Stephon 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.
A 6-foot-6 guard, Castle was finishing his first season with the NBA's 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.
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 "second home," he said.
"Everything kind of happened fast from there," Castle said.
By December, Castle's Spurs teammates, many of them serious soccer fans, learned that their point guard was not only last season's NBA Rookie of the Year, but also one of several minority owners of CT United of Major League Soccer's developmental second division, called Next Pro. CT United began its first season this month.
"We got a lot of soccer fans on our team," Castle said, "so it started some trash talk, kind of instantly."
He had become the latest basketball star to become an owner in another sport — 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.
Athletes are increasingly interested in owning equity in teams or brands, said Smith, Castle's 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 — he declined to say the percentage of his ownership stake — became official in December.
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 "legacy," Smith said. Castle never switched high schools or flipped his college commitment, both rarities among top prospects.
"I feel like that's just the way me and all my siblings were raised, just to think smart, think ahead and try and not to skip steps," Castle said.
As he founded CT United from scratch, the 44-year-old Swanston also wasn't looking to skip steps, understanding the soccer club would need to prove to MLS leaders that it was worthy of inclusion in the sport's top domestic league.
"To 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've ever done," he said.
United's placement in Connecticut is no accident.
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's track team. While there, he learned that UConn's wildly successful men's and women's basketball programs weren't the only uber-popular teams on campus. The women's soccer team played for a national championship in 2003, while the men won the title in 2000 and regularly topped NCAAattendance rankings.
"On a Friday night, thousands of people, everybody, went to soccer matches," Swanston said.
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's 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.
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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't already MLS teams, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and High Point, North Carolina.
"Connecticut is the most densely populated, affluent market in America with none of the top five major sporting leagues, right?" Swanston said. "A billion dollars a year pretty much goes to subsidize New York and Boston out of Connecticut."
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.
Curtis was impressed by Swanston's ambition and confidence. And, "as a person of color," Curtis added, "you don't always meet a prospect that is also a person of color that is going to be a potential owner within the league."
MLS does not keep demographic data on its teams' ownership groups, a spokeswoman said. The league describes Swanston as "one of only a few Black majority team owners in the history of U.S. pro sports." There are currently no Black majority owners of MLB, NBA, NHL or NFL teams.
MLS has league rules for vetting potential team owners, who are the league's de facto business partners, Curtis said, calling it "probably the first and the last point that you focus on. What's the ownership group going to be? Who are they? What are their values? What are their principles?"
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's combined wealth.
"If you talk about four groups or four families worth $2 billion instead of one [family], you've dramatically increased the potential for minority ownership and female ownership," Swanston said. "I think in the meantime, where we're 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."
Swanston and his wife, Michelle, the team's co-owner, have intentionally kept CT United's identity local. They started a free youth academy. Eight wolf's tails in the team logo represent one for each of Connecticut's counties. The sponsor on the front of the jersey is headquartered in Stamford; the jersey wasdesigned bya Bridgeport-based company. As the team waits to build a stadium in Bridgeport, its home games this season will be held around the state in a barnstorming tour.
And to fill out his ownership group, he began talking with Smith and Castle's father about including Stephon, in part because of his role on the 2024 Connecticut team that won an NCAA basketball championship. It was Castle's shared affinity for Connecticut that mattered to Swanston, not his soccer knowledge — "I know he likes winning," Swanston said.
Castle knew about the lack of Black ownership when he agreed to join.
"I wouldn't say that was a sole reason why I think I made that decision, but it definitely played a factor for sure," he said.
Castle was drawn more to keeping his connection to Connecticut and being part of a team from its inception. He also appreciates soccer, even if he doesn't compete himself. He has long played soccer video games — typically as established powers Liverpool and Manchester City — and he attended a game at Barcelona's famed Camp Nou stadium in 2023 on a trip with the UConn basketball team.
Castle envisions being involved and wants to build relationships with United players, many of whom are similar in age. But that will have to wait; the Spurs this season have become overnight NBA title contenders and could play deep into June. He might try to strike up a conversation with the Spurs' owners to get advice, he said.
For now, he keeps CT United jerseys and a scarf at his Texas home. He's been part of the club for less than six months yet already believes this won't be his last investment in pro sports.
"Just being able to connect with people on that [ownership] level is obviously a big thing for me. So just that in itself I feel like is a success," he said. "So later down the line, even after my career, I'm probably definitely going to look into doing this again."
