Facets
Is Edward Rogers About to Be the Wealthiest Man in Professional Sports?
Michael Smith
Toronto
//
June 2026
The largest shake-up in the global sports world is happening right here in Toronto, and what that means for you.
Edward Samuel Rogers III has a number on his wall. Not literally. I doubt the chairman of Rogers Communications is quite that theatrical. But figuratively, unmistakably, in the way that certain men of a certain ambition carry a fixed point on the horizon that organizes everything else in their field of vision. That number, I believe, is $21.17 billion. That is the current enterprise value of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, the American colossus built by Stan Kroenke that owns the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, Arsenal Football Club, and a constellation of other franchises across five continents. It is, by most measures, the most valuable privately held sports and entertainment company on earth. And if my read of what is unfolding in Toronto this summer is correct, Ed Rogers intends to surpass it.
In my view, everything that is happening in Toronto's sports and media landscape in the summer of 2026 flows from that singular ambition: every acquisition, every merger, every quiet conversation in the corridors of Bay Street. The proximate event is surgical in its simplicity. Rogers Communications is acquiring the remaining 25% stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment from Larry Tanenbaum's Kilmer Group for approximately $3 billion. But to frame this as merely a transaction is, I think, to miss the point entirely. It looks to me like a piece of a far larger puzzle that Ed Rogers has been assembling, methodically and with great patience, with the explicit goal of building the world's dominant sports and entertainment empire. Not the largest in Canada. The largest globally, full stop.
Should the deal close as expected, Rogers could control the three most storied franchises in Toronto under a single operational banner to be christened Rogers Sports & Entertainment (RSE), bundled with Sportsnet, the country's most-watched sports network. If that happens, it would represent a vertical integration so complete, so elegantly ruthless, that I suspect competitors are only beginning to grasp what is being assembled around them.
The Numbers
$3B
Estimated value of Kilmer Group's 25% MLSE stake.
$21B
Current enterprise value of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment.
2030
Target year for an NFL franchise kick-off in Toronto, pending league approval and stadium construction.
"To surpass Kroenke, Rogers must build something the Canadian sports market has never seen: a conglomerate that doesn't just own the teams, but owns the conversation around them."
—Michael Smith, June 2026
The Empire Takes Shape
What strikes me most about the Rogers play is that its genius lies not in the acquisition itself, which has been anticipated for years, but in what could come after. To surpass Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, Rogers cannot simply own hockey and basketball teams in one market, however large. He needs scale, integration, and the kind of media leverage that turns sports assets into something far more valuable than the sum of their franchises. The merger of the Blue Jays' and MLSE's front office and business operations into a single entity, to be named Rogers Sports & Entertainment, looks to me like the architecture for exactly that. And underneath all of it sits Sportsnet, the asset that could transform RSE from a sports holding company into something qualitatively different: a unified commercial machine capable of offering a sponsor, in a single conversation, access to the Maple Leafs, the Raptors, and the Blue Jays across television, digital, radio, and live event, all potentially controlled by a single entity. It is the kind of cross-platform scale that brands have been told to chase for twenty years and has, until now, simply not existed in Canada. Rogers may be about to put it on the market.
For the major corporate categories that have long competed for category rights across Toronto's professional sports landscape (financial services, automotive, spirits, telecommunications, and beyond), the implications are, in my opinion, seismic. RSE would likely look to synchronize contract expiration dates across its portfolio, creating all-or-nothing negotiating leverage that has never previously existed in this market. Want the Leafs? You may find yourself buying the Raptors and the Blue Jays, too. The most logical extension of this strategy, as I see it, would be to further fragment commercial categories, carving the broad "financial services" bucket into retail banking, wealth management, and insurance, mirroring the sophisticated rights models long employed by the NFL and the English Premier League. For the Bay Street institutions that have rested comfortably inside broad exclusivities for decades, negotiating renewals one franchise at a time, this would represent not merely a recalibration, but a structural dismantling of the landscape around which they have built their sports marketing strategies.
The Departure of Larry Tanenbaum
In any drama of ascent, there must be those who exit the stage. Larry Tanenbaum is an affable, enormously successful real estate and private equity titan who has served as MLSE chairman and, in many respects, the emotional steward of the Leafs' long-suffering fanbase. He will depart with his pockets full, his legacy intact, and $3 billion to show for it. What happens next is, admittedly, speculation on my part, but it is speculation worth taking seriously.
The scenario worth considering is this: Rogers, eager to streamline RSE around its crown jewel properties, may look to push the sale of Toronto FC and the Toronto Argonauts as part of the broader transaction. Neither franchise fits neatly, in my view, into the global sports conglomerate Ed Rogers is trying to build: MLS and the CFL do not move the commercial needle in this market the way the Leafs, Raptors, and Blue Jays do, and carrying them would introduce operational complexity without meaningfully advancing the Kroenke benchmark. If that is how it unfolds, Kilmer would not be chasing these assets so much as receiving them at the right price. Combined with the Toronto Tempo and a freshly announced $100 million US investment in the PWHL, making Kilmer the league's first Canadian investor, a favourable deal could hand Tanenbaum a portfolio that spans women's sport, community football, and professional hockey. It is not the empire he originally built. But it is coherent, forward-looking, and entirely his own. A consolation prize, perhaps. Or perhaps something more interesting than that.
The Man He Wants to Surpass
To understand the full scope of what Ed Rogers is attempting, it helps to understand the man whose benchmark he has chosen. Stan Kroenke is the template for what a twenty-first century sports empire looks like when built to its logical conclusion. The son-in-law of Walmart founder Sam Walton, Kroenke spent decades quietly acquiring franchises the way other men acquire real estate: methodically, without fanfare, always with an eye on the long game. Today, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment controls the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids, and most glamorously, Arsenal Football Club in the English Premier League. It is a vertically integrated business anchored by in-house broadcast assets and amplified by SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, a $5.5 billion monument to the convergence of sport, entertainment, and real estate. Its enterprise value sits at approximately $21.17 billion USD. It is the gold standard of diversified sports ownership, the thing that all serious players in the industry measure themselves against.
Ed Rogers is following the same blueprint, with one crucial difference. Kroenke assembled his empire quietly, over decades, largely beneath the radar of public consciousness. Rogers has announced his intentions with a clarity that is almost startling. In my view, the $21.17 billion figure is not a whispered aspiration: it is the target I believe Rogers is building toward. And what strikes me is that in pursuing it so deliberately, Rogers is doing something Kroenke never needed to do: making the ambition itself part of the strategy, turning the pursuit of scale into a narrative that attracts investors, partners, and attention in roughly equal measure.
If the MLSE acquisition is the opening move, the endgame, as I see it, is an NFL franchise. Ed Rogers has made little secret of it. The 50,000-seat Rogers Stadium, which opened at the former Downsview airport site in June 2025, offers a useful piece of context here, though it is worth being precise: Rogers didn't build it. The venue was conceived, financed, and constructed by Live Nation Canada, with Rogers purchasing the naming rights and telecom sponsorship. It is a distinction that matters, because it illustrates exactly where Rogers currently stands in the Downsview story: as a brand on the signage, not a hand on the deed. The permanent stadium Ed Rogers would actually want to build is a different proposition entirely, and it would require a far more consequential conversation than a sponsorship agreement.
That conversation would need to happen with two landlords, neither of whom is easily moved. The 520-acre Downsview site is jointly controlled by Northcrest Developments, a subsidiary of the Public Sector Pension Investment Board and one of Canada's largest institutional investors, which purchased the former airport lands from Bombardier in 2018, and Canada Lands Company, a federal Crown corporation that owns and operates Downsview Park itself. Any proposal to carve out a section of this land for an NFL-calibre stadium would require negotiating with both a pension fund answerable to millions of Canadian retirees and the Government of Canada. It is, in the most literal sense, public land. The political and regulatory dimensions alone would, in my estimation, dwarf the franchise fee.
And yet the site strikes me as, by far, the most viable in the GTA for a project of this scale: a vast former airfield already threaded with TTC and GO Transit access, positioned along the 401 corridor, with the footprint to accommodate a world-class enclosed stadium and its surrounding infrastructure. To even enter the conversation with the NFL, Rogers would need to arrive with serious capital, and that raises a question worth examining. The NFL, for its part, is not indifferent. The league has made no secret of its international expansion ambitions, with games already being played in London, Frankfurt, and São Paulo. But Toronto, the fourth-largest city in North America, remains what I consider the great unfinished business of its expansion story on home soil. A market the NFL has openly courted for decades, sitting just across the border from its heartland, without a franchise to call its own. But before Rogers can talk to Roger Goodell, he would need to talk to a pension fund and a Crown corporation. That meeting may prove the harder of the two.
"A permanent facility at Downsview would secure a year-round monopoly on Tier 1 global stadium tours and high-profile international sporting events in Canada."
—Michael Smith, June 2026
Finding the Money: The Art of Selling a Piece of the Dream
There is, of course, a rather pressing question that sits beneath all of this grand ambition like a fault line: where does the money come from? Acquiring an NFL franchise, even entering the preliminary conversations that precede one, is a financial undertaking of staggering scale. In my estimation, Rogers would need to arrive at the table with a minimum of $3 to $4 billion to secure a controlling stake in an expansion franchise. The total expansion fee could run anywhere between $8 and $10 billion, meaning Rogers would need to assemble a broader ownership group to round out the remainder. The NFL's debt ceiling of approximately $1.5 billion for franchise acquisitions further constrains the financing options, making outside equity not just helpful but essential. Rogers Communications is a large and profitable enterprise, but it is also a publicly traded telecommunications company with shareholders, debt obligations, and a board that answers to more than one man's vision of sporting destiny. You cannot simply redirect the cable bill revenues toward a football team.
The most logical path forward, as I see it, is elegant in its ambition if formidable in its execution. Rogers Sports & Entertainment, once fully constituted as a standalone entity, could sell a significant equity stake, either to a consortium of venture capital and private equity investors, or through a public market listing, or some combination of both. The logic seems sound to me. RSE would enter the market as arguably the most compelling sports and entertainment investment vehicle ever assembled in Canada: three major-league franchises, an in-house broadcast network, and a chairman with a documented, public ambition to build the world's largest sports conglomerate. For the right institutional investor, whether a sovereign wealth fund, a US-based private equity house, or a sports-focused VC with an appetite for Canadian market exposure, a stake in RSE could be a trophy asset of the first order.
The NFL itself has opened its ownership structures to private equity in recent years, recognising that the capital requirements of modern franchise ownership have outgrown the traditional model of the sole billionaire proprietor. In that context, Ed Rogers would not merely be asking the NFL for a franchise. He would be arriving with a financial structure that speaks the league's own evolving language. As for an IPO, a Rogers Sports & Entertainment listing on the TSX, or more provocatively on a US exchange, would be a cultural event as much as a financial one, potentially inviting Canadians to buy into the dream while simultaneously generating the capital that makes $2 billion franchise conversations possible. Whether Rogers pursues the private route, the public one, or threads both simultaneously, how he finances this ambition will be as closely watched as the ambition itself.
Bell's Uncomfortable Seat
There is one party conspicuously absent from this story of consolidation, and their silence feels, to me, like its own kind of signal. Bell Media, through TSN, has long shared the Toronto sports broadcast landscape with Rogers' Sportsnet in an uneasy duopoly. That arrangement, never exactly warm, could become something far more adversarial. Should Rogers assume full control of MLSE, the migration of Maple Leafs and Raptors regional broadcast rights from TSN to Sportsnet seems to me not just likely but strategically inevitable. For Bell, this would not be a scheduling inconvenience. It would be the slow removal of the inventory that justifies TSN's existence.
Consider what TSN's sports broadcast proposition might look like in a world where Rogers controls the Leafs, the Raptors, and the Blue Jays, the three franchises that drive the overwhelming majority of sports viewership in English Canada. Bell could be left with rights to properties that, however meritorious, do not move the needle in the same way: CFL games, international soccer, some NHL national packages, the odd tennis tournament. That is a portfolio that supports a respectable regional sports network. It does not, in my view, support the national sports media brand that TSN has spent four decades building.
The question I keep coming back to is whether Bell would simply absorb the loss, accepting a diminished but sustainable role in the Canadian sports media ecosystem, or whether the strategic logic of retreat would eventually prove irresistible. A full divestiture of TSN and its affiliated sports radio stations would allow Bell to concentrate on its telecommunications and streaming assets, shedding the cost structure of a linear sports network in an era when linear television is already under structural pressure. Should that happen, Rogers could preside over something approaching a broadcast monopoly on professional sport in English Canada. The CRTC would have opinions. The competition bureau would have questions. And Ed Rogers, one imagines, would have answers prepared well in advance.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
For the average Toronto sports fan, the one who has bled blue and white through decades of playoff heartbreak, who stays up past midnight for west coast Jays games, who has begun tentatively to believe in a Raptors rebuild, the Rogers consolidation may feel like an abstraction right now. I don't think it will stay that way. It is likely to be felt in subscription bundles and streaming packages, as broadcast rights migrate behind an increasingly integrated Rogers paywall. It will probably be felt in the price of a premium seat at Scotiabank Arena. And it could be felt, more subtly, in the texture of the broadcast itself: in which stories get told, which sponsors get amplified, which narratives a company that both owns the team and controls the camera chooses to foreground. The question I find most compelling is this: what does consolidation into a $21 billion global conglomerate mean for the Canadian fan's sense of cultural ownership over their own teams? The Maple Leafs have always felt, to me, like a public trust, a source of collective suffering and occasional joy that belongs to the city rather than to any shareholder. Whether that feeling survives is, ultimately, the most human question in this entire story, and the one no balance sheet can answer.
For corporate sponsors and media buyers, the implications could be equally profound. The comfortable bilateral category deals that brands have renewed on autopilot for years may give way to something more demanding, more expensive, and considerably less forgiving of inertia. Those that move quickly and position themselves inside RSE early could secure terms that look like bargains within a decade. Those that hesitate may find themselves boxed out of opportunities entirely, or bidding at a market rate that bears little resemblance to what they pay today.
Ed Rogers is turning fifty-seven. He inherited a telecommunications empire and appears, to me, to be in the process of transforming it into something altogether more grand: a global sports and entertainment conglomerate with a single, declared ambition to be the biggest in the world. Stan Kroenke built his empire across decades, acquiring franchises on two continents with the quiet, relentless patience of a man who never needed to announce himself. Ed Rogers is making his intentions rather more public. Whether he gets his NFL franchise, whether the stadium rises at Downsview, whether Rogers Sports & Entertainment one day prints a number that eclipses $21.17 billion, none of that is certain, and I would be the first to admit it. What I do believe is that a Canadian, in a country that has rarely produced this species of sporting ambition, has decided to play the game at the highest level it has ever been played. The clock is running. The target is set. And Ed Rogers, by all available evidence, is just getting started.
About
the
author
Mike Smith
Vice president, Partnerships
Mike brings over 15 years of global experience structuring partnerships across athletes, properties, and brands. As Head of Partnerships, he operates at the intersection of strategy and creativity— advising brands on how to navigate the business of sport.
He can be reached at msmith@experiencediamond.com
The views expressed in this piece are the author's own analysis and opinion. All projections are speculative.
Let’s talk.
The best way to get to know us—and how we work with clients—is by reaching out.
