Gerry Cardinale, Founder and Managing Partner, RedBird Capital Partners

RedBird, the private equity firm that Gerry Cardinale founded in 2013, earlier this year relaunched the XFL, which it had acquired out of bankruptcy alongside Dany Garcia and Dwayne Johnson for $15 million. The debut of the rebooted spring football league capped a particularly busy 12 months for Cardinale, arguably the top dealmaker in sports, as he spent the last year flexing his financial influence across sports teams, leagues, players unions and original content.

In August, Cardinale’s firm joined the New York Yankees in acquiring AC Milan for €1.2 billion, adding to RedBird’s portfolio of global sports team assets that includes stakes in the Boston Red Sox, Pittsburgh Penguins, Liverpool FC and Toulouse FC, which last year was promoted to the top tier of French soccer.

The next month RedBird exited its 40% position in OneTeam Partners, the group licensing and investment platform it had launched with the NFLPA and MLBPA just three years earlier, at a reported $1.9 billion valuation, booking over a 500% return.

Cardinale, a former longtime Goldman Sachs partner, then led his investment firm to increase its stake in Skydance Media as part of a $400 million strategic investment round intended to fuel the production company’s sports strategy. Skydance later launched Skydance Sports in partnership with NFL Films, and in March it released the Ben Affleck-directed “Air,” which depicted the story of how Nike landed its seminal partnership with Michael Jordan.

And in December, RedBird partnered with Abu Dhabi’s International Media Investments to launch a $1 billion investment vehicle, RedBird IMI, that will invest in global sports and entertainment content companies. The fund is led by Jeff Zucker, the former chairman of news and sports for WarnerMedia who has also joined RedBird as an operating partner.