Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will buy the assets of the bankrupt professional football league XFL as part of a group bid with his business partner Dany Garcia and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners, Bloomberg News reported. The group is paying $15 million for substantially all of the assets of Alpha Entertainment LLC, the parent company of the XFL, according to a statement yesterday. Johnson and Garcia were looking at buying the XFL at the same time as Cardinale, with the two groups then deciding to join together to complete the purchase, Garcia said in an interview Monday morning. Garcia and Johnson were previously married. “We were simultaneously all examining the property deeply,” said Garcia, who was a big fan of the XFL in its 2020 season and called Johnson when she saw the opportunity to buy it. “We were two groups who could see the magic of this league.” Cardinale is a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner and his private investment firm RedBird manages $4 billion of capital. Cardinale partnered with the Steinbrenner family in 2002 to launch the YES Network, the no. 1 regional sports network in the U.S., according to the Redbird website. The sale is subject to bankruptcy court approval at a hearing Friday and may be completed around August 21. Alpha Entertainment filed for bankruptcy in April after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the shutdown of the league’s first season. The upstart football league was founded in 2017 by promoter Vince McMahon, best known for making professional wrestling into a global business, and played its first game in 2020, according to a court filing. McMahon withdrew his bid to buy the XFL out of bankruptcy in May after opposition from creditors.
