Next on the Premier Lacrosse League Roadmap: Team Owners
The PLL’s eight teams are currently all owned by the league.
The 2026 Premier Lacrosse League season begins on May 8 in Salt Lake City. Currently, all eight teams in the pro men’s lacrosse league, as well as the four teams in the recently launched Women’s Lacrosse League, are owned by the PLL itself. But that’s not the long-term plan.
The PLL will eventually move to a model with individual team owners, league founder and president Paul Rabil said on a recent episode of Portfolio Players . Rabil told Front Office Sports that team ownership was a prerequisite for becoming a top five North American sports league. “I think the right ones are force multipliers.
They create more value in some cases than the league does,” Rabil said. He pointed to NFL owners Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft, who’ve done “amazing things,” as well as Angel City FC and Inter Miami, as models for effective ownership. Alongside brother Mike, Rabil launched the PLL in 2019 as a competitor to Major League Lacrosse, which had multiple franchise owners before switching to a single-entity league in January 2020 and merging with the PLL that December.
Rabil said the PLL is now set up for broader success by introducing team owners: “When we do sell teams, we will be in a better position than had we done it formerly. ” Currently, the league has a touring model ; even though each team is attached to a city, competition rotates through different stops across a 12 weekend regular season, plus a midseason All-Star event. Rabil believes that in order to attract team owners, the league will need to eventually move away from touring and find permanent home venues, as “you’re not going to want to come in and buy a team and only get one or two game weekends.