Other Spectator Sports (NAICS 711219): An Investor's Primer

1. Overview

"Other Spectator Sports" is the federal statistical bucket for the people and small businesses that compete in spectator sports outside the big team leagues and the racetrack operators. NAICS — the North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's standard scheme for coding industries — puts three things in code 711219: independent athletes who perform for a paying audience (professional golfers, boxers, race-car drivers, tennis players); the owners of racing "participants" — the horses, greyhounds, and cars that get entered in races; and the specialized support businesses (sports trainers and similar) that make those competitors run. It is not a synonym for the whole U.S. sports economy.[1]

Why it matters: this is where the labor and the animals/machines of the sports economy sit, as distinct from the venues (racetracks) and the franchises (teams). It is a genuinely large cultural economy, but its cash flows are unusually individualized and private. Most of the money accrues to sole proprietors, family businesses, and private LLCs, not to shares you can buy. Federal data count only about 3,100 employer establishments and $4.3 billion in employer receipts here — a fraction of the real footprint, because the industry is dominated by individuals who file as one-person businesses.[2]

Public-market ways in are indirect and thin. You cannot buy "a racehorse owner" or "a boxer" on an exchange, but you can buy the promoters and rights-holders adjacent to them — combat-sports promoter TKO Group Holdings and Formula One/MotoGP owner Liberty Media — plus racetrack-and-wagering operator Churchill Downs. Private-market ways in are the more literal ones: owning (or fractionally owning) a racehorse, backing a motorsports team, or holding equity in a promotion. Both routes are covered in Sections 4 and 10.

2. What it is, and what it excludes

In scope (NAICS 711219):[1]

• Independent athletes competing before paying audiences — golfers, boxers and mixed-martial-arts (MMA) fighters, race-car and motorcycle drivers, jockeys, professional skiers, and similar. Legally, most are independent contractors, not employees.
• Owners of racing participants — Thoroughbred and Standardbred racehorse owners, greyhound kennels, and auto/motorcycle/snowmobile racing teams that enter cars or animals in events.
• Support specialists — sports trainers, referees, umpires, and similar personnel who service competitions.

711219 is the residual "other" line inside industry group 7112, Spectator Sports. The economic chain around it runs: participant (athlete or racing owner) → sanctioning body → promoter or venue → media and wagering → fans — and the listed companies you can actually buy sit at the promoter/venue/rights end, not the participant end.

Explicitly excluded — and where those activities live instead:[1]

This matters in practice: a fight promoter such as UFC is technically a promoter (711310), while the fighters are the 711219 athletes; a racetrack is 711212, while the horse owner who races there is 711219.

Ownership mix — overwhelmingly small and private. Federal concentration data show 2,611 employer firms, a four-firm concentration ratio (CR4 — the share of receipts held by the largest four firms) of just 16.3%, and a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard 0–10,000 concentration gauge) of 104 — far below the ~1,500 level below which regulators treat a market as "unconcentrated." In plain terms, the businesses inside this code are among the most fragmented in the economy. (That does not mean any given sport or series is unconcentrated — see Section 8.)[2]

3. How big it is

Our federal ground-truth figures (U.S. Census Bureau; employer businesses only):[2]

Average payroll works out to roughly $73,000 per employee — reasonable for the trainers, grooms, and race-operations staff who make up most of the payrolled headcount, but it tells you almost nothing about the industry's economics, because the marquee earners are not on anyone's payroll.[2]

The undercount is the whole story here. County Business Patterns and the Economic Census count only businesses with employees. This industry is defined largely by people who have none: a golfer, a jockey, or a single-horse owner typically files as a sole proprietorship or a small LLC. Those "nonemployer" businesses vastly outnumber the ~3,100 employer establishments. (The Census Bureau publishes a separate Nonemployer Statistics series that captures them, but that specific count was not in our ground-truth dataset, so we state no figure for it.) So the $4.25 billion employer-receipts number is a floor, not a measure of the sport. For scale, the racing sector of the U.S. equine economy alone is estimated by the American Horse Council at roughly $6.4 billion in direct economic impact and about 86,000 jobs — before golf, motorsports, or combat sports.[6]

Two cautions. First, the fragmentation the HHI shows is fragmentation of the code, not of professional football, global motorsport, or the PGA Tour — do not read it as evidence that any major league or series is unconcentrated. Second, the federal extract gives no reliable NAICS-level figure for attendance, media-rights revenue, athlete pay, margins, or total private-market value; those should not be back-filled from broader sports-industry estimates.[2]

4. The investable universe

There are, effectively, no pure-play public companies whose core business is being an independent athlete or a racehorse/car/dog owner — because those are individuals and private ventures. What public markets offer is exposure to the promoters, rights-holders, and venues one step away from the 711219 competitors. Treat the table as "closest public proxies," not members of the industry itself. Listings are on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or Nasdaq.

Caveats: TKO's WWE half is scripted entertainment, not athletic competition, so only part of it maps to "spectator sport" in the competitive sense; and TKO's control sits with Endeavor, which Silver Lake took private in 2025 — TKO stays listed but with heavy private-equity control, a governance point for minority holders.[12][20] Liberty Media owns the series, not the cars — the constructors and race teams remain separate businesses. Churchill Downs is really a racetrack-and-gaming company, included here as the most direct listed way to touch the horse-racing ecosystem the 711219 owners depend on.

A note on companies you'll see on generic "sports stock" lists: Madison Square Garden Sports (MSGS — Knicks and Rangers) and Atlanta Braves Holdings (BATRA/BATRK — the Braves and Truist Park) are real listed sports investments, but they are team-and-venue companies that sit in NAICS 711211, not 711219. Buy them for team exposure — they are not this code.[23][24]

Major private and "other" owners — where the real 711219 value sits:

• Motorsports teams: almost entirely private. Forbes-style estimates put Hendrick Motorsports around $315M, Joe Gibbs Racing ~$230M, Richard Childress Racing ~$158M, and Team Penske ~$152M in value; NASCAR itself is privately held by the France family, and IndyCar is owned privately by Roger Penske (not through public Penske Automotive Group). Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin's 23XI Racing is the highest-profile newer entrant.[9]
• Golf: the PGA Tour is a nonprofit that spun out a for-profit arm (PGA Tour Enterprises) backed by outside investors; LIV Golf is funded by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF). Individual players are independent contractors.[10]
• Horse racing: owners range from single individuals to syndicates and operations like Godolphin and Coolmore; racetrack group 1/ST (The Stronach Group) is private.[4]
• Fractional racehorse platforms: MyRacehorse sells micro-shares in racehorses from as little as $100 and reports 50,000+ owners — a 2,570-owner group held 2024 Preakness winner Seize the Grey.[16]

5. How the money works

Because the segments differ, the unit economics differ. But a common thread runs through all of them: money flows from wagering, media rights, and sponsorship into purses and prize money, and only a minority of participants earn back their costs. This is a power-law, tournament-style economy — a few winners take most of the money.

Horse racing (owners' economics). U.S. Thoroughbred bettors wagered about $11.3 billion in 2024, funding roughly $1.31 billion in purses.[4] Roughly 7 cents of every dollar bet live at the track is siphoned into purse accounts — the pool that pays owners, trainers, and jockeys.[5] A purse is typically split winner-take-most (about 60–70% to first, then declining shares). The brutal reality for owners: industry groups estimate fewer than 10% of racehorses earn enough in purses to cover their annual training and care costs, and in 2025 roughly 78% of starters earned less than the ~$40,000 it costs to keep a horse in training.[5] Owners therefore rely on the occasional big win, plus breeding/stud value — a colt that wins major races becomes far more valuable at stud than any purse. Here the asset (a proven bloodline), not the annual cash flow, is where returns are made.

Motorsports (team economics). A NASCAR Cup team's revenue is a stack of three things: charter payments (an equity-like guaranteed entry paying roughly $141,000 base per race, ~$185,000 including recent-form bonuses); race purses (points races carry purses near $11 million, split across the field); and sponsorship, the real backbone at 60–80% of a team's budget — a top primary sponsor pays $10–20 million a year for one car.[7][8] Yet costs run around $20 million per car per season, and in 2024 only three organizations made money; teams reported losing about $2.2 million (weighted average) per car, with revenue per car ranging from ~$8 million at the smallest teams to ~$43 million at the top.[7] The charter itself has become the store of value — a tradable asset whose price has climbed sharply — which is exactly what 23XI fought NASCAR over in antitrust litigation.[19]

Golf, boxing, MMA (athlete economics). Prize money is enormous at the top and thin below it. The 2024 PGA Tour paid roughly $400 million in regular-season purses plus ~$340 million more across majors and bonus pools (the FedEx Cup alone pays a $25 million winner's bonus); LIV Golf paid ~$375 million in event prize money plus bonuses.[10] Top golfer Scottie Scheffler cleared over $62 million on-course in 2024.[11] But players are independent contractors who pay their own travel, caddie, and coaching costs, and most tour pros earn far less. In combat sports, fighter purses plus pay-per-view (PPV) upside can be huge for headliners and minimal for undercard fighters — one driver of the proposed federal minimum of $200 per round for pro boxers.[13]

The investor's summary: across every segment, income is concentrated, costs are fixed and high, and the durable value is in assets — a bloodline, a charter, a fighter's or golfer's personal brand — rather than in steady operating margins.

6. What drives demand

• Legal sports betting — the single biggest tailwind. U.S. legal sportsbooks keep setting records: the American Gaming Association (AGA) reports about $16.96 billion of commercial sportsbook revenue on roughly $166.94 billion of "handle" (the total amount wagered) in 2025, up from ~$14.2 billion of revenue on ~$148 billion of handle in 2024.[22][17] Betting itself is classified elsewhere (a gambling industry), but more of it deepens engagement across racing and combat sports and feeds the wagering pools that fund horse-racing purses.
• Media rights and streaming. Live sport is premium content in a fragmenting media market; rights fees are the growth engine behind F1's rise under Liberty Media and TKO's UFC/WWE deals.[12][18]
• Star power and personalities. Demand in these individual sports is unusually tied to specific people and animals — a charismatic fighter, a dominant golfer, a Triple Crown contender. Rivalries and breakout stars move the numbers.
• Sponsorship and corporate marketing budgets, which are cyclical and track the broader economy — the first thing to soften in a downturn, especially in motorsports.
• Discretionary and luxury spending. Owning a racehorse or a race team is a discretionary, often passion-driven outlay by wealthy individuals; demand here follows high-end wealth and confidence.

Forward-looking judgment: premium live competition should stay strategically valuable, but growth will be uneven — properties with scarce rights, strong audiences, and global distribution have far more pricing power than a small operator dependent on one sponsor, venue, animal, or athlete.

7. Regulation

Regulation in 711219 is a patchwork that varies sharply by segment:

• Horse racing — federal, and contested. The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020 created a private Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA), overseen by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to set uniform national rules; its Racetrack Safety Program took effect in 2022 and its Anti-Doping and Medication Control program in 2023.[15] HISA's constitutionality is under active legal fire — a circuit split has emerged (the Sixth Circuit upheld it in December 2025; the Fifth Circuit again struck down its enforcement powers in June 2026), leaving the framework likely to return to the U.S. Supreme Court.[15] Any owner or trainer operating nationally faces real regulatory uncertainty.
• Boxing — federal floor, state enforcement. The Professional Boxing Safety Act (1996) and the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act (2000) require promoter financial disclosures and curb conflicts of interest, but day-to-day licensing sits with state athletic commissions, producing inconsistent rules. Congress is weighing the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, which would add a national minimum per-round payment for fighters.[13]
• Greyhound racing — being legislated out of existence. Dog racing is now prohibited in 41 states; Florida's 2018 Amendment 13 (passed with 69% of the vote) shut down the sport's largest hub, and only a couple of operational tracks remain nationwide.[14] For the "dog owner" slice of 711219, this is effectively a terminal regulatory decline.
• Sports-betting law (backdrop). The Supreme Court's 2018 decision in Murphy v. NCAA struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), letting states legalize sports betting; wagering is now regulated state-by-state and by tribal authorities.[21] Because purses and much of the racing ecosystem lean on wagering pools, changes to betting tax, "takeout," or licensing flow straight through to this industry.
• Live-event ticketing (consumer protection). The promoter and venue proxies investors actually buy (Churchill Downs, TKO events) are subject to federal all-in "junk-fee" price-disclosure rules[27] and the anti-bot BOTS Act.[28]
• Motorsports and golf — largely self-governed by private sanctioning bodies (NASCAR, IndyCar, the PGA Tour) rather than government, though animal-welfare, safety, labor-classification, and antitrust law all apply at the edges.[19]

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

Two opposite forces coexist. At the participant level (the actual 711219 businesses), the industry is atomized and unconsolidatable — thousands of independent athletes and owners, a CR4 of 16% and an HHI near 100.[2] You cannot roll up "boxers" or "racehorse owners."

At the promoter/rights-holder level one step above, consolidation has been dramatic. The 2023 merger of UFC and WWE into TKO Group created a combat-sports colossus now extending into boxing (Zuffa Boxing) and bull riding (PBR).[12] Liberty Media added MotoGP to Formula One, concentrating global motorsport rights.[18] In horse racing, wagering and track ownership are consolidating around a few operators (Churchill Downs, 1/ST). Private capital is also assembling multi-property sports holding groups — Fenway Sports Group (Red Sox, Liverpool FC, Pittsburgh Penguins) and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment (76ers, Devils) — though these span teams and venues well beyond this narrow code.[25][26]

The strategic pattern: value is migrating upward, from the competitors to whoever controls the events, media rights, and betting rails — precisely why the listed proxies are promoters, not participants. The counter-current is athlete/team pushback for a larger share of that value, visible in NASCAR's charter antitrust fight and golf's PGA-vs-LIV realignment.[19][10]

9. Risks

• No pure-play liquidity. Public investors cannot own the industry directly; they own adjacent promoters whose fortunes only partly overlap with the competitors'.
• Loss-making unit economics. Racehorse and motorsports-team ownership lose money for most participants most years — these are passion/asset plays, not income streams.[5][7]
• Regulatory and legal overhang. HISA's unsettled constitutionality, boxing's fragmented oversight, and animal-welfare politics (which already killed greyhound racing) are live threats.[14][15]
• Concentration and key-person risk. Value hinges on a handful of stars, animals, or franchises; injury, scandal, retirement, or a horse's death can erase it.
• Cyclical sponsorship and discretionary spending, which contract in downturns.
• Betting-market dependence. Purses and much of the ecosystem lean on wagering; changes in tax, takeout, or gambling regulation flow straight through.[17]
• Animal-welfare and safety scrutiny, an escalating reputational and legislative risk for every animal-racing segment.[14]
• Governance. The listed proxies carry controlling owners and dual-class or tracking-stock structures (Liberty's F1 tracking stocks; Endeavor/Silver Lake control of TKO) that can subordinate minority holders.[20]

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes (indirect):

• TKO Group Holdings (TKO) — the cleanest listed exposure to the individual-athlete economy, via UFC and (soon) boxing, with WWE attached.[12]
• Liberty Media — Formula One Group (FWONK/FWONA) — Formula One and MotoGP rights, a bet on premium motorsport media value.[18]
• Churchill Downs (CHDN) — the horse-racing venue-and-wagering ecosystem the owners depend on.
• Broader sports-betting and sports-media names capture the demand tailwind without the participant-level loss economics.[22]

Private routes (direct):

• Fractional racehorse ownership via platforms like MyRacehorse — shares from ~$100, sold under securities-crowdfunding rules; understand these are high-risk, mostly-money-losing collectibles with occasional windfalls, not income investments.[16]
• Full or syndicate racehorse ownership, motorsports team equity/sponsorship, or stakes in promotions — capital-intensive, illiquid, and typically the domain of high-net-worth passion investors.

What to check before buying either. For the public proxies: recurring contracted revenue, media-rights duration and renewal pricing, cash conversion, debt, parent-company/controlling-owner structure, and who owns the underlying commercial rights. For private deals: purse/prize dependence, cost-per-start and equipment replacement, sponsor renewals, insurance, governance, and exit liquidity — and never underwrite off one headline valuation or one winning season.[15][16]

Near-term drivers to watch: the legal sports-betting boom looks set to keep expanding wagering pools and fan engagement, supporting horse-racing purses and combat-sports viewership; media-rights inflation continues to reward the consolidated rights-holders (TKO, Liberty Media) more than the competitors; and the resolution of HISA's constitutional fight will shape horse racing's operating environment for years. The defining feature for investors will not change soon: the cultural value of these sports is large and growing, but capturing it on the public market means buying the promoters and rails, while the participants themselves remain a private, high-risk, asset-driven world. These are judgments about direction, not guarantees.

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Sources

1. NAICS.com / U.S. Census Bureau. "NAICS Code 711219 — Other Spectator Sports (definition and cross-references)," 2022 NAICS. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=711219&input=711219&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns 2023 and 2022 Economic Census (Industry Statistics & Concentration), NAICS 711219. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html and https://api.census.gov/data/2022/ecnsize.html
3. U.S. Small Business Administration. "Table of Size Standards," NAICS 711219 ($16.5M), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
4. Thoroughbred Daily News. "Handle Drops, Purses Up Slightly In 2024," 2025. https://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/handle-drops-purses-up-slightly-in-2024/
5. Horse Racing Sense / New York Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association. "Horse Racing Purse Money: Where It Comes From and How It's Split" and "The State of Thoroughbred Racing," 2023–2025. https://horseracingsense.com/horse-racing-purse-money/
6. American Horse Council / BloodHorse. "2023 National Economic Impact Study — racing sector," 2023. https://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/articles/274764/ahc-equine-industry-has-177-billion-economic-impact
7. FOX Sports. "NASCAR Financials Revealed: Inside Profits, Losses, Charter Payouts," 2025. https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nascar/nascar-financials-revealed-profits-losses
8. Forbes (Greg Engle). "NASCAR Charter Documents Reveal How Much Teams Actually Get Paid Per Race," 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregengle/2025/10/29/nascar-charter-documents-reveal-how-much-teams-actually-get-paid-per-race/
9. Sportsnaut / Forbes. "The Richest NASCAR Teams (team valuations)," 2024. https://sportsnaut.com/nascar/7-richest-nascar-teams-including-hendrick-motorsports
10. Golf Monthly / golf.com. "2024 PGA Tour and LIV Golf Prize Money and Money Lists," 2024. https://www.golfmonthly.com/features/revealed-the-jaw-dropping-amount-paid-in-prize-money-across-the-top-mens-professional-golf-tours-in-2024
11. Forbes (Justin Birnbaum). "World's Highest-Paid Golfers 2024," 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinbirnbaum/2024/06/12/worlds-highest-paid-golfers-2024-jon-rahm-rory-mcilroy-scottie-scheffler/
12. TKO Group Holdings Investor Relations / SEC. "TKO Reports Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2024 Results ($2.8B revenue)," 2025. https://investor.tkogrp.com/news/news-details/2025/TKO-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2024-Results/default.aspx
13. Congress.gov. "Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act (2000)" and "Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act (H.R. 4624, 119th Congress)," 2000–2026. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4624
14. GREY2K USA / NBC News / Humane World for Animals. "The Decline of U.S. Greyhound Racing; Florida Amendment 13," 2018–2024. https://www.grey2kusa.org/about/states.php
15. American Veterinary Medical Association / BloodHorse / The Racing Biz. "HISA Constitutionality — Supreme Court remand and circuit split," 2025–2026. https://www.avma.org/news/supreme-court-sends-horseracing-authoritys-constitutionality-cases-back-lower-courts
16. MyRacehorse / Forbes / Kingscrowd. "Fractional Racehorse Ownership (shares from $100; Seize the Grey)," 2023–2025. https://myracehorse.com/us
17. Legal Sports Report / American Gaming Association. "Record 2024 U.S. Sports Betting — ~$148B handle, $14.2B revenue," 2025. https://www.legalsportsreport.com/218449/2024-us-sports-betting-revenue/
18. Liberty Media Corporation / SEC / BlackBook Motorsport. "Formula One and MotoGP Full-Year Financial Results," 2024–2026. https://www.libertymedia.com/investors/news-events/press-releases
19. Motorsport.com / Racing News. "How NASCAR's Charter System Works; Antitrust Settlement and 23XI Litigation," 2024–2025. https://www.motorsport.com/nascar-cup/news/how-nascars-ownership-charter-system-works/10779373/
20. Silver Lake. "Endeavor Announces Completion of Acquisition by Silver Lake," 2025. https://www.silverlake.com/endeavor-announces-completion-of-acquisition-by-silver-lake/
21. Supreme Court of the United States. "Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association" (PASPA struck down), 2018. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf
22. American Gaming Association. "State of the States 2026" (2025 commercial sports-betting revenue and handle), 2026. https://www.americangaming.org/resources/state-of-the-states-2026/
23. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. Form 10-K," FY2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1636519/000163651925000027/msgs-20250630.htm
24. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Atlanta Braves Holdings, Inc. Form 10-K," FY2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1958140/000110465926020650/batra-20251231x10k.htm
25. Fenway Sports Group. "Who We Are," 2026. https://fenwaysportsgroup.com/who-we-are/
26. Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. "Who We Are," 2026. https://www.hbse.com/
27. Federal Trade Commission. "Bipartisan Rule Banning Junk Ticket and Hotel Fees," 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/12/federal-trade-commission-announces-bipartisan-rule-banning-junk-ticket-hotel-fees
28. Federal Trade Commission. "BOTS Act Compliance: Time for a Refresher?," 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2025/04/bots-act-compliance-time-refresher