You. are. The yield.

There is a specific feeling — if you grew up on sports, you know exactly what it is — of belonging to something that has nothing to do with money. The walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth with the bleachers losing their minds. The game-seven buzzer-beater that makes strangers hug each other in parking lots. The jersey you wore to school the next day as a declaration of civic identity.

I am a father. I have kids who love to play sports. I coached baseball. It became part of my parenting philosophy around the ideals of competition — the pure version, where effort and heart and team and will determine outcomes.

I thought it was one of the last remaining domains in American life that the machinery of financial extraction had not fully colonized.

I was wrong.

The Los Angeles Lakers sold this summer for $12.5 billion. The man who bought them flipped them at a $2 billion profit in just over a year — the same man facing intense SEC and federal probes into how his life insurance entities funneled billions in policyholder cash into his private holdings.

The Lakers were a liquid high-leverage asset to park capital while the investigation played out. A place to put money. A jersey to put on it.

The Dodgers are run by Guggenheim Partners — a private equity titan that defers hundreds of millions in player contracts into the 2040s not because it’s better for the franchise but because it’s sophisticated cash-flow engineering designed to maximize present-value yield while pushing tax liabilities down the road. Winning a World Series is a branding exercise. The real return is in the real estate portfolio, the regional TV rights deal, and the institutional investor’s expectation of 8-12% annual return on a multi-billion dollar sports asset.

When institutional investors expect that return, here is what they do not care about: affordability, championships, civic pride, the bleachers, the walk-off, the buzzer-beater, your kids.

Here is what they do care about: ticket revenue, parking revenue, concessions yield, streaming subscription fragmentation, merchandise margin, and the EBITDA figure that positions the asset for the next buyout.

You. Are. The yield.

Your loyalty is the asset being securitized. Your history with the team — the years you spent caring, the money you spent on jerseys your kids outgrew, the cable package you kept because you couldn’t miss the playoffs — these are what private equity underwrote when they valued the franchise. Your passion is the collateral.

And the collateral is being called.

A decent seat at a major West Coast venue costs four figures. Parking costs what a family dinner used to cost. A beer costs more than an hour of minimum wage. The regional sports network that used to come with your cable package has been disaggregated across three streaming services because every rights holder in the chain needs to extract maximum yield per subscriber per platform.

This is not the escalation of player contracts. This is the Asymmetric Extraction theorem applied to civic culture. The same mechanism that harvests financial volatility, that profits from war, that extracts value from communities without returning it — has been applied to the thing you were watching on a Sunday afternoon with your kids to escape all of that.

There is no escape.

The Clippers built a billion-dollar arena in Inglewood and are facing allegations of off-book deals and shell entities used to circumvent salary cap regulations — corporate web-work and side-channel arrangements that settle the game not on the court but in offshore structuring meetings.

I am done.

Not angry-done. Decided-done. The quiet resignation of someone who has watched the machinery consume one thing after another and has finally run out of domains to protect from it.

The game was supposed to be pure. The game was supposed to be the one thing that remembered what it felt like before everything became a transaction.

The Lakers were not a basketball team.
The Dodgers are not a baseball team.
They are instruments of capital allocation wearing jerseys.

And we are the data points in the model that prices the exit.

I’m out.

Not of sports — my kids still play, I still watch them on a Saturday morning in the cold, and nothing about that has changed. But of the professional entertainment product that uses civic identity as distribution infrastructure for a private equity return.

The game I loved was never for sale.

What they sold was never the game.

KJS August 2026