![\"Image:](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/260313-Stephon-Castle-ew-334p-c1d2bf.jpg\")
Stephon Castle of the San Antonio Spurs during the third quarter of the game against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 1.Dustin Satloff \/ Getty Images<\/p>\nStephon Castle had been playing for a professional sports team for only a few months last year when the then-20-year-old began considering owning a piece of another.<\/p>\n
A 6-foot-6 guard, Castle was finishing his first season with the NBA\u2019s San Antonio Spurs last spring when his agent, Joe Smith, and father, Stacey, ran an investment opportunity past him. Such approaches are common for newly minted millionaires, such as NBA rookies. But this one felt different.<\/p>\n
Andre Swanston, one of only a handful of Black majority team owners in all of North American professional sports, wanted Castle to join the ownership group for a new soccer franchise in Connecticut. Castle was raised in Georgia but had committed to play at the University of Connecticut before his junior year of high school, and in 2024 won an NCAA championship in his lone collegiate season. The state has become a \u201csecond home,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything kind of happened fast from there,\u201d Castle said.<\/p>\n
By December, Castle\u2019s Spurs teammates, many of them serious soccer fans, learned that their point guard was not only last season\u2019s NBA Rookie of the Year, but also one of several minority owners of CT United of Major League Soccer\u2019s developmental second division, called Next Pro. CT United began its first season this month.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got a lot of soccer fans on our team,\u201d Castle said, \u201cso it started some trash talk, kind of instantly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stephon Castle of the San Antonio Spurs during the third quarter of the game against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 1.Dustin Satloff \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
He had become the latest basketball star to become an owner in another sport \u2014 and specifically soccer. LeBron James bought a minority stake in Liverpool of the Premier League in 2011. As MLS grew to 30 teams, James Harden joined the ownership of the Houston Dynamo in 2019, and Kevin Durant bought a piece of the Philadelphia Union in 2020. Five years later, Durant bought into Champions League winner Paris Saint-Germain too.<\/p>\n
Athletes are increasingly interested in owning equity in teams or brands, said Smith, Castle\u2019s agent, yet he described Castle as an outlier. At the time James, Harden and Durant purchased their stakes, each was already an NBA veteran on a lucrative contract. Castle was only 21 and a rising star still on his rookie contract when his minority ownership in CT United \u2014 he declined to say the percentage of his ownership stake \u2014 became official in December.<\/p>\n
The decision was not out of character for Castle, Smith said. The two met when Castle was still in high school, and Smith said he was struck by how much the teenager was already considering his \u201clegacy,\u201d Smith said. Castle never switched high schools or flipped his college commitment, both rarities among top prospects.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like that\u2019s just the way me and all my siblings were raised, just to think smart, think ahead and try and not to skip steps,\u201d Castle said.<\/p>\n
As he founded CT United from scratch, the 44-year-old Swanston also wasn\u2019t looking to skip steps, understanding the soccer club would need to prove to MLS leaders that it was worthy of inclusion in the sport\u2019s top domestic league.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo show that we can be the first team to actually grow from within the Major League Soccer ecosystem from an academy team to a minor league team to major league team is, I think, earning it in a way that no one else can say they\u2019ve ever done,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
United\u2019s placement in Connecticut is no accident.<\/p>\n
Raised in the Bronx, Swanston attended boarding school in Connecticut and later went to the University of Connecticut, where he was a triple jumper on the school\u2019s track team. While there, he learned that UConn\u2019s wildly successful men\u2019s and women\u2019s basketball programs weren\u2019t the only uber-popular teams on campus. The women\u2019s soccer team played for a national championship in 2003, while the men won the title in 2000 and regularly topped NCAA attendance rankings<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOn a Friday night, thousands of people, everybody, went to soccer matches,\u201d Swanston said.<\/p>\n As recently as last fall, the men still drew the fifth-highest attendance average in the NCAA. Such a built-in fan base was part of Swanston\u2019s calculus for wanting a team in the state, an idea he said first took hold in 2018 and became more possible in 2020, when the data company he founded sold for nine figures, he said.<\/p>\n Not long after, he heard that MLS was starting a second division as part of a plan to develop younger players, staffers, executives and even test on-field rules in markets where there weren\u2019t already MLS teams, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and High Point, North Carolina.<\/p>\n \u201cConnecticut is the most densely populated, affluent market in America with none of the top five major sporting leagues, right?\u201d Swanston said. \u201cA billion dollars a year pretty much goes to subsidize New York and Boston out of Connecticut.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2021, Swanston met with Ali Curtis, the president of MLS Next Pro. Curtis had started as the general manager of Toronto, making him the first Black general manager in league history, before rising through the ranks. Swanston can talk at length about soccer prospects and playing styles, and believes that knowledge helped MLS officials take him seriously.<\/p>\n Curtis was impressed by Swanston\u2019s ambition and confidence. And, \u201cas a person of color,\u201d Curtis added, \u201cyou don\u2019t always meet a prospect that is also a person of color that is going to be a potential owner within the league.\u201d<\/p>\n MLS does not keep demographic data on its teams\u2019 ownership groups, a spokeswoman said. The league describes Swanston as \u201cone of only a few Black majority team owners in the history of U.S. pro sports.\u201d There are currently no Black majority owners of MLB, NBA, NHL or NFL teams.<\/p>\n MLS has league rules for vetting potential team owners, who are the league\u2019s de facto business partners, Curtis said, calling it \u201cprobably the first and the last point that you focus on. What\u2019s the ownership group going to be? Who are they? What are their values? What are their principles?\u201d<\/p>\n As valuations of U.S. pro teams have spiked over the last decade, there is also the question of how many individuals have enough money to buy teams. Leagues carefully review the wealth of a controlling owner, but Swanston believes minority representation could grow if more value were placed on an ownership group\u2019s combined wealth.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you talk about four groups or four families worth $2 billion instead of one [family], you\u2019ve dramatically increased the potential for minority ownership and female ownership,\u201d Swanston said. \u201cI think in the meantime, where we\u2019re gonna see diversity and ownership is in minority positions, with people owning 1% to 10% of clubs, and I think we have seen a huge jump in that over the last decade.\u201d<\/p>\n