KVIG Informative

The firm behind the 1989 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco now controls the streaming rights, ticketing platform, and athlete data for high school sports in Nevada and across the country. KKR’s $744 billion empire has quietly built a tollbooth around the games that once cost nothing to watch.

If a grandparent in Henderson wants to watch their grandchild play varsity basketball at a Clark County high school this season, there is a good chance they will need a subscription. Not a ticket, paid at the door with cash the way it has worked for a century of Friday nights. A subscription. Monthly or annual. Charged to a card. Processed by a platform owned, in part, by a private equity firm that manages $744 billion in assets and whose signature deal was the 1989 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, the largest corporate takeover in American history at the time.

The firm is KKR, officially Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co. The platform is PlayOn Sports. The streaming network is NFHS Network. The ticketing app is GoFan. The athlete statistics and rankings platform is MaxPreps. All of them now operate under one roof, backed by the same capital, pointed at the same market: the families of the estimated 8 million high school athletes competing in the United States right now, including those at every NIAA-member school in Nevada.

The consolidation happened quickly and with almost no public discussion. It is now complete.

Who KKR Is

Jerome Kohlberg Jr., Henry Kravis, and George Roberts founded KKR in 1976 after leaving Bear Stearns, where they had pioneered what they called bootstrap investments, using a company’s own assets as collateral to borrow money to buy it. The leveraged buyout, or LBO, was their core instrument. It allowed them to acquire companies with minimal cash, load the acquired company with debt, extract fees, and exit. Kohlberg resigned from the firm in 1987 amid internal tensions. Kravis and Roberts continued without him.

In 1988, KKR won a six-week bidding war for RJR Nabisco, the food and tobacco conglomerate formed by the merger of R.J. Reynolds and Nabisco Brands. The $25 billion deal, completed in 1989, was the largest leveraged buyout in history and remained so for 17 years. Time magazine ran the headline: “A Game of Greed.” The book and later film, Barbarians at the Gate, documented how the deal played out. KKR collected a $75 million fee on the transaction. It spent years selling off RJR’s divisions to service the debt load, including Del Monte Foods and international tobacco operations. Thousands of workers lost jobs across those divested units.

Today KKR manages approximately $744 billion in assets across private equity, infrastructure, real estate, and credit. It has 568 portfolio companies and has completed 300 acquisitions, according to Tracxn’s April 2026 investor profile. Its co-CEOs are Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall, who took over in 2021. Its offices span 30 cities on five continents. It is one of the largest and most consequential private equity firms on earth, and it has spent the last four years building an infrastructure that sits between working-class Nevada families and their children’s high school games.

How They Got Into Youth Sports

KKR’s entry into high school sports began in February 2022, when it made a significant investment in PlayOn Sports, a company founded in 2008 that had pivoted from college sports production to high school sports streaming in 2009. PlayOn is best known for operating the NFHS Network, a joint venture launched in 2013 with the National Federation of State High School Associations, the national body that governs high school sports rules and standards. The NFHS Network streams live and on-demand video of high school athletic events across more than 27 sports in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

Financial terms of KKR’s initial investment were not disclosed. In April 2022, KKR made a follow-on investment to support PlayOn’s merger with GoFan, a digital ticketing and fundraising platform for high school events. GoFan is now the official ticketing partner for 80 percent of all state high school athletics associations in the country, according to the company’s own materials. KKR’s Ted Oberwager said at the time of the initial investment: “PlayOn is empowering high school athletic programs and providing fans and families new ways to watch the games that matter most to them.”

In February 2025, PlayOn acquired MaxPreps from CBS Sports, a division of Paramount Global. MaxPreps was launched in 2002 to cover high school sports and grew into the dominant platform for crowdsourced scores, rosters, schedules, and rankings. It serves millions of athletes, parents, coaches, and administrators monthly. The acquisition was competitive. PlayOn CEO David Rudolph said in an interview with Sportico that both sides probably would have liked different terms, which suggests it landed about where it was supposed to.

In August 2024, KKR completed a separate $4.75 billion acquisition of Varsity Brands, the Dallas-based company that owns BSN Sports, the largest team dealer and online outfitter for team sports equipment in the United States, and Varsity Spirit, the dominant operator in competitive cheerleading. Together with PlayOn, KKR now touches nearly every commercial dimension of high school athletics: the uniforms players wear, the equipment programs buy, the tickets families purchase, the games people watch, and the statistics that follow athletes through their careers.

What This Means in Nevada

The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association, the governing body for high school athletics in the state, is a participating association on the NFHS Network. NIAA events across football, basketball, volleyball, track and field, softball, soccer, lacrosse, and other sports are available on the platform. State championship events in Nevada are among the postseason games for which NFHS Network holds exclusive or first-right-of-refusal streaming rights.

That exclusivity is the pressure point. The Colorado High School Activities Association’s published media policy, one of the most explicit documentation of how the rights structure works in practice, makes clear what happens when a school or parent tries to stream a postseason game on YouTube, Facebook, or any platform other than the NFHS Network. Per-game rights fees apply. Football games streamed outside the network during postseason: $500 for live, $250 for on-demand. Basketball: $250 live, $150 on-demand. The state association is required to monitor non-NFHS platforms during the postseason. Schools are responsible for paying the fee if any of their parents or spectators use unauthorized platforms.

Nevada’s postseason rights structure under the NIAA has not been publicly documented at the same level of detail as Colorado’s, but the NFHS Network’s own FAQ confirms that for many postseason events, the platform holds exclusive broadcast rights. A family that cannot afford a subscription, or whose elderly relative does not use a smartphone, has no legal alternative for watching a state championship game their grandchild is competing in.

GoFan operates as the ticketing layer on top of the streaming infrastructure. The platform charges a convenience fee on every ticket, starting at $1 for tickets under $10 and scaling to $1 plus 5 percent of face value for tickets above $10. GoFan describes itself as free for schools, which is accurate in the sense that the fees are passed to the fan. App store reviews document consistent complaints about events not appearing in the app, refund difficulties, and the absence of cash alternatives at gates where GoFan is the required purchasing method. Several schools have moved to cashless, paperless gate operations exclusively through GoFan, leaving community members without smartphones, or with phones that are low on battery, without a path to entry.

The Data Question

The acquisition of MaxPreps created what the Youth Sports Business Report described in April 2025 as an unprecedented dataset spanning virtually every dimension of high school sports engagement. MaxPreps holds comprehensive team and athlete statistics. GoFan holds transaction data on who bought tickets to which events. The NFHS Network holds viewing metrics showing which games were watched by whom and for how long. VidSwap, another PlayOn subsidiary, holds performance analytics for teams and coaches. When integrated, these four data streams create a detailed behavioral and demographic profile of high school athletes and their families across the country.

PlayOn has not publicly disclosed what it does with that integrated data, who it is shared with, or what commercial uses are anticipated. The NFHS Network’s terms of service, updated in November 2024, require users to arbitrate any disputes rather than litigate in court, and include a class action waiver. Those terms apply to subscribers who pay for the service to watch their children play.

The Bigger Portfolio

KKR’s interest in youth sports does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader pattern of private equity accumulation in sectors that were once public goods, community institutions, or simply beyond the reach of institutional capital because the margins were too thin or the scale was too small.

KKR holds Simon and Schuster, the publishing house it acquired for $1.6 billion in October 2023. It has made investments in healthcare infrastructure in India and attempted a $2 billion acquisition of British healthcare property developer Assura in 2025. It manages multifamily housing developments in Stockholm and elsewhere through its real estate arm. KKR Real Estate Finance shifted toward more aggressive loan origination in 2025, taking on higher risk to generate higher returns. It acquired Arctos Partners, a sports investment firm that holds minority stakes in professional sports franchises, in a deal valued at roughly $1 billion in late 2025, giving it a foothold in the NBA, MLB, MLS, and NHL. Through MLS, it launched Hometown Soccer Holdings in early 2026 to accelerate the commercial expansion of MLS NEXT Pro.

The pattern is visible when assembled: publishing, healthcare property, housing debt, professional sports, high school sports infrastructure. These are not random targets. They are sectors where people have limited alternatives, where demand is inelastic, and where digital platforms can insert a fee structure between consumers and something they previously accessed without one.

What KKR Says

PlayOn CEO David Rudolph acknowledged the private equity dynamics directly in an interview with Sportico after the MaxPreps acquisition. He noted that youth sports, both through high schools and club sports, offer lower price points for investors who want exposure to sports without paying $6 billion for a franchise. “I think there are more and more people who are looking for ways to invest in sports but don’t want to spend $6 billion to have a team that may or may not turn out to be a smart financial investment,” he told Sportico in April 2025. The comment was offered as explanation, not apology.

PlayOn President B.J. Pilling, describing the company’s relationship with KKR to PE Insights, highlighted KKR’s value and professionalism and credited the firm with driving PlayOn’s growth and helping execute the MaxPreps acquisition. He did not describe any tension between KKR’s return expectations and the mission of serving high school athletic communities.

KKR’s co-CEO Joseph Bae has described youth sports as an underpenetrated market with strong engagement metrics and loyal consumer bases. The firm has promoted its employee ownership program, under which employees of KKR portfolio companies receive equity stakes, as evidence of alignment between capital and workers. That program does not extend to the parents paying subscription fees to watch Friday night games.

The NIAA has not stated publicly the terms of its agreement with PlayOn and NFHS Network, including what revenue it receives from subscriptions, whether exclusive postseason rights fees apply in Nevada, and whether any provisions allow schools to stream games on alternative platforms without charge.

The grandparent in Henderson is still waiting for someone to answer.