Paul Rabil was sick of Major League Lacrosse. It was 2017, and Rabil, a two-time MVP, was embarrassed to tell people he was a professional lacrosse player. He had good reason. In the world of pro sports, lacrosse had a pitiful reputation, if it had a reputation at all. Founded in 1999 as the first professional outdoor lacrosse league, MLL never attracted a meaningful fan base. Attendance had plummeted by 40 percent since 2011, to an average of just 3,800 per game. By comparison, the NCAA men’s lacrosse championship game once drew nearly 50,000 fans.
MLL also offered one of the worst player experiences in all of professional sports. Players worked full-time jobs outside of lacrosse and played games on weekends during the summer. The base salary for rookies was $6,000. When the league made travel arrangements, it would sometimes book players on connecting flights to save money. What’s more, players didn’t always have access to basic amenities like locker rooms and showers—or ice baths. Rabil had to buy ice at the CVS across the street from his apartment to treat his knee and foot.
After more than a decade in MLL, Rabil knew that professional lacrosse was broken. So he set out to fix it. In 2017, in partnership with his brother Mike, a serial entrepreneur who ran a small investment firm, Paul raised a pool of capital from a group of private equity firms and hedge funds and made an offer to acquire MLL for $35 million. The bid failed. Then the Rabils decided to do something crazy: They would start their own league.
In so doing, they would become the closest thing in the sporting world to entrepreneurs. In sports, the teams aren’t the startups now; the leagues are. A GM might have a founder’s spirit Oakland A’s), but, generally speaking, a sports team today is no more an entrepreneurial venture than a fast-food franchise is.
