Alex Bhathal and his sister Lisa Bhathal Merage have some rules they follow ahead of each Portland Fire game they attend. For Alex, it means wearing a lucky red shirt—a switch from his usual black attire, which was correlated with two team losses. And for Lisa, she sits in seat 11 of her designated row.
The pre-game rituals of the owners of the first-year WNBA franchise are a product of their father, a businessman and sports investor who emigrated from India to the U.S. in 1960.
Lisa remembers one of the superstitions their father would espouse: “If your left eye twitches, it means that money is coming your way.”
The siblings have certainly seen recent success through their family investment firm RAJ Sports. After buying the Portland Thorns in the growing NWSL in early 2024 for a reported $63 million, the siblings are expanding their roots in the city. In September of that year, RAJ Sports purchased the Portland Fire for $125 million to secure control of the newly announced expansion franchise, which began play in the 2026 season.
The team now has a valuation of $380 million and has the fourth-highest attendance of the WNBA’s 15 franchises, averaging about 14,500 fans per game in its inaugural season. Last month, RAJ Sports opened the Kaiser Permanente Performance Center, the $150 million joint training facility for the Thorns and the Fire.
“We know that things are going to take time. But we also knew that we were going to surprise some people, and I think we’ve done that,” Alex told Fortune. “We’re really grateful and appreciative of being able to do this in a city like Portland, where it is the global epicenter of women’s sports.”
Cameron Browne/NBAE—Getty Images
A family affair
The influence of the siblings’ parents runs deeper than just game-day superstitions. Shortly after the siblings’ father Raj Bhathal immigrated to the U.S., he and their mother, Martha Bhathal, started swimwear company Raj Manufacturing in Southern California.
It meant the siblings grew up in Los Angeles with a sports team to follow for about every season: Rams in the fall, Lakers in the winter, and Angels in the spring and summer.
In addition to being a sports fan, Martha was an athlete. While growing up in California, she lettered in about seven sports growing up and played golf at UCLA.
Raj took a liking to American sports too, even beyond fandom and swimwear. In the late 1980s, he learned about the NFL’s efforts to expand internationally from an article in the Los Angeles Times, and called up the league office through a mutual contact, and ended up becoming the first franchise winner of the World League of American Football, what was then the first transatlantic pro sports league.
“We grew up with our parents as examples to us for how you show up in the world, not only in business but within a community,” Lisa told Fortune.
Raj’s time with the circuit was cut short; the domestic teams ultimately folded as the league transformed into NFL Europe, but by then, the kids had caught the bug.
They took over their family’s swimwear manufacturing business in 2006 as part of a succession plan, transforming it less than a decade later into RAJ Sports with the purchase of a minority stake in the Sacramento Kings NBA team in 2013.
“It was tremendously impactful in terms of getting a little bit of understanding and knowledge and relationships in the business side of sports,” Alex said. “That’s what led to ultimately us pursuing sports team ownership more holistically later in life.”
Portland’s women’s sporting epicenter
Lisa believes her family’s years in the fashion industry gave her and her brother a premonition about the rise of women’s sports years before the NWSL and WNBA would take off in earnest. Years ago, after the purchase of the Sacramento Kings—where Raj and Alex sit on the board, and where Raj is an alternate governor and vice chair—the family saw opportunities for women’s sports cross their desk. At the time, some called it a fad.
“Some people at that time were calling it a ‘moment,’ and I absolutely disagree with that. It’s about the rise and the future of women’s sports,” she said.
Portland, in some ways, was a natural fit. The city is home to Adidas North America and neighboring Beaverton is home to Nike’s world headquarters, creating another connection between the family and the sports lifestyle industry.
Lisa watched the Thorns play at Providence Park, and Alex began working on a business plan to purchase the NWSL team. Around the same time, ZoomInfo co-founder Kirk Brown’s bid for Portland’s WNBA expansion franchise fell through, and the siblings pounced on the opportunity.
“The stars just aligned for us, and it was meant to be,” Lisa said. “Portland is an amazing city, and Portland shows up for its sports.”
Last month, RAJ Sports, partnering with Nike, held its second annual Epicenter Sports Week, a summit to promote women’s sports. It’s a display of confidence in the future as well as an admission that the structure of women’s leagues still has some uncertainty surrounding them. Besides each league navigating issues around growth and sustainability, there’s questions around increasing pay to match leagues’ success, infrastructure to accommodate training and games, as well as politics, most recently in the WNBA having to address the eligibility of transgender athletes.
That’s an advantage to having two growing teams in Portland sports, Alex said. There’s twice the stakeholders, athletes, and fanbases from which to learn.
“In the business of sports, there’s always something crazy that happens almost every day,” he said. “It’s important to backstop that against a clear direction on what we’re trying to build.”
