C

tattoos—greets each fan with a broad smile
and a handshake or high-five and asks where
they are from. Most take the opportunity to
lobby him directly to bring PLL games to their
city. Lacrosse is on the rise at the exact moment
that tackle football participation among high
school players is cratering (down 6.6% over the
past decade and even more at the youth level),
and NFL TV ratings last year were about 12%
shy of their high-water mark in 2015. Rabil
knows a scoring opportunity when he sees
one. Lacrosse involves “the contact of football,
the agility of basketball, the endurance of
soccer, and the hand-eye skill of baseball and
hockey,” he says. “There’s a large audience that
the pro game hasn’t hacked into yet.”

CHANCES ARE YOU HAVEN’T BEEN TO A
professional lacrosse game and probably
can’t even name a team. North America’s two
existing leagues (the MLL, which is played
outdoors, and the 32-year-old National La-
crosse League, which plays indoors) sold an
average of 3,600 and 9,400 tickets per game
last year, respectively, compared to the NBA’s
18,000 and the NFL’s 67,000, and neither
league has full-season TV coverage. The NCAA
Final Four lacrosse championship remains
the sport’s marquee event, drawing 30,000
fans per game. Dom Starsia, the legendary
University of Virginia coach who spent last
season as an assistant coach for the MLL’s
Boston Cannons, recalls a game last year at a
30,000-capacity stadium. “There must have
been about 50 people in the stands,” he says.
“You can’t get much worse than that.”
Both the MLL and the NLL, like most pro-
fessional sports leagues, follow a franchise
model: Teams are owned and controlled by
wealthy individuals or groups and based in
a home city. The leagues operate, essentially,
as trade associations. Some revenue (from
licensing, broadcast, ticket sales, merchan-
dise) is shared among all teams, while some
(from concessions, luxury-box sales, venue
rental) accrues to individual franchises. Scal-
ing a new league with this model has become
prohibitively expensive. When the NFL was
founded, in 1920, new franchises cost about
$100; now they sell for more than $2 billion.
The Rabil brothers didn’t have that kind
of money. They’d grown up in a middle-class
family (paper-salesman dad, art-teacher
mom) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where
every other yard had a lacrosse goal, and by

the age of 12 budding athletes had developed

either a deadly shot or expert glazier skills.

The two brothers competed against each

other so fiercely that neighborhood pickup

games included a “Rabil rule”: Mike and Paul

had to be on the same team in order to avoid

game-ruining fistfights.

Mike went on to become captain of the

Dartmouth football team. Paul concluded his

college career at Johns Hopkins by becoming

the first player selected in the 2008 MLL draft,

signing with the Boston Cannons for less

money per year than LeBron James earns dur-

ing a post-game ice bath: $6,000. Like most

professional lacrosse players, Paul had to take

a second job. He chose commercial real estate.

As it turned out, 2008 was a terrible time for

that, but perfect for experimenting with social

media to build a personal brand. He began

posting one video to YouTube a week, a habit

he’s maintained for more than a decade; col-

lectively, his videos have been viewed more

than 25 million times. Paul built a large,

multiplatform following that helped drive the

growth of the Maryland-based lacrosse camp

and clinic business he was launching. Soon,

he’d quit his real estate job to become a full-

time lacrosse player/entrepreneur, and his

continued dominance on the field—MVP of

the MLL as well as the world championships—

fueled a virtuous cycle (positive media cov-

erage, expanding social footprint, speaking

engagements, camp and clinic growth) that

attracted sponsors such as Under Armour,

New Balance, Red Bull, and Chevrolet. By

2014, his endorsement deals totaled north of

a million dollars, a first for the sport.

During the off-season, Paul worked with

his brother, who’d parlayed two success-

ful fitness endeavors—Turnstyle Cycle, in

Boston, and seven Snap Fitness franchises

in four states—into an investment career.

Rabil Ventures provided early-stage capital

and strategic advice to a variety of compa-

nies. (Its portfolio includes the sports-news

website The Athletic and direct-to-consumer

packaged-goods purveyor Brandless.)

Though amateur lacrosse was booming,

the MLL was not, with attendance declining

from its 2011 peak. In 2017, the Rabils were ap-

proached by several hedge funds and private

equity companies to assemble a deal to acquire

the MLL and revamp its business strategy.

“We sat down with the MLL leader-

ship [and had] three or four conversations

over a year,” Mike

recalls. “We said,

‘This isn’t working,

and we have an idea

of how to make it

work.’ ” But the two

sides were never able

to agree on a price.

“When you get to

a place where the

math doesn’t pencil

out, you’ve got to go

your own way.”

The Rabils have

conceived the PLL as

a single entity rather

than an association

of franchises. It’s

owned by investors

and PLL employees

(the players and the

league staff ), all of

whom stand to bene-

fit from future profits.

To achieve national

reach without having

to assume the exorbi-

tant costs required to

host full-season schedules at six venues, the

Rabils settled on a touring model: Players, who

are guaranteed a minimum annual salary of

$25,000, are assigned to a team and can re-

side wherever they like. Each weekend, all six

teams descend on a different major-market

city (12 in all, from Boston to Portland, Oregon)

to play three games, two on Saturday and one

on Sunday. Fans can buy tickets for individual

games or a pass for all three for less than $50.

Every week, the PLL will create the festival at-

mosphere of the NCAA championship.

After developing this plan throughout

2018, the Rabils began in November to ap-

proach investors whom Mike had met through

work and Paul had encountered during speak-

ing engagements at events such as South by

Southwest and the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics

Conference. “Over the past 25 years, I’ve sat

through 50 to 60 pitches for taking profes-

sional lacrosse to the next level, and this was

the first time I was inclined to say yes,” says

Mike Levine, a onetime Cornell lacrosse player

and now head of CAA Sports, a division of the

Creative Artists Agency. “The current system

was broken and wasn’t going to get better.

We needed something different.” Levine was

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