The New York Yankees announced monumental news last week, but it had nothing to do with Aaron Judge or Cody Bellinger’s returns from injury, Ben Rice finding a slump buster, or Yankee Stadium concessions no longer selling the 99 Burger in a mushy, lukewarm state. Instead, a week after Major League Baseball’s trade deadline closed, the Steinbrenner family acquired an unlikely teammate at the owners’ table — Apollo Sports Capital, an equity investor that owns stakes in Madrid’s second-biggest soccer team, Major League Pickleball, and Wrexham AFC (the as-seen-on-reality-TV Welsh soccer club co-owned by (and co-starring) Ryan Reynolds). In return for $2.6 billion, the Steinbrenners gave up as much as 15 percent of the Bronx Bombers to an industry often unfavorably compared to (the not cool kind of) vampires.

It seems like everyone is hooking up with private equity guys these days, and sports are no exception. Now that American sports leagues have begun allowing outside investment, large investors such as Apollo have been buying non-controlling stakes in teams. But this is the Yankees. Love them or hate them, they are an outsized institution not only in baseball, but all pro sports, and they have a well earned reputation for ambition and doing whatever it takes to win. As the Yankees went, so went the rest of the sports world.

But times and the Yankees have changed. The Steinbrenners have found themselves in a familiar spot among sports franchise owners: operating a wildly popular family-run team, with control of huge but illiquid assets, and facing rising operating costs. The Yankees have nearly paid down and refinanced $1 billion of debt after moving to new Yankee Stadium 17 years ago, and, according to The Athletic, are thought to still have about $100 million in debt remaining. As with many 21st century sports franchises, it’s far more than a ball club — it’s a holding company called Yankee Global Enterprises whose portfolio contains a baseball team; a spring training stadium in Florida; an operating agreement for Yankee Stadium; and minority stakes in a regional sports network (YES), a hospitality company (Legends) and two soccer teams (New York City FC and AC Milan).

There’s also no getting around the fact that the modern-day Yankees aren’t quite what they used to be; their days as baseball’s apex predator in talent acquisition are over. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ wealthy ownership group, sweetheart TV deal, and free-jazz accounting have made them the new inevitable destination for most stars, and they are the team now constantly accused of “ruining baseball.”. The Dodgers have surpassed the Yankees in annual revenue as well as on the field; while LA is chasing their third World Series title in a row, the Yankees are close to equaling their longest championship drought. (They last won it all in 2009.)

That’s all a long way of saying the Yankees’ owners could use some money, and........

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