What happens when two former athletes get together to form something special? That’s the story of former NFLer Marques Colston and former professional fighter Nick Edwards. They are the founders of Champion Venture Partners and Champion Fund. 

“Nick and I have been in this sports business ecosystem for, I guess, over a decade each at this point in a bunch of different roles, from operator roles to practitioner roles from Nick’s standpoint,” said Marques Colston, former New Orleans Saints alumnus. “I’ve been an owner-operator in the indoor and arena football league. We’ve, we’ve both been on the investor side too.”

Colston has a good backstory. He was a terrific NFL wide receiver. A Saints legend and fans remember his on-field heroics. Since Drew Brees is on the Hall of Fame ballot, I asked him his thoughts on his former teammate. “One, the most obvious is if you look at the stats, the things that you can measure. I mean, he’s off the charts with all of them, from completion percentage to total yards, total touchdowns. That’s just the surface level.

“I think it gets even deeper is, one, just the career that he had with the Saints, I think it’s Hall of Fame worthy. That stretch that he had with the Saints was truly historic. And then you start to layer in the actual impact in the community. Just the timing and everything that was meaningful around the success of the organization at that time for that region. It takes it over the top. He’s absolutely first ballot.”.

His business life has been concentrated in Pennsylvania.

“I started in my hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then got into the Philadelphia soul ownership group,” he added. 

Access is what they’re selling. 

“And obviously, as investors, we’ve been individual with angel investors. I’ve worked on the syndicate side with some athletes’ syndicates. Nick has been on the GP side on the fun side,” Colston added. “And what we’ve seen over the decade plus that we’ve been in is it’s just a very, very closed network ecosystem to where the opportunities and the funnel for opportunities is very narrow to get access,” Colston added. “And when we set out to launch Champion Fund, the whole mission and vision was to create access to alternative investments in sports for every investor.”

71 teams in North America have some private equity stake in them. But not the NFL!

The reality is if you look at basically, if you follow the, I say this probably way too often, but if you follow the dollars, the digital footprint of dollars, you’ll know exactly why things are restricted or where they’re not,” said Edwards, a former pre-UFC fighter and college football player. “Okay. The reality, with the NFL, as Marcus said, there are 32 groups that are kind of holding that. If you look at the NBA. The reason why coming out conglomerated together is because it actually took multiple sources; it wasn’t sexy right away. So, to actually create more liquidity to move it differently, created a much larger playing system, a much larger area to latch onto the meteorite, steaming growth than others. So they actually saw the tailwinds of PE being a plus long before. The other thing is just in the NFL, it’s a behemoth.”

One more note on their business that Nick touched on.

“So one of the big powerful things for us, and he teed this up really well on how we said this, because we went from being athletes, working inside billion-dollar organizations, to them being operators, entrepreneurs, where we had, both sides of the waves, successful lives, et cetera,” Edwards divulged. “Then we went to be investors, and now we’re leads in this area. And so that seems like a linear path, but it really goes this direction when you’re living in real time.”

These two are driven, and I can see this becoming something big for them.