Lisa Leslie and Sha'Carri Richardson put money into a volleyball team that cost a reported $20 million, in a league that played its first match 21 months ago. Gunna left YSL Records and started his own label, in partnership with the company that owns YSL. j-hope and Nigo put an embroidered squirrel on a Nike Air Force 1 and are releasing it from one website in Tokyo. Welcome back to The Closeout. Let's get into it.

League One Volleyball, a women's professional league that grew out of a youth club system, announced the ownership group for its Miami expansion team last week. LOVB played its first match in January 2025. The names that traveled were Lisa Leslie and Sha'Carri Richardson.

The capital belongs to somebody else. LOVB Pro says the group is led by 3 investment firms, Suprette, Jett Sports and Fifth Down Capital, alongside the family office of Chase Coleman, who founded Tiger Global Management, and his wife, Stephanie. The league did not disclose the expansion fee. A person with knowledge of the deal told Forbes the owners are paying $20 million.

No individual stake was disclosed for anyone.

What did get disclosed is who said yes. Leslie is a Naismith Hall of Famer with 4 Olympic golds. Richardson is an Olympic gold medalist. Melissa Ortiz played for the Colombian national soccer team and now broadcasts. Anne O'Neil played in the WNBA and analyzes for ESPN. Ros Gold-Onwude played college and pro basketball and calls games. Hannah Stocking played collegiate volleyball before Forbes put her on a creator list.

6 women with careers in the sport or next to it, on the cap table of a women's professional franchise.

On the men’s side: Pusha T. Champ Bailey. Carlos Dunlap. Braxton Berrios. Volleyball Olympians Phil Dalhausser, Tri Bourne and Aury Cruz. And Ryan Clark, who ran as the Lead in Issue #19 after ESPN fired him on live television.

Here is the part that makes the $20 million interesting.

LOVB started with 6 clubs. This season it adds Los Angeles, Minnesota, San Francisco and Miami, which makes 10. Broadcast viewership on USA Network and ESPN more than doubled year over year. Season ticket and group sales grew by double digits. In December the league signed a multiyear deal with Victory+ to carry more than 20 regular season matches a year free to viewers. Underneath the pro league sit nearly 100 youth clubs reaching about 30,000 athletes across more than 30 states, and the league says more than 3 quarters of its pro athletes have national team experience.

It raised $160 million before it ever played a game.

Now price it against the rest of the shelf. Major League Volleyball reportedly sold a Los Angeles slot for $15 to $20 million. The NWSL sold Columbus for $205 million. WNBA expansion went for $250 million.

A volleyball franchise costs 8% of a WNBA franchise right now.

The women on this cap table are not the first ones to find that number. LOVB closed $100 million in November 2024 led by Atwater Capital, with Ares Management funds and Left Lane Capital, bringing it to $160 million. Lindsey Vonn was in it. So were Candace Parker and her daughter Lailaa, Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler, and Kevin Durant with Rich Kleiman's Boardroom Sports Holdings.

Issue #21 ran the WNBA version of this, where 5 athletes took equity before CNBC printed a $1 billion valuation on the Golden State Valkyries. That league now sells stakes at institutional prices.

Volleyball is where that league was 4 years ago, and the same kind of buyer is showing up earlier.

Candace Parker and Lindsey Vonn funded this league before it played a match. Leslie and Richardson bought the tenth team. Whoever buys the eleventh pays for what they built.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the reigning NBA MVP, joined the ownership group at Atlético Madrid, a club Apollo Sports Capital valued at €2.5 billion including debt when it took its 55% controlling stake in March.

Michael Strahan, the Hall of Fame pass rusher, launched Grand Slam of Flag through his company SMAC Entertainment, a 6-nation women’s flag football series carrying a $500,000 prize pool per event that debuts Super Bowl week in February.

Gunna, the Atlanta rapper who came up on Young Thug’s YSL Records and took DS4Ever to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2022, announced SB The Label on October 9, alongside a single called “Pop It.” He is the CEO.

His partner is Atlantic Music Group, and specifically 300 Entertainment, where co-presidents Rayna Bass and Selim Bouab said they were honored he entrusted them. AMG chairman Elliot Grainge said the same thing in his own words.

Here is the detail most of the coverage skipped. Gunna's last album, The Last Wun, came out in August on YSL Records. YSL Records is an imprint of 300 Entertainment.

So he left an imprint of 300 Entertainment and launched his own imprint with 300 Entertainment. Same parent company, different seat at it.

That is a real move and it is worth being precise about what kind. He went from an artist signed to somebody else's imprint to the CEO of one. He has a title, a roster and a partner. Whether he owns the masters his label puts out has not been stated anywhere, and financial terms were not disclosed.

Karl Fowlkes made this exact point in Issue #20. In music, he said, the org chart is settled. Lawyer, manager, PR, agent, everybody knows the job. His complaint about college sports was that no such chart exists, so nobody's role is defined and nobody's job is to object.

Gunna is operating inside the settled chart. He moved up one defined seat in a structure that already had a name for it.

The title is public. The ownership is not.

j-hope, the BTS rapper, and Nigo, the Japanese designer who founded A Bathing Ape in 1993, put their names on a Nike Air Force 1 Low together. Two-tone brown shiny leather, a squirrel embroidered on the heel counter, "J-Hope Air" and "Nigo Air" split across the tongue tags and heel, and a vintage-style box with a co-branded translucent case.

It drops October 17 at Humanmade.jp and nowhere else. The wider release follows October 22 on SNKRS and at select retailers. No price announced.

Nigo co-founded Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream with Pharrell in 2003, which Issue #21 covered from the other direction. Human Made is his.

Carlie Irsay-Gordon on Front Office Sports Tonight.

She became Owner and CEO of the Colts in 2025, after 13 seasons as vice chair, and talks to Bridget Condon about the attention that came with the job and how she runs the place. FOS Tonight is new: 30 minutes, Monday through Saturday, hosted by Matt Iseman, built around the business stories behind the games.

This issue opens with women buying into a league. Here is one running a franchise.

The Miami group paid a reported $20 million for a professional volleyball team. If somebody handed you $20 million tomorrow for a stake in any league, where would it go? Hit reply. I’m reading every one. See you next Wednesday.