Football as a legacy minority
Silver Lake is a technology-focused private-equity firm with roughly $100bn under management, co-led by Egon Durban and Greg Mondre. Its football footprint is a single position: a minority stake in City Football Group, taken in 2019. Durban is the firm's sport-and-media lead, but the CFG holding is passive and illiquid, with no control rights and no governance footprint comparable to the firm's other sport bets.
The firm's real sport thesis is not football at all. In 2025 Silver Lake completed a ~$25bn take-private of Endeavor, making it one of the largest controlling owners of live-sports IP on earth — Endeavor holds the controlling stake in TKO Group, the listed parent of UFC and WWE. Against that, CFG is a legacy minority the firm has held for more than six years.
Scale, structure, and the football stake
How the firm actually deploys
Football is the least strategic part of Silver Lake's sport book. CFG is a passive, illiquid minority with no control rights, held now for over six years — likely a fund-VI vintage approaching the end of its hold window. The firm's attention and governance sit elsewhere: Durban chairs Endeavor and sits on the TKO board, and the firm's real bet is owning the rails of live combat and entertainment IP rather than a slice of a football operating group.
Under Silver Lake, the strategy reads as classic technology-PE value creation — consolidate, attach durable IP, defend pricing. The CFG stake is increasingly hard to value publicly because no secondary transaction has reset the 2019 mark, which means any “gain” is narrative rather than realised. The contested Endeavor take-private price, subject to appraisal litigation, is a live variable in the firm's reported returns.
Direction in 2026
The 2026 posture is concentration. Endeavor and TKO are now the firm's single largest global position, and the IP-consolidation logic playing out there — pulling IMG, On Location and PBR under TKO — is where capital and management attention are directed. Football is steady-state by comparison.
The open question for football observers is liquidity: with the CFG holding past six years, whether Silver Lake seeks an exit — a secondary sale or a buy-back by Abu Dhabi's ADUG — before the relevant fund winds down, and whether such a transaction would finally reset the 2019 valuation that everyone quotes but no one has marked.
- Silver Lake releases (SLP VII close; CFG 2019 deal; Endeavor completion)
- PitchBook (CFG $4.8bn valuation)
- Sportcal, SportBusiness (CFG stake increase)
- SportsPro; TKO filings (IMG/On Location/PBR $3.25bn)
- Caveat: CFG current stake % and any post-2019 valuation mark are not disclosed