in media and global properties.
- Athlete-led funds
- Player-founded vehicles, €40M+ raised, investing from pre-seed to club stakes.
- Multi-club operators
- Hands-on ownership groups with active projects across European football.
- Sports-focused venture
- Early-stage funds across sport, media and technology, with investor communities behind them.
Across The Network
Our friends.
A selection of the firms and desks we work alongside.
Sports & Capital Dinners
Where deals begin over dinner.
Invite-only gatherings of investors, owners and operators. One city at a time, where capital and clubs already gather.
Held. The series continues in Riyadh.
The Madrid dinner, as it was.
- Date
- Monday, September 14, 2026
- Venue
- Arzábal, Estadio Santiago Bernabéu
- Format
- Seated dinner. No stage, no press. Chatham House rules.
- Room
- Up to 40 seats. 30 investor, 10 ancillary, each vetted.
- Demand
- Oversubscribed. Seats were approved one by one from more than 100 registrations.
The Room
€1B+
AUM represented
12+
Countries represented
5
Club owners at table
C-suite
Seniority level
The Series Continues
Held · September 2026
Madrid
Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, the week of the World Football Summit and the Madrid F1 weekend.
Next in series
Riyadh
The Gulf edition. Date and venue shared with approved guests first.
Invitations received
London & Tokyo
Invitations received to host. Under consideration for the 2027 calendar.
2027 onward
By invitation
Further tables follow the deal flow. Announced privately, never publicly.
The Network Behind The Mandate
Strategic partners.
STATUS Branding & Luxury V3
Tim Robertson · Founder & GP
Experiential brand studio and sports collective. Invitation-only rooms across entertainment, finance and culture; co-host of the dinner series and R² Exchange.
Visit
Vestible
Parker Graham · Principal
Regulated investment platform for sports capital raises. Registered execution partner.
Visit
Athvance Capital
Danny Menkens · Principal
Sports-focused investment firm and co-host of the investor dinner series.
R² Exchange
Community first. Origination partner second.
The private markets network we co-host with Tim Robertson: managing directors, principals and family offices, vetted one by one, with a preference for opportunities that carry cultural weight alongside the capital. Members receive a curated deal feed, facilitated introductions and seats at the dinner series. Buy-side and sell-side subscriptions are priced and invoiced separately.
Founder & CEO
Jorge Rolis
Jorge began his football career at Sporting CP and played until an ACL injury ended it at 18. Years in commercial and operating roles across technology and fashion followed, before he founded Velaris in Lisbon.
He originates opportunities and introduces institutional capital to club and asset owners across Europe, the United States and the Gulf, spanning European football, US major league franchises, equestrian sport, sports-anchored real estate and sporting IP.
With Tim Robertson he co-hosts the Sports & Capital Dinner series and the R² Exchange network, beginning in Madrid, continuing in Riyadh.
Based in
Lisbon, Portugal
Markets
Europe | United States | Gulf
Languages
Portuguese | English
From LinkedIn
Jorge Rolis
Notes from the deal table.
Follow on LinkedIn
1wA German investment group just acquired 90% of Estrela da Amadora's SAD for €40 million — the largest sale of a controlling stake in a Po…
That number deserves a moment of attention. Six years ago, Paulo Lopo bought the entire club for €72,000. Estrela were playing in the Campeonato de Portugal, well below the professional top flight. The €40 million exit values the controlling stake at more than 500 times that original investment — a return that belongs in a different conversation from typical football ownership. The group is led by Johannes Mosmang, 35, a German executive who spent more than a decade at FC Bayern München and will now become president of the SAD. Among the investors are Thomas Müller, currently with Vancouver Whitecaps FC, goalkeeper Yann Sommer, and recently retired defender Mats Hummels. The deal was completed on Thursday and is being formally announced today, August 24. The commercial logic is straightforward: Estrela are in their fourth consecutive Primeira Liga season, they have a functioning infrastructure, and they sit in Amadora — just northwest of Lisbon — in one of European football's most talent-productive markets. For a German group with deep Bundesliga networks, that is a credible platform to build a scouting-to-development pipeline at a price point that would not buy a mid-table Bundesliga squad's second striker. Three conditions tend to define whether a Primeira Liga acquisition becomes a pipeline asset or a vanity project: sustained top-flight status, a Lisbon or Porto catchment, and an operator with existing transfer-market relationships. This deal checks all three on paper — the question is execution. Mosmang's decade at Bayern Munich is the operational signal worth reading carefully. This is not celebrity capital looking for a brand story — it is football-industry capital looking for a structural arbitrage between Portuguese football's cost base and its access to global transfer markets. The counter-point worth watching: Estrela have avoided relegation by a margin of two to four points in each of the last three seasons — the football has to keep delivering for the asset thesis to hold, and integrating new ownership, a new SAD president, and a new strategic direction simultaneously is a live execution risk, not a theoretical one. If the Mosmang-led group delivers on the Bayern-network thesis, CF Estrela SAD is quietly becoming a template for how German football capital enters Iberian markets — not through the front door of FC Porto or Sport Lisboa e Benfica, but through a €40 million record that most people outside Portugal have not yet noticed. If you are advising on or tracking cross-border ownership in Southern Europe, my DMs are open. #PrimeiraLiga #SportsBusiness #FootballInvestment
61 reactions
2wRich Paul manages $7 billion in player contracts across basketball, football, baseball, and soccer — and he just told Newsweek that youth…
That combination is worth unpacking. KLUTCH SPORTS GROUP, LLC is not a boutique agency making incremental moves. It is one of the most valuable sports representation firms in the country, built by someone who has spent years watching talent develop from grassroots level to max contracts. The commercial logic is straightforward: the agency business is a downstream bet on talent. If the pipeline is broken at the youth level — if, as Paul put it, "bad habits" are already painted on by the time players reach professional representation — then the quality and volume of the asset Klutch manages is directly affected. Investing upstream is not philanthropy; it is vertical integration of the talent supply chain. The NIL dimension adds another layer. As name, image, and likeness money reaches further down the age ladder, the infrastructure around young athletes — coaching, development, financial literacy, representation — becomes commercially significant far earlier than it once was. Whoever builds credible platforms at that entry point is positioned to compound relationships across a player's entire career. The open question is whether Klutch's relational capital can be converted into operational infrastructure — or whether Paul is describing a thesis that still needs a vehicle. That distinction matters because the market is more crowded than it looks. Overtime has already built a vertically integrated youth-to-media model with institutional backing. Other capital has followed. Paul's edge is relational, not operational — and translating agency credibility into a scalable youth investment thesis requires infrastructure he has not yet publicly described. Klutch's existing network — the athlete trust, the cross-sport footprint, the agent relationships — gives Paul a differentiated entry point into a market that is large, fragmented, and still maturing institutionally. If the strategy takes shape with the same deliberateness that built Klutch, Paul is positioning at the earliest point in the professional sports funnel. That is a long-duration bet with compounding returns that most agency operators have never thought to make. #KlutchSports #YouthSports #SportsBusiness
76 reactions
3wFC Bayern München have agreed to sell the final 5% stake of Bayern München AG to heating technology company Viessmann for €250 million —…
That number deserves a moment of attention. This is not a sudden pivot. Viessmann has been inside Bayern's commercial structure since 2018, starting as a regional partner in China, expanding to Southeast Asia in 2021, going global at the start of the 2022/23 season, and extending the partnership ahead of schedule in February 2026. Max Viessmann, CEO of Viessmann Generations Group, already holds a seat on Bayern's supervisory board. The equity sale is the structural confirmation of a long-running relationship. The commercial logic is straightforward: adidas, AUDI AG, and Allianz each hold 8.33% and sit at the top of Bayern's partner hierarchy. Viessmann now joins that tier — moving from platinum partner to main partner, alongside Telekom. For €250 million, Viessmann buys not just a financial stake but boardroom proximity, brand alignment with one of the most globally distributed clubs in football, and a seat at the table when commercial decisions are made. That is a different category of partnership than a shirt sleeve or a stadium naming right. For Bayern, the deal closes a chapter that has been open since Uli Hoeneß confirmed in November 2025 that the club could sell the remaining 5% without a member vote — and that a two-thirds majority for anything beyond 30% would never materialise. The Financial Times had reported Bayern came close to selling the stake to private equity firm EQT last winter. Choosing Viessmann over a financial sponsor signals a preference for industrial partners with operational presence in Bayern's ecosystem rather than pure capital. The counter-point worth watching: Bayern president Herbert Hainer said as recently as April 2025 that the club was not looking to sell its remaining shares. The speed of the reversal, and the fact this emerged via a single German-language report, means the deal is not yet confirmed by the club. The 50+1 rule also caps the ceiling — no investor, however deep-pocketed, can acquire a controlling position, which limits the upside for purely financial buyers and keeps the ownership story structurally different from Premier League or Serie A peers. If the deal closes as reported, Bayern will have quietly assembled one of the most strategically coherent minority shareholder registers in European football — four industrial giants, each with a long-term commercial relationship that predates the equity, and none with the leverage to override the membership. #BayernMunich #Bundesliga #SportsBusiness
118 reactions
3wCitigroup is circulating an eight-page sales brochure for Leicester City Football Club — a League One club with £103.6m in bank loans, mo…
That number deserves a moment of attention. The brochure, titled 'Project Lineup', packages the King Power Stadium, the £121m Seagrave training facility opened in 2020, Belgian sister club OH Leuven, and the women's team alongside a forecast turnover of more than £97m for the 2026 financial year. What it omits is instructive: the back-to-back relegations from the Premier League and Championship, the debt load, and the cumulative losses that accompanied the yo-yo years between 2023 and 2025. The commercial logic is straightforward: King Power, the Srivaddhanaprabha family's Thai duty-free business, has faced its own financial difficulties in parallel with the club's decline, and a clean exit at a premium to tangible asset value is the rational outcome. The 2016 Premier League title at 5,000-1, the 2021 FA Cup, the academy pipeline — Jeremy Monga sold to Manchester City for £10m last month — and the status as one of only five clubs to have won all three major English trophies since 2000 are real selling points, even from League One. The counter-point worth watching: the gap between a £200m-plus asset valuation and the operational reality of a third-tier club with significant debt is wide, and any buyer inherits a rebuild that runs deeper than the stadium and training ground. Distressed club sales at this price point attract interest but rarely close quickly — and the brochure's silence on liabilities will be the first thing any serious buyer's advisers address in due diligence. If a credible buyer emerges willing to absorb the debt and back a multi-year promotion campaign, Leicester's infrastructure — genuinely Premier League-grade in League One — is quietly one of the more defensible platforms in English football below the top flight. #LeicesterCity #FootballBusiness #SportsBusiness
72 reactions
2moRob McElhenney is now linking Wrexham AFC's orbit to a $644 billion fund.
That number deserves a moment of attention. The headline is straightforward: Wrexham co-owner Rob McElhenney has connected with a $644bn fund for a new sports investment. The details from the primary source are limited, but the direction of travel is clear — McElhenney is not treating Wrexham as a vanity project. He is building a capital network around it. This matters because it signals how the Wrexham story is evolving commercially. Three straight promotions, 2 million annual visitors to the town (up 20% since the 'Welcome to Wrexham' docuseries launched), and a global media footprint have turned a non-league Welsh club into a credible institutional conversation. That is not nothing. The commercial logic is straightforward: celebrity ownership creates awareness, but institutional capital creates durability. If McElhenney is now sitting across the table from a fund of this scale, it suggests the Wrexham brand has crossed a threshold — from entertainment story to investable sports asset. Ryan Reynolds and McElhenney have always framed the Wrexham project as being about the town as much as the club. A $644bn fund partnership, if it materialises into meaningful capital deployment, would accelerate infrastructure, academy development, and the commercial verticals that actually sustain a club through the volatility of promotion and relegation cycles. The honest counter-point: one reported link does not make a deal, and institutional funds circle many opportunities without converting. The Championship is also a brutal environment — Wrexham opens the 2025-26 season against Cardiff on August 17, and Premier League promotion is far from guaranteed. The brand only holds its premium if the football keeps delivering. Still, the fact that a $644bn fund is in the conversation at all tells you something real about where sports investment appetite sits right now — and about what McElhenney has quietly built beyond the documentary cameras. #WrexhamAFC #RobMcElhenney #SportsBusiness #SportsInvestment #FootballOwnership #Championship #WelcomeToWrexham
37 reactions
Start A Conversation
Buying, selling, or
exploring a sports deal?
We work discreetly with buyers, sellers and capital partners across sports M&A. Tell us about your mandate and we’ll take it from there.
Jorge Rolis · Founder & CEO · Lisbon, Portugal