Investment Bank William Blair Buys Inner Circle Sports

Investment bank William Blair has reached an agreement to purchase boutique advisor Inner Circle Sports, a move that will give the firm an immediate presence in the rapidly growing world of sports dealmaking.

Under the agreement, Inner Circle and all 16 of its employees will move under the William Blair umbrella. Co-founders Rob Tilliss and Steve Horowitz will retain day-to-day control of the business, which will continue to operate as Inner Circle Sports for the foreseeable future.

The deal is expected to close, pending regulatory approvals, toward the end of the second quarter. Financial specifics were not disclosed.

The move comes amid a 20-year wave of growing sports valuations and investor interest, a shift that Inner Circle Sports helped guide from the front lines. The group was founded in 2002 and has carved out a niche facilitating team sales, LP transactions, debt financing and other adjacent M&A activity.

Thanks in part to its size, its narrower focus and its tendency to hire analysts and executives with investment banking experience, the group has done more sports team M&A transactions than perhaps any other bank in the world over the past decade.

Among them were deals at the outset of major shifts in sports investing. For example, Inner Circle advised Fenway Sports Group on its roughly $480 million (£300 million) takeover of Liverpool in 2010, a harbinger of the flood of U.S. investment into European soccer. Four years later, the group advised Wes Edens and Marc Lasry on their $550 million purchase of the Milwaukee Bucks, the highest price ever paid for an NBA team until Steve Ballmer bought the Clippers a few months later for $2 billion.

More recently, the firm built a notable business in women’s sports, advising on multiple rounds of NWSL expansion. The start of that work preceded a much larger rush of capital into the NWSL and WNBA.

“As a team, we are creative in thinking through the sports trends that are on the horizon,” Horowitz said in an interview. “We were early to capture opportunities in women’s sports, youth sports and European football—helping our clients with investments that have yielded significant value creation.”

William Blair, which is privately held and headquartered in Chicago, has about 2,000 employees, with client assets in excess of $145 billion. Its investment banking division has 650 employees and completed about 200 M&A deals in 2025.

“Expanding our capabilities in sports, media and entertainment is a key strategic priority for William Blair,” Matt Zimmer, global head of William Blair’s investment banking, said in a statement.

William Blair works with hundreds of private equity funds and family offices, a network that could provide additional deal flow for the Inner Circle team on both the buy and sell side of future M&A. The group is planning to staff up in the coming months, Horowitz said.

Amid that change, he said the group will look to preserve what was a close knit and informal corporate culture by banking standards. That included firm-wide birthday parties for employees, weekly pickup basketball games and quarterly happy hours for people across the industry. Inner Circle’s website does not list titles for any employees, including Tilliss and Horowitz.

“We foster an entrepreneurial environment whereby, starting at the junior level, our team can build relationships to carry with them over the course of their career,” Horowitz said. “This concept of building strong relationships is a skill everyone should have and we expect this to continue at William Blair.”

In recent years Inner Circle has pushed to expand its presence in other areas. They include music and entertainment; college sports advising; and stadium projects. The group also does advisory work for deals in tech and media.

Winston & Strawn LLP served as legal advisor to William Blair. Solomon Partners served as financial advisor to Inner Circle, while Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP served as the sell-side legal advisor.