Bilal Little:

Welcome to another edition of ETF Central. I'm your host, Bilal Little. I'm a director here at the New York Stock Exchange, and this particular episode is really important to me. This is one of my closest friends. His name is Marques Colston. He's a former NFL star where he not only won a Super Bowl during the 2009/2010 season, but he also played a pivotal role in really reshaping an entire city after Hurricane Katrina, which is New Orleans. I got to tell you, this one is important to me because I want to understand what has he been doing life after football, what are his new ventures? What is he talking about with clients, investors, and how has he transitioned into the investment landscape? So stay tuned. This is going to be a powerful one. Marques, welcome to the show.

Marques Colston:

I appreciate you having me, man.

Bilal Little:

Man, how's it feel coming down to the exchange?

Marques Colston:

I've been here a few times, man, but this is a different one. This is a special one. Just the ability to have this conversation, I feel like it's been a long time coming,

Bilal Little:

Man. It's been 25 years since we've known each other, and you wouldn't think 25 years ago we'd be sitting right here.

Marques Colston:

We've come a long way from the dorm room.

Bilal Little:

A long way. A long way. So Marques was my college roommate back in college at Hofstra University. He went on to do some amazing things, and I think it's important for you to tell your background, Marques, to the audience, this is a combination of investors, financial advisors, people in the ETF ecosystem, and just the entire investment landscape. But you've had a really interesting journey since you've sort of left playing football as a financial advisor, as an angel investor, as a participant, I would say, in the financial services market. How would you frame your background and since you transitioned from football and where you are today.

Marques Colston:

Man, I would say from the outside looking in, very random. So fortunate and blessed enough to play 10 years in the NFL, all with the New Orleans Saints. About a third of the way through that journey, I started my business journey. My first stop was as a owner operator of an indoor football team, which was crazy in hindsight, playing my season in New Orleans in the fall and then flying to Pennsylvania and running the team in the spring. But from there I got into angel investing. I've always been an inactive angel, and for me it was always around not just deploying the capital, but deploy the capital and figure out how I can add value, and that was really my way of learning. I guess paid internships, just reversing the pay.

So from there, once I got into the business world, was able to map my journey in becoming an NFL player to the journey of an entrepreneur. Just opened up the world in a whole different way for me, and that's when it became easier for me to move from place to place, from role to role industry to industry because I had this foundational mindset that allowed me to get to the NFL and thrive. I was able to take that, extract it and drop it into different places. And just like I said, a very random journey from the outside looking in. Go ahead.

Bilal Little:

Most people don't know you were also a financial advisor for a couple years.

Marques Colston:

Yeah, it's a lot of different stops, man. A lot of different stops. Like I said, the owner-operator piece, I did that for seven years, was an adjunct professor at University of New Orleans for a couple years teaching leadership and entrepreneurship, created a program at Columbia Business School in partnership with them to teach athletes how to invest, teach entrepreneurship and venture investing. And I think for me, it all revolved around this gap and kind of trying to create platforms and creating solutions that would've serviced the older version of me, the younger version of me, I should say. There's just so many gaps as an athlete that you experience and the service providers don't necessarily fill all of those gaps. And my journey in hindsight is really a journey of trying to retroactively fill those gaps. And financial advising was one of those areas that I wanted to get into, wanted to see if I could do it differently, see if I can put a different spin on the service provider aspect of it, just given the experience that I had as a player myself.

Bilal Little:

Would you say you went into these roles within financial services because of, one is the gap, but two, your curiosity just pulled you into them as well?

Marques Colston:

Yeah, I mean, you've known me for long enough to know that I've always kind of been a tinkerer, right? So curiosity is definitely the main driver in these because you have to be curious to step into new environments that are just foreign. And there's a bit of courage that comes along with that curiosity that says, "All right, you know me as this one thing. You know me as this entertainment figure from the field, but I want to step into your world. I want to humble myself enough to learn your world and then figure out how to take my lived experiences to augment what I'm doing in your world." And that's just kind of always been my approach to these different roles in these different industries.

Bilal Little:

What is it like to transition as a ... I mean effectively, you're a celebrity figure, right? And you transition into the world of financial services. I would feel that, look, I can't speak for you, but I know personally people tend to put you in a box. How do you sort of break that or dismantle that view of you?

Marques Colston:

Man, it's tough and it starts with the realization that some people will never let you out of that box. Their perception of you is just locked in. It is what it is. And the quicker you realize that there are some people that you can kind of change their perception while there are others that are always going to see you as the former football guy, that was a starting point for me. And learning through trial and error, how to identify those earlier and earlier and not to invest time, effort, and energy in those relationships that weren't going to move because you do get that a lot.

You do get anchored to your past. You do get anchored to your success in a lot of ways, and everyone likes to talk about the doors that it opens. What people don't necessarily talk about is once you walk in the door, if you're wearing the wrong uniform, so to say, you don't ever get to do what you came in the room to do, you're always entertaining, you're always shaking hands. You never get a chance to fully explore that room because you're trapped in the corner signing autographs and taking pictures.

Bilal Little:

Yeah. So if you can, let me stay on this for a second because I think it's important. What do you do or what have you done to change that and to at least control your controllable?

Marques Colston:

That's a great question, and I think you nailed it within the questioning. You got to control the controllables, like I said, just getting reps with entering these rooms and entering these conversations, you start to identify who is genuinely interested in what you have to offer versus who is interested in what you can do for them. And that pattern recognition kicks in the more you do it. And it really is a function of just becoming more intentional with the people that truly see you, investing time, effort, and energy there to make sure that those relationships are mutually beneficial and the superficial ones are going to stay superficial. So over time you just stop investing in those relationships and you really build the real relationships that are mutually beneficial.

Bilal Little:

No, man, that's fantastic. So I want to transition now and get into what are you doing now and what are you working on that you want people to know?

Marques Colston:

Man, I'm excited to be here to talk about it because this is ... I finally built a platform that makes what felt like a really random journey make sense. So a couple years ago started a firm, an asset, a sports investment firm called Champion Venture Partners. And when we started that firm, the North Star was always to launch a publicly available interval fund that invested across the sports landscape. And in a world where the sports asset class is coming of age, the sports asset class is getting a lot of attention even from the institutions at this point. Again, using that lived experience, it was really important for our team to create a vehicle that wasn't just serving the 1% again. So we set out to launch this interval fund called Champion Fund in a way that took the entire sports ecosystem, we call it the value chain of sports.

So the clubs and teams themselves, the franchises, the real estate aspects of it, the media and entertainment aspects of it, the service-based businesses that keep the lights on and keep the industry moving, taking all of these different disparate pieces and bringing them into a portfolio that one allowed investors to get access to the full breadth of sports. But two, opened the door for different type of investor, which includes the retail class of investor and not just super high net worth retail investors, but truly non-accredited investors can play in the same sandbox with accredited investors.

Bilal Little:

This is an interesting topic because we're seeing the democratization of investment across the entire spectrum. We also are seeing, I would say the infrastructure change when it comes to who can get access to what historically, and I want to sort of level-set this conversation so we can move forward, but historically you needed a financial advisor to pick and choose whatever the investments would be. And in essence, and this is again, I give a ton of credit to financial advisors, they can't control markets.

They can provide access, but dependent upon where their firm is located or how they do business with other investment managers, they may not have access to all of the investment products that might be suitable to meet your needs and interests. Post-covid, not only the ETF wrapper, but interval funds, closing funds, a lot of different investment strategies, they now are open and they can be purchased. So we're talking about the democratization of the entire investment landscape, but I want you to unpack the opportunities that are just, they may be overlooked by most people when it comes to all of the components or elements of the value chains of sports.

Marques Colston:

So before I unpack the value chain, you touched on a couple different, what I'll call tailwinds that we've really been tracking and following, which led us to launch this vehicle. I think what you just laid out and just the appetite for alternative investments as a whole is definitely one of those tailwinds. The more people get access to information, the more people get access to what's out there and publicly available, the more they have an appetite to want to go get it. So that's one of the huge tailwinds compounded by the fact that sports itself has slowly ... actually not slowly, quickly evolved from a seasonal entertainment-based business to a 24/7, 365 entertainment platform.

And when you combine those two tailwinds with the fact that you're just seeing some interesting things in the investment management landscape, you're seeing some of these VC firms, traditional VC firms, the largest VC firms kind of move to structures, the RIA structure that gives them more flexibility, gives them the ability to diversify even outside of just the early stage investment. I think those three tailwinds really dovetailed into our want and need to build this strategy in a way that, look, the NFL, NBA, NHL, NLB, that has been the investment conversation when it comes to sports. And the reality is there just not enough, there's just not enough people with the capital to make meaningful contributions to those investments, right?

Bilal Little:

For sure, for sure.

Marques Colston:

And I think that's one of the biggest reasons you're seeing the door get open for private equity because twofold, these family owners need liquidity to actually run the operations in a world where they have a ton of equity built in these positions, in these teams, but there's only so many individual people that can provide that liquidity. That's where the institutional capital starts to flow in. So when you start to unpack institutional investment coming into the space, there's a return profile that has to be met. So what you're going to slowly start to see is as institutional capital comes into the sports ecosystem, there's going to be more and more investment into that platform itself. And to me, that's where the sports value chain becomes really important because you buy a team at $10 billion, like the Lakers just got purchased for, at some point you have to continue to reinvest in that platform to continue to drive the growth.

Bilal Little:

You need growth.

Marques Colston:

So that's where the real estate players are going to come in. The media players are going to come in, the service-based businesses and the hospitality plays, and as the value creators in the ecosystem that are fans and athletes. You create the value, whether you're on the field like I was for 10 years, literally as the product, or you're the fan that's sitting in the stands or watching at home that is driving the eyeballs that create the media value that drives the whole valuation model. So you have these two different groups that are creating the value, the biggest catalyst for why the sport is valuable, but they don't have access to actually own it.

That's the opportunity that we saw as the product and as people, and this is where the experience comes in these different roles, is I've been the player, I've been the owner, I've been the financial advisor, and I'm able to see where all of these gaps lie and see where the value is truly created in the sports platform. So to be able to take all of those insights over the last 15 years and put them into a platform that gives the value creators access to it as an investment opportunity, that's the north star that I didn't know I was looking for.

Bilal Little:

Man, you laid out something that's so powerful because now you say it, I see it. But then you also see, see we're moving from legacy systems like media relationships that are now very disparate. Now I have nine different streaming platforms just to watch the same amount of games, let alone, so now that's fragmented. So we've gone actually from a unified platform to a fragmented platform. Then you also have, I would say, this sort of emerging new sports arenas from pickleball to watching minor league baseball and all of these different edutainment aspects of sports that no one ever paid attention to. But now it's almost niche like sporting events that you can pay attention to. How do you see that? Because no one wants to buy the ... certain people want to buy Lakers, people want value. Where do you see the most opportunity with some of the things that you're creating if you can speak broadly about, like the Maddox?

Marques Colston:

I would say this emerging leagues in sports that you just mentioned, they're really interesting to us for a couple of different reasons. The main reason is sports and the value around sports has become a game of distribution. The entertainment value itself, the live entertainment value, the live experience is one thing, but the distribution of those sports is what's truly driving the valuations through the roof. And in a world where the linear platforms, the CBSs, the ABCs of the world, they've bid these prices up so high, but they're not going to be in position to compete with the streaming platforms, the Netflix is an Amazon's that just print cash. So in a world where sports is always going to be appointment viewing, it's always going to have that live element to it.

As the media landscape gets more crowded, what I think is ultimately going to happen is some of these traditional and legacy players are going to have to find other places to go because their whole model is built around a captive audience with eyeballs that they can go sell against. So as more media players come into the space and the legacy players get displaced, they have to go somewhere to find that appointment viewing. And that's where the emerging leagues really get appetizing for us because as these legacy players find these other pockets to frequent, that's when you're going to see some of these emerging leagues. The values start to mirror the growth that we've seen in the big four, the big five over the last few decades.

Bilal Little:

Did you know there were over 1100 ETFs launched in 2025? How do you make sense? How do you find the tools and resources to compare contrast strategies? That's why there's etfcentral.com. It's a website where there's tools, resources, and a way to track and monitor your portfolio. Please visit etfcentral.com. Look, everyone's witnessed the Sticker prices of these franchises. We've all paid attention to them. Cowboys are worth this, right? Lakers are worth that. Yankees are worth that. You see these outlandish sort of contracts by the big four, but then viewership is going down and with this next generation, they are social first or mobile first, and in many of the platforms, they kick them off if they're streaming some of this stuff. So because you also do coaching and advising, how do you coach and educate the ecosystem, the people you're effectively looking to invest in and participate and work with about these sort of changing demographics because they got to pay attention to them, I assume?

Marques Colston:

It's very interesting. You're starting to see what I always call the big four, really the big five. There is scarcity there that creates that intangible value. If you were to look at some of the premier franchises, the Lakers, the Celtics, those that have that historic value to them, the historic brand, there's some intangible value built into those valuations. As an emerging league, you're not going to have that same luxury. So your fundamentals have to be sound. So I think what I look at is you have to understand where in the lifecycle you're investing, right? We're talking about the big four big five leagues. Take the MLS out of it for a minute because it's the newer of the bunch.

These are decades long platforms that have seen ... they're in the mature side of the lifecycle. So if you're investing into these emerging leagues, you have to understand that they're in an early stage in the lifecycle, and you've got to be able to invest in the fundamentals and be able to create enough of a fan experience and enough of an outsized interest that attracts, again, the catalyst is going to be media. So it's easy to fall in love with the sports themselves, but it's truly about the business fundamentals. It's truly about the one team that does really well in its geographic region, can't ... the one team that does really well is not going to be able to outpace a league that doesn't do well, right?

Bilal Little:

Correct.

Marques Colston:

Versus a league that does well is going to pull some of the lesser-

Bilal Little:

The laggards too.

Marques Colston:

Yeah. It is going to pull the laggards along with it. So it's strong league dynamic, strong league fundamentals and economics is where you start. And then again, back to the value chain conversation. If you can invest in strong leagues that have upside and growth potential, how do you augment that with the right platforms and the right plug and play types of technologies and plug and play types of opportunities that really cement it in a growth stage?

Bilal Little:

No, man, I think you know that. So let's lean into that part too, and I hope this is okay because I read a lot about data, right? Data is the new currency and it will be the currency of the future. And rather you want to talk about the news around SpaceX or whatever data centers and being able to mine data and unify data is going to be critical. So when you get sports fans in these rooms and they got all their cell phones, there's a sort of unique honeypot of data that's another part of that value chain of this very unique group of people that have all come together that have this common interest of this sort of sporting event. How are you guys looking at stuff like data as a partnership or as an opportunity as well?

Marques Colston:

It is front and center with the way that it's really the connective tissue for this whole ecosystem. A model that we really look to and really helped us develop this whole rules-based approach that we have is the battery in Atlanta. So they have the stadium itself, they have all of the retail, they have hotel properties, hospitality, they have all of these different pieces. They have an ecosystem basically in one place, but what they also have underground is the data that they extract from all of those different pieces.

And when you think about just a game itself, if you go into one of these stadiums, you go into SoFi Arena, you go into the Caesar Superdome, the amount of data that is generated in that three hours during that game with everyone sitting there with their cell phones out, recording, interacting with the big screen, interacting with all of the QR codes and all of the fan engagement pieces that exist in a game to keep somebody captive for three hours. The amount of data that gets driven just through that three hour period is mind-boggling. And the next wave of this is how do teams and organizations as now as platforms start to monetize that data? How do they start to license it? We're already seeing it with sports betting. We saw the explosion of sports betting, which is all driven through data

Bilal Little:

For sure. And that's expanded to predictive markets, and that continues to expand rapidly. I mean, even here we invested obviously $2 billion in Polymarket.

Marques Colston:

Back to one of the questions you asked earlier, it's all a function of fan engagement. So keeping that audience captive, it's creating opportunities to engage fans, which ultimately creates data, which kind of creates this virtuous cycle.

Bilal Little:

So this is important because I'm assuming you're studying publicly traded companies today and how they're participating on the media side. And one of the things that I always try to find is like, "Okay, well what's the ETF angle?" And the ETF angle is I look at the Netflix of the world or I look at the Hulu's, I mean obviously not public, but I look at some of these multimedia platforms and I'm like, "What are they doing? What are they doing that I should be doing or paying attention to?" How are you following? Or what are you following just on the public side to keep obviously the connective tissue?

Because you're looking at private opportunities and early stage venture opportunities. And then you're also looking at, well, who are some of the incumbents that technically are critical partners to pull these businesses along. And you think about it, look, I just use this example rather you look at boxing as a dying or legacy sport, the Jake Paul and all that stuff that they got going on, and their partnership within the streaming platforms is a good example of the evolution of the sport. How are you looking at some of that stuff, and how does that help drive or inform you?

Marques Colston:

So it's an interesting question that it's really bifurcated in my head. So the player in me, you understand what the competitive landscape looks like from the people competing. It's never about the entertainment itself, but the high level of preparation and performance is entertaining. But on the flip side of it, from the business landscape, it's really taking these private and off-market platforms that you don't really get a ton of data around because it's all in-house and it's looking to how they interface with these publicly traded companies that kind of give you tea leaves on where things are going.

So take the NFL as an example. It's really hard to get any data around a franchise through the NFL, right? The one outlier is the Green Bay Packers. Because they're publicly traded, the stock doesn't have any monetary value, but as part of that publicly traded piece of it, they have their annual reports. So the information that you see coming out about the NFL is a function of the Green Bay Packers and just extrapolating the data. So absent of that, you look to the Amazons of the world, you look to the Netflix's of the world in other leagues, you look to like MLS, you look to the Apples of the world and you-

Bilal Little:

And advertisers.

Marques Colston:

You see where the partnerships lie, where the revenue streams lie and how these publicly traded platforms. You get a feel for what the decision-making metrics are to partner with these live sports platforms. And it doesn't tell you the whole story, but it gives you enough context to try to figure out where the next moves are going to be made. And at the same time, like I mentioned before, as these new players are coming online, these legacy players are going to get displaced somewhere. So you track those metrics as well. It's kind of an ecosystem where everything that happens, there's kind of this domino effect, and you just follow the domino effect to the best that you can and to the information that's available, and you use those insights with your intuition and you make decisions.

Bilal Little:

So I want to ask you a question because that was actually really informative, but it actually sparked a question in my mind. You've had to kiss a lot of toads and frogs to get to where you are for people to understand the vision of what you're trying to build and develop. What's one thing on your wish list from investors or your ecosystem that you're trying to build that you would like to see sort of manifest a little faster?

Marques Colston:

That's a really good question because the obvious is just the speed and the pace of access. Being an interval fund, we are kind at the mercy of the SEC, and we've been in the process of getting green lit to launch our fund. And it makes it challenging as a new fund manager with a new fund concept in a relatively nascent asset class, to not be able to go and truly talk about what you're building. That presents some challenges, but the saving grace of sports is so sexy as an investment, and it is just so ubiquitous as a platform itself. You get interest. And one of the reasons we built this platform goes back to the value creators. We're seeing it in the college world. We're seeing the tide kind of turn to where the value creators are starting to be taken care of, but there's still this legacy feeling of it's not ever going to be the way it used to be. And in some aspects, you and I understand this as broke college athletes.

Bilal Little:

Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

Marques Colston:

How it used to be wasn't that great for the athlete.

Bilal Little:

No, not at all. Not at all.

Marques Colston:

So just that perception of the changes that are happening with the athlete, they kind of continue to get bastardized, and I'll say this, the athletes that get spoken about on a regular basis, you see the same handful of names over and over again.

Bilal Little:

Absolutely.

Marques Colston:

And that becomes the entirety of the athlete community, which is not the case. So the thing that I would love to see is more nuance around the athlete experience, and I think NIL within the college ranks is going to help speed that up. But we just kind of got to get over this feeling of nostalgia kind of driving everything.

Bilal Little:

Yeah. Maybe can you speak a little bit about NIL mean, look, it's not my core sort of function, and obviously I just read the headlines, but you're seeing massive, I mean not only private equity firms rather like Utah or Michigan State. I mean, you're seeing these hundreds of millions of dollars of donor advised funds effectively going to these universities to compensate these students without loyalty, without handcuffs. I mean, these are just blank checks effectively. How do you negotiate, communicate? What's happening there to your partners and everyone else? What needs to transpire there you think?

Marques Colston:

I think the next logical thing that has to happen is just guide rails around player movement, and as a function that coach movement. I think the business model itself makes sense on the surface. I think what's going to end up happening is we're going to calcify the different tiers of college athletics sooner than later. If you're not in the Big 10 or the SEC or one of the power four schools, you're going to have to redefine what a win looks like for you. The days of the Boise States, the Cinderella team coming out of nowhere and making it to the playoffs, and-

Bilal Little:

It's going to be hard to garner talent.

Marques Colston:

It is going to be really hard to retain that talent. So I think we're seeing a real evolution of how schools evaluate success. But at the same time, I think the guide rails that really govern player compensation, that's going to be the next big step that makes this thing go. Because you're right, the amount of money that's flowing into the space-

Bilal Little:

It's crazy.

Marques Colston:

It's one of those things where sooner and later when a novelty wears off, donors are fatigued at this point.

Bilal Little:

Where's my ROI?

Marques Colston:

Exactly. Where's the ROI? And as an investment, these schools are now going to be tasked with being better stewards of those dollars, and it's going to lead to a more professionalized operation. The kids are getting paid like professionals. The coaches have been getting paid like professionals, but the operations itself is still very much an amateur donor-based model. And I think that shift to what you just saw with Utah the other day, I think that's this seal being broken and an institution saying, "Look, this is now a professional operation and we have to operate as such."

Bilal Little:

Marq, man, this has been fascinating. So I want to sort of land the plane with this over the next five years. Where do you see Championship Ventures and the ecosystem that you're building? Where do you see things?

Marques Colston:

I would say five years out, my North Star would be, obviously you want to be able to launch a fund and invest successfully and create some significant returns for your investors. I think that's the table stakes, but I think more conceptually, the ability to use the sports asset class as a vehicle to make alternative investing more accessible, more available to every investor. That's kind of the North Star we're chasing. Sports is a really, really good entry point because it is so ubiquitous. But the reality is wealth building looks different based on your background, based on your upbringing, based on the resources that are available to you. And the vision here is to build something and build a platform that makes alternative investing accessible for everyone.

Bilal Little:

Marq, if you could tell people in the business world, one thing about viewing athletes as they transition, what would you tell them?

Marques Colston:

Ooh, there's so many things. I'll say this. More often than not, I get asked the question, what from my playing career have I been able to translate directly into business? And the answer is really not a whole lot. You have to go into the new industry, go into the new role, and you have to level set and learn how to do it. You have to learn what to do. You have to learn the roles and responsibilities of that role. What does translate is how you do it. And I always talk about this. Everyone wants to talk about Sundays plan on Sundays and how amazing that was. The real growth and the real opportunity for translation is in the process of getting to Sundays, right? It's the process of being 180 pound freshman at Hofstra with no real opportunity, no real shot on paper to make it, but believe in enough surrounding yourself with the people that are going to push you and bring the best out of you. And that process of going from vision to reality, that's the piece that athletes have mastered that you just got to repurpose in a new context.

Bilal Little:

Marques, that's amazing, man. Thank you so much for joining ETF Central.

Marques Colston:

Appreciate you man.