High rates? No Problem. How Rocket’s Former CEO is Expanding His Sports Portfolio
When Jay Farner started out at what would eventually become Rocket Companies, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate hovered right around - wait for it - 8.75 percent. That was the mid-90s. Rates would come down, and stay down for what felt like forever. In the interim, Rocket would become one of the most recognizable brands in American finance - in no small part because of the billions Farner spent putting it in front of sports fans.
I remember the excitement at ESPN for the Quicken Loans Carrier Classic, the first D1 basketball game played on the deck of a US aircraft carrier. The Billion Dollar Bracket with Warren Buffett. The Super Bowl ads. In a cluttered media landscape, Farner knew sports cut through.
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“Out of all the different ways to reach folks,” he told me this week, “sports really time and again won…(today) we want to own those sports assets because we know how valuable they are.”
Now rates are closer to where they were when he started. And Farner - who left Rocket in 2023 and launched Ronin Capital Partners - is on the other side of that trade entirely. The current interest rate environment has turned out to create more opportunities for Ronin - not fewer - and they are acting on it. That includes a forthcoming announcement this year on a new sports investment overseas. (Check out the full video podcast with Jay at the end of this post for more details.)
“Firms that use a lot of leverage, borrow a lot of debt to make purchases - they have to reduce the purchase price, they can pay less,” he said. “It opens up opportunities for firms that are willing to cut more of an equity check.”
Ronin, he says, is “leverage light.” Family office structure, patient capital. And right now, he says that’s an advantage.
How he’s invested in sports
The names in his current sports portfolio are eclectic by design: Detroit City FC; TGL’s first expansion franchise, the Motor City Golf team; global pickleball rating system DUPR; sponsorship analytics tool Trajektory and Student Athlete Score, a platform that helps college and high school athletes navigate NIL.
If there is one throughline with these investments, it’s that he doesn’t just want to write a check.
“If we’re simply providing capital, we’re probably not the right investor,” he told me. What is he looking for? Properties where his specific background and skillset can add value to the firm’s business and leadership team.
“As Dan Gilbert used to say to me,” he said, “we need to be investing not only in the jockey, but the horse.”
He learned that from the inside. During his Rocket years, Farner was a part of Gilbert’s Cleveland Cavaliers ownership group. Watching Gilbert own that franchise - chasing wins on the court while investing in the in-arena experience, right down to what is normally the shabbiest part of the arena - the visitors’ locker rooms - shaped how he thinks about his own sports investments today.
“The player who’s visiting today may be on your team tomorrow,” Farner said. “So treat them in a way that makes them want to come to your stadium, come and be part of your team.”
Detroit’s soccer team
One of the hottest debates among American soccer fans has been the question of promotion and relegation - the European and global soccer system where top performing teams are elevated to a higher division, and teams that finish at the bottom of the league are demoted to a lower division.
Major League Soccer has resisted it - but the second-tier United Soccer League, or USL, voted to implement promotion and relegation, starting in 2028. Farner is buying into that system - with Ronin Sports & Entertainment in July making the largest investment in the history of Detroit’s USL club, Detroit City FC.
I asked him if promotion and relegation concerns him as an owner - to see an asset potentially diminish overnight because of demotion to a lower tier.
“Relegation may actually help the financial thesis,” he told me. “If you’re watching your NBA team and they’re not performing well, maybe you don’t have a reason to go to some games at the end of the season. But in a soccer league with relegation, every single game matters - even if it’s not to make the playoffs, it’s to stay in that premier league.”
Ronin’s investment allows the club to construct a new $150 million stadium, which will also ultimately include mixed-use development in an area called Corktown, just west of the city’s downtown. Farner gets excited talking about the supporters section in the future stadium - which won’t be tucked into the endzone, it’ll be at midfield.
“They bring so much energy,” Farner said, “and it transfers the culture.”
Right now, Farner is bullish on the experience economy.
“We’re watching to see how AI impacts things,” he said. “It reminds me a bit of the dot-com period - it looked like there’d be a hundred or a thousand winners, but you had to take a step back and realize there’d only be a handful.”
While that shakes out, he’s leaning into investments that “we can touch and see” - industrial real estate, large-scale residential, sports. But not sports betting or predictive markets, for now - for the record, his youngest son has looked into predictive markets and he says he’s steered him back towards the stock market.
Something coming
Ronin is expanding its footprint in sports - in the month or so, they will announce a new investment in sports overseas, he described it as “a different format on a traditional sport.”
I asked him if his investment in DCFC - and its connection to global soccer culture - perhaps piqued his interest in deploying capital overseas. He said Ronin had been approached by international soccer brands before the Detroit investment came together. The stake in the Detroit club was personal - he spent decades building up Rocket in downtown Detroit, his kids grew up in the area - so that one came first. The international play is about expanding the scope of Ronin’s portfolio.
“We can watch the ups and downs and have a little more diversification,” he said.
The long game
We ended the conversation talking about a mutual connection - family members afflicted by Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases.
Farner is an investor in both the Cleveland Clinic Brain Study and the Kirk Gibson Foundation in Detroit, which supports Parkinson’s patients and their caregivers. Of course, the return there isn’t financial but will be measured by its impact, Farner says - people and their lives.
The investment is personal. Farner recalled that his grandfather was “a tool and die man,” a clay model maker who used his hands his entire life. Parkinson’s cruelly took that away.
“He said to me, ‘It’s so frustrating, I can’t use my hands anymore,’” Farner said. “And then to watch the deterioration - and then to watch my grandmother, with really no support system set up.”
The Cleveland Clinic piece is in foundational research, the kind of studies that take decades to bear fruit. He drew a line to the clinic’s heart and vascular work, which shaped treatments for a generation.
“That’s the same thing they’re doing now with brain,” he said.
You could say the same philosophy applies to sports assets, and to other investments Ronin makes. No clock, just the belief that if you make the right investment and stay in it long enough - something changes.