Europe’s sports landscape is fragmented across multiple federations and rights structures, which is enough to deter most generalist capital. However, Athvance Capital sees that complexity as its edge, and has spent its first year building a portfolio spanning multi-club football, combat sports, padel and beach volleyball and the infrastructure that holds them up.

Launched in January this year, Athvance Capital is a European sports investment fund founded by Danny Menken, the former Eurosport managing director and Eleven Sports co-founder, with ex-JP Morgan investment banker Karim Ben Rejeb.

It targets emerging and under-commercialised sporting assets, with the intention of building an integrated ecosystem of businesses that can be scaled long term. 

Athvance officially launched at the beginning of this year. What opportunity and trends were you seeing that convinced you now was the right time to launch the platform?

First, sport has finally been recognised as a genuine asset class – capital is flowing in, but almost all of it is chasing the same handful of trophy properties at prices that leave very little room to actually build.

Second, the operational side of sport has been transformed. Content, distribution, fan data, monetisation – the infrastructure that used to be the preserve of the biggest leagues is now available to properties several tiers down.

So you have a moment where there’s an enormous universe of under-commercialised sports IP, and for the first time the tools exist to professionalise it at reasonable cost. 

Coming out of Eleven Sports, Eurosport and Infostrada Sports Group, and my co-founder from JP Morgan we have lived both sides of that – the media and operating reality, and the capital markets reality. We built Athvance because that gap between where value is being paid for and where value can actually be created has never been wider.

You have characterised the company as an investment platform as opposed to a fund. How does your approach differ from a traditional private equity vehicle and other investors in the market?

A closed-end fund is built around a clock. You raise, you deploy over a fixed window, and then you are structurally forced to sell – often exactly when an asset is starting to compound. That timeline is fundamentally mismatched with how sports IP matures. We are structured as an evergreen industrial group, not a fund. That means we can hold as long as an asset is creating value, and it means we’re operators sitting inside the businesses, not allocators watching from a board seat once a quarter. The other real difference is that we bring shared infrastructure. When we invest, a portfolio company plugs into proprietary technology and media capabilities – content operations, club management, fan monetisation – that they could never build alone. We are deploying a repeatable operating system across everything we own. That’s much closer to an industrial holding company than to a traditional PE vehicle.

What informed your decision to focus on the European market specifically? Would you ever expand that scope if the right opportunity presented itself

Europe is where the inefficiency is greatest, and inefficiency is where our edge lives. The US sports market is deep, mature and, frankly, efficiently priced. Europe is fragmented – dozens of federations, languages, jurisdictions and rights structures – which scares off a lot of generalist capital but is precisely where founder-led, under-commercialised IP is sitting undervalued.

Our network and operating history are European, so we can move through that complexity faster than most. That said, sport is global and so is the value. Football, combat sports, padel, beach volleyball – these are international by nature, and our IP is built to scale across borders. We are European by base and by discipline, not by dogma. If a property fits the thesis and the geography extends the value of something we already own, we will follow it.

There has been an influx of capital into premium sports properties over the last decade. Why do you believe the next wave of value creation will come from assets outside of that top tier?

Because at the top tier, the value has largely already been paid for.

When you buy a major-league franchise or elite media rights today, you are paying a price that assumes near-perfect execution – the upside is priced in, and you are mostly betting on multiple expansion continuing forever. 

Outside that top tier, you find properties with real fanbases, real cultural relevance and real growth, that have simply never been commercialised properly. They have been run by passionate people who are brilliant at the sport and were never given the tools or capital to build the business around it. That’s the opportunity. 

You can enter at a sensible entry multiple, apply professional content, distribution and monetisation, and change the asset trajectory. The value there is not financial engineering – it is operational. You are not hoping the market re-rates the asset; you are building the earnings yourself.

You have already made a series of investments, including in ve2ventures, the Estrella multi-club football group and Levels Fight League. What’s the thread that ties them together? What are the key criteria you’re looking at when evaluating opportunities?

The thread is under-commercialised IP with authentic fan connection, paired with the technology that lets us scale it. That second part is deliberate. With ve2ventures we backed a company whose whole purpose is to buy and build the media and operating infrastructure – content, club management, fan monetisation – that makes every other property we own more valuable. It sits underneath the portfolio as the enabler. Then there’s the IP itself: Levels Fight League, a founder-led combat property with real cultural relevance and proven talent development; multi-club football, where operational discipline and shared infrastructure compound across sites.

When we evaluate an opportunity, three questions matter most. Is there a real, engaged community we can grow rather than manufacture? Is it founder-led and culturally authentic – because you can’t fake that? And is it under-monetised relative to its underlying value, so there’s genuine operational headroom to build into? Get honest answers to those and the financial case tends to take care of itself.

Your leadership team boasts experience across a range of sectors within sport. Given that operational expertise, how actively involved do you plan to be with your portfolio companies?

Very. That’s the whole point of how we’re built – we are operators first. But active doesn’t mean we run over founders. The reason a property is worth backing is usually the founder and the culture they’ve created, and if we crush that, we have destroyed the very thing we bought. So the model is: founders keep the sporting vision and identity, and we come in behind them on everything they’ve never had – commercial strategy, content and media, distribution, data, monetisation, M&A. Donovan continues to lead the sporting direction at LFL; we support the expansion around it. Practically, that means our team is embedded, not observing. We share infrastructure and people across the portfolio, so a founder isn’t rebuilding a content operation or a commercial function from zero – they inherit ours. It’s hands-on where we add value and hands-off where they do.

So far you have invested in sports like football, padel and combat sports. Are there specific sports you’re focusing on or is it more about the potential of the property itself?

It’s the property, not the sport – though certain verticals do have structural tailwinds we like. Padel is the obvious one: one of the fastest-growing sports in the world, still early in its commercialisation, exactly the kind of curve we want exposure to. Combat sports has that global growth trajectory combined with founder-led authenticity. But we don’t start with a list of sports and go shopping. We start with the property. A brilliant, under-commercialised asset in a smaller sport will beat a mediocre one in a fashionable sport every time. What we are really underwriting is community, authenticity and monetisation headroom – and those can show up in almost any discipline. The sport is the context; the property is the investment.

Athvance has been described as a provider of patient, flexible capital. How does that philosophy inform how you think about potential exit pathways, and what does a successful outcome look like for Athvance and the assets you invest in?

Patient capital changes the entire conversation about exits, because we’re not obligated to sell. Our evergreen structure means we can hold an asset for as long as it keeps compounding, and that alignment is felt by founders on day one – they know we’re not going to force a sale into a weak window just because a fund clock ran out. When exits happen, they should happen because it’s genuinely the right moment for that asset and its people, not because our structure demands it. Flexibility works the same way on entry: majority or minority, lead or co-invest, we shape the instrument around what the situation needs rather than forcing every deal into one template. A successful outcome, for us, is an asset that’s meaningfully more valuable and more professional than when we arrived – better monetised, wider reach, stronger community – with the founder’s original vision intact. 

More broadly, what does success look like for Athvance in both the immediate and longer term?

Success is really about validation of the model, and we are already seeing it on two fronts.

The first is investor appetite. We closed €60M in 2025 but the more telling signal is who’s leaning in. We are having energising conversations with US institutional investors – family offices and sports-focused funds who know this space intimately – and the reason it resonates is the operating model. American capital has watched sport get priced to perfection at the top and is actively looking for a differentiated, operator-led way in. An evergreen platform that builds value inside assets rather than betting on multiple expansion is exactly the exposure they’ve been trying to find in Europe, and don’t have a domestic equivalent for.

The second front is the deals themselves. Every property we enter is a proof point – each one demonstrates that the infrastructure genuinely lifts the asset and that the playbook repeats. So in the immediate term, success is that flywheel turning: strong dialogue with the right investors, a widening pipeline of the right properties, and each deal making the model more credible than the last. Longer term, it’s about being the partner of choice for the next generation of sports assets – the first call a serious founder makes, and the reference point for how sport gets professionalised outside the trophy tier. If in a few years our properties are category leaders, our investors have compounded alongside us, and the platform is proving itself deal after deal rather than on a single bet – that’s success.