O’Melveny’s Sports Group has more than a half-century’s experience providing business and legal advice to the some of the biggest names in sports. Our long history extends back to the 1950s, when we played a key role in bringing professional sports to California, handling the relocation of the then-Brooklyn-based Dodgers baseball franchise to Los Angeles, advising Jack Kent Cooke on his acquisition of the Lakers basketball team and structuring the deal that brought superstar Wilt Chamberlain to the Lakers from Philadelphia.
Today, the sports business is global—and so is our Sports Group. Our team has negotiated tens of billions of dollars worth of broadcast and new media rights licenses for sports programming around the world, structured complex cross-border investments and sports-related joint ventures, and worked with some of the industry’s best-known brands to develop and execute strategies for expanding their exposure to fast-growing emerging markets in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
And we continue to handle many of the legal matters that draw above-the-fold coverage in sports pages everywhere, from the acquisitions and dispositions of sports franchises to federal and special grand jury investigations into the use of performance-enhancing drugs to legal disputes and criminal charges involving professional athletes to lucrative network deals monetizing valuable sports content, our capabilities in the sports media space prompting law firm rankings publication
Chambers and Partners to describe our Sports Group as “a clear go-to for all things media and sponsorship-related.”
We also have a strong track record of advising clients on all stages of stadium and arena financing and development, including transactions related to facilities in Los Angeles (L.A. LIVE, Home Depot Center), San Francisco (AT&T Park), San Diego (Petco Park), Portland (Rose Garden Arena) and others. We assist our clients in developing creative deal structures, including combinations of public and private debt financing, as well as cutting-edge approaches such as securitizations and tax-advantaged financing.
For more information, visit our
Entertainment, Sports and Media,
Entertainment and Media Litigation, and
Project and Infrastructure Finance and Development pages.