Major League Volleyball announced its Los Angeles franchise for the 2027 season, led by Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Ben Priest, and Alisha Childress. The ownership group paid an undisclosed expansion fee that league sources value in the $15M-$20M range, triple what earlier franchises paid in 2024. The team will be the league's sixth, with two more markets expected before the 2027 launch.
Soon-Shiong brings $5.8B in estimated net worth from NantHealth and ImmunityBio, plus ownership of the Los Angeles Times and a minority stake in the Lakers. Priest served as Clippers president of business operations until 2023, overseeing sponsorship and arena deals during the Intuit Dome planning phase. Childress, a former U.S. national team player, adds credibility in a sport where founder legitimacy matters to sponsors who write six-figure kit deals for teams with zero broadcast distribution.
The play here is venue optionality and sponsor arbitrage. MLV teams operate in 5,000-8,000 seat arenas, well below the 18,000+ capacity NBA barns that price out experimental sports properties. Los Angeles offers USC's Galen Center, UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, or a downtown rehearsal run at crypto.com before the venue calendar fills for 2027. Priest knows the sponsorship map: Clippers closed $500M+ in partnerships during his tenure, and volleyball's demographic skew—60% female fans, median household income $95K—overlaps with brands that overpay for reach in coastal markets.
The Soon-Shiong name also signals MLV's shift from athlete-founder capital to institutional checks. The league's first five franchises were backed by former players and regional real estate operators writing $3M-$7M checks. This round prices in media speculation: MLV has held preliminary talks with Apple and Amazon about a 2027 streaming package, though no term sheet exists. Expansion fees reflect the bet that a 50-match season across eight markets generates enough inventory for a mid-seven-figure annual rights deal, which would triple team revenues before a single ticket sells.
Childress's role is operational credibility. She captained the U.S. team that won bronze at the 2016 Rio Olympics and has name recognition in a player pool where 90% of American pros compete overseas for $50K-$150K per season. MLV's salary structure offers $75K-$200K domestically, with equity kickers for marquee signings. The Los Angeles roster will need three recognizable names to justify the launch, and Childress's Rolodex is the shortest path.
League-wide, MLV now has franchises in Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Omaha, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles. Two more are expected by September, with Dallas and Phoenix drawing the most founder interest. The 2027 season will run January through April, a calendar window that avoids NBA and NHL but competes with college basketball. Attendance targets are 3,500 per match, which would generate $40M-$50M in ticket revenue across eight teams if pricing holds at $35 average.
The Los Angeles announcement also clarifies the league's governance structure. Soon-Shiong and Priest will not join MLV's board, which remains controlled by founding teams and commissioner Kyle Keller. That keeps voting power with operators who paid early-stage prices, a detail that matters when broadcast revenue splits are negotiated in 2026.
Watch for the Los Angeles venue announcement by August, which will signal whether the team is treating this as a Galen Center placeholder or a multi-year Pauley Pavilion anchor. Coach and GM hires follow in September, and the first player signings—likely two Olympians and one NCAA champion—will arrive before December. The final two expansion markets should be confirmed by October, setting the full eight-team map before the league's first collective bargaining discussions in early 2027.
The takeaway
Los Angeles enters MLV at **3x** earlier valuations, pricing in streaming speculation and Soon-Shiong's balance sheet as league targets **eight teams** for 2027.
major league volleyballlos angelespatrick soon-shiongexpansionsports ownershipvolleyball
Brand your brand — for real
70,000 products · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · imprinted since 1997
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.