Mark Walter appears ready to part with another piece of his sports empire, which has been crumbling for months.
After selling his majority stake in the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers and his minority stake in Chelsea of the Premier League, the billionaire is seeking a sale of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks according to Bloomberg.
Walter is reportedly looking to sell the Sparks and their team facility for at least $700 million, which would shatter the record for the most expensive sale in WNBA history. That title currently belongs to the $300 million the Fertitta family paid for the Connecticut Sun, which is being relocated to Houston.
The most recent round of Sportico team valuations estimated the Sparks’ value at $400 million, though such projections often differ from the team’s actual price. Sportico’s NBA values were more than a billion dollars below both the $10 billion valuation Walter paid to acquire the Lakers, then the $12.5 billion he got from Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner.
Walter has owned a majority stake in the Sparks in 2014, two years after his Guggenheim Partners consortium purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers. Like with the Dodgers, Walter has counted Magic Johnson, Todd Boehly, Robert Patton and Stan Kasten among his Sparks co-owners.
News of Walter’s interest in selling the Sparks comes amid considerable legal and financial scrutiny of his non-sports businesses. Federal prosecutors have been looking into Walter’s insurance firms since last fall, with questions about the number of deals they’ve made with companies also controlled by Walter, and whether or not those relationships were disclosed to the necessary people.
Walter’s reaction has been to raise as much cash as possible in order to pay off those deals under investigation, hence his deals with the Lakers, Chelsea and now potentially the Sparks.
From a sports perspective, the question remains whether Walter will be forced to sell the Dodgers, which have become the powerhouse of MLB with record payrolls, three World Series titles and 13 NL West titles under his ownership.
Both Kasten, the president of the Dodgers, and Walter’s TWG Global firm have been insistent the Dodgers are not for sale.
In addition to the Dodgers and Sparks, Walter also owns the Professional Women’s Hockey League the Cadillac F1 racing team and IndyCar’s Andretti Global team.