Private equity billionaire José E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, took the stage at Sportico’s Invest New York event to break down their recent acquisition of the San Diego Padres at an MLB-record $3.9 billion.
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“[The Padres brand] is about inclusion, not in an old woke sort of way, but in a we-are-here way, and I like to say it’s San Diego and the Padres for San Diego, the Baja community, and beyond,” Jones said.
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The Padres are a robust business that is stronger than any of the recent MLB teams on the market. It led to a competitive bidding process. The three other finalists for the Padres included Dan Friedkin, whose Pursuit Sports owns Everton and AS Roma; Golden State Warriors co-owner Joe Lacob; and Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores. The Padres had three bids of at least $3.5 billion, including the winning one.
In 2025, the team posted gross revenues of $530 million and EBITDA of $20 million, according to multiple people who reviewed the pitch deck distributed during the sales process. Petco Park is one of the best-drawing venues in MLB. San Diego had the league’s second-best attendance figure last year, with 3.4 million fans, and it has been in the top five each year since 2021.
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Feliciano, who co-founded Clearlake Capital with Behdad Eghbali in 2006, has become a more prominent sports investor in the last few years. Clearlake provided a large portion of the funding for the $3.16 billion purchase of English soccer giant Chelsea. Feliciano and Jones are also minority investors in the Minnesota Timberwolves and have invested across sports through Dyal HomeCourt Partners, Arctos Sports Partners, Monarch Collective and Project Level.
Feliciano is the second Latino owner in baseball, joining Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno. “We have a new set of experiences,” Feliciano said. “I’m obviously fluent in Spanish; 30% of the players in the league speak Spanish. That affords me a different perspective than other folks around the league … we can bring that unique perspective to try to make the team a little bit better.”
The couple stayed out of the fray when pressed on some of the biggest issues in MLB and the Premier League. On MLB’s pending labor issues, Feliciano said the question was “outside the strike zone,” and he didn’t want to opine on issues Dodgers owner Mark Walter and Manchester City are facing. Feliciano did confirm that the Padres’ multiyear deal with prediction market Kalshi announced in August was done by the team’s previous ownership group.
“There are a lot of things we inherited,” Feliciano said. “Many things can be used for good. It can be used for things that are less positive. I think we want to keep it positive in San Diego, so I think that that’s one of the many things that we’ll look at over the next several years.”
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Feliciano reiterated that Kalshi is a “good partner right now,” but that the industry is under scrutiny and something we “should look at.”
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
