Investing in sports is valuable in part because it is one of the last apolitical cultural touchstones in an otherwise polarized environment, sport investor and venture capitalist Mark Ein said Wednesday.
“Sports and music are the two things that really bring us together at scale at a time when we need more connective tissue,” Ein said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit.
Ein’s portfolio spans football, soccer, baseball, and tennis, including the Washington Commanders, Leeds United, and the Baltimore Orioles. Ein also owns the Mubadala DC Open tennis tournament.
“The greatest compliment I’ve gotten from my tennis tournament is… that people say it’s the greatest melting pot of our community when they go there,” Ein said.
At Commanders games, Ein said, “people are high-fiving the person next to them, and they don’t know who they voted for, they don’t know what they do for a living. They don’t know what religion they are. They don’t care.”
Still, sports hasn’t been immune from America’s culture wars: Most recently, some conservative commentators have criticized the NFL for choosing Puerto Rican singer and rapper Bad Bunny — whose songs are entirely in Spanish — to perform the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show.
Ein said “everything in the world” is subject to such fraught discourse, but sports is the “least” exposed.