Inside Britain's fastest-growing sports teams and brands

Athena Sports

Sir Ben Ainslie is considered the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, securing four gold medals and a silver. A year after his swansong at London’s 2012 Olympic Games he changed tack, launching his Athena Racing team to contest the America’s Cup and a host of other top events.

Ainslie continues to compete, skippering Ineos Britannia to glory at last October’s Louis Vuitton Cup in Barcelona. A few days later, the team delivered the best showing by a British boat at an America’s Cup for some 90 years.

Athena Racing owns 60 per cent of the Emirates Great Britain Sail Grand Prix Team, one of 12 team franchises competing in the global sailing competition, SailGP.

Over the years, Ainslie has reeled in a succession of big-name sponsors, including Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos and the US bank JP Morgan. That has helped its revenues to grow by 112.1 per cent over the past three years to £65m.

Athena is now part of a wider group wrapping in Ainslie’s philanthropy and his other business ventures. These include BAR Technologies, a start-up aiming to help tankers, pleasure boats and other vessels harness wind power to cut carbon emissions.

Poole-based Athena Sports Group also includes ainslie + ainslie, a fledgling supplements business Ainslie launched with his wife, Georgie. Its first product, Night Powder, aims to boost recovery, maximise sleep and improve immunity.

Queensberry Promotions

Few names are bigger in British boxing than Frank Warren. Over nearly half a century in the sport, he has promoted and managed household-name fighters ranging from Frank Bruno and Chris Eubank to Tyson Fury and Ricky Hatton.

Raised in an Islington council flat, Warren left school at 14 and initially worked as a trainee solicitor. His first foray into boxing promotion came in 1976, when his second cousin Lenny McLean was struggling to find someone to jump into the ring with.

Four years after that first unlicensed bout, Warren managed to secure a licence for a contest between two little-known American heavyweights at an obscure London hotel. Although he had secured TV rights, these were later blocked by the sport’s governing body, which had a rule banning a promoter's first licensed fight from being televised.

That would end up costing the young man trying to shake up boxing £17,000 – about £72,000 in today’s money. But before long, Warren was back on his feet and money from broadcasters was soon rolling in.

His mission to disrupt the sport was not without its perils. In 1989, he lost a lung when he was shot twice in the chest by an unknown gunman wearing a balaclava. One of the bullets missed his heart by an inch.

Warren’s company Queensberry Promotions takes its name from the rules drafted by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry in the 1860s that still govern boxing to this day.

Over the years, the Hertford-based firm has promoted more than 1,000 events and 150 world champions. Warren is certainly still swinging, with revenues up 657 per cent over the past three years to £112.2m.

Luton Town FC

Promotion to the Premier League doesn’t just make players and fans walk a little taller, it also supercharges a club’s finances.

When Luton Town broke into English football’s top-flight for the 2023-24 season, it received £116.6m for broadcast rights and commercial revenue from the league.

This was certainly a very different ball game from the £10.1m received from the EFL Championship the year before.

Then there’s the money Luton itself made during the 2023-24 season. Match-day earnings jumped by £1.1m to £6.2m and there was a threefold increase in the club’s commercial revenues. Overall, revenues are up 632.5 per cent over the past three years to £132.6m.

All this gave Luton the cash to pay out promotion bonuses to the squad, which led them into the Premier League, spruce up one of the stands at home ground Kenilworth Road, spend £25m on new players and even pay back a loan from the Covid era.

But life for fans of the Hatters – who include the singer-turned-DJ Cerys Matthews and former England cricket captain Sir Alastair Cook – hasn’t been so sweet of late. Luton’s spell in the Premier League lasted just one season. Then, in May this year, after a woeful 2024-25 Championship campaign, they were relegated to League One.