Alex Bhathal and his sister Lisa Bhathal Merage follow a set of rituals before every Portland Fire game they attend. Alex wears a lucky red shirt—a departure from his usual black attire, which coincided with two team losses. Lisa, for her part, always sits in seat 11 of her designated row.

The game-day superstitions of the first-year WNBA franchise's owners trace back to their father, a businessman and sports investor who emigrated from India to the United States in 1960. Lisa recalls one of the beliefs he often espoused: "If your left eye twitches, it means that money is coming your way."

The siblings have recently seen considerable success through their family investment firm, RAJ Sports. After purchasing the Portland Thorns of the growing NWSL in early 2024 for a reported $63 million—a league record sale at the time, reflecting how quickly NWSL franchise values were climbing—they deepened their roots in the city. In September of that year, RAJ Sports bought the Portland Fire for $125 million, securing control of the newly announced expansion franchise, which began play in the 2026 season. That price tag itself marked how sharply WNBA expansion costs had risen: the Golden State Valkyries had joined the league for a reported $50 million fee just a few years earlier.

The Fire now carry a valuation of $380 million—more than triple what the siblings paid for the franchise—ranking them among the league's most valuable teams and underscoring a broader surge in women's sports franchise valuations across both the WNBA and NWSL. They also rank fourth in attendance among the WNBA's 15 franchises, averaging roughly 14,500 fans per game in their inaugural season. Last month, RAJ Sports opened the Kaiser Permanente Performance Center, a $150 million joint training facility for the Thorns and the Fire, part of a wider wave of investment in dedicated infrastructure for women's professional teams.

"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."

A family affair

The influence of the siblings' parents extends well beyond game-day superstitions. Shortly after their father, Raj Bhathal, immigrated to the U.S., he and their mother, Martha Bhathal, founded the swimwear company Raj Manufacturing in Southern California, which grew into one of the country's larger swimwear businesses and made the family's fortune.

Growing up in Los Angeles, the siblings had a sports team to follow in nearly every season: the Rams in the fall, the Lakers in the winter, and the Angels in the spring and summer.

Martha was an athlete as well as a sports fan. While growing up in California, she lettered in about seven sports and played golf at UCLA.

Raj also took to American sports, beyond fandom and the swimwear business. In the late 1980s, after reading about the NFL's efforts to expand internationally in an article in the Los Angeles Times, he called the league office through a mutual contact and ultimately became the first franchise winner of the World League of American Football, then the first transatlantic professional 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 run with the circuit was cut short—the domestic teams eventually folded as the league transformed into NFL Europe—but by then, the children had caught the bug. It was an early lesson, too, in the volatility of expansion ventures in sports, a backdrop that informs how the family now approaches league-building opportunities.

Under a succession plan, they took over the family's swimwear manufacturing business in 2006, and less than a decade later transformed it into RAJ Sports with the purchase of a minority stake in the NBA's Sacramento Kings in 2013, a deal that preceded the surge in NBA franchise valuations over the following decade.

"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 the family's years in the fashion industry gave her and her brother an early sense of the rise of women's sports, years before the NWSL and WNBA took off in earnest. After the Sacramento Kings purchase—where Raj and Alex sit on the board, and where Raj serves as an alternate governor and vice chair—the family began seeing women's sports opportunities cross their desk. At the time, some observers dismissed it as 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. The years since have borne that out in measurable ways: record viewership for women's basketball, rising attendance across the NWSL and WNBA, and media-rights deals that have grown alongside the leagues' commercial momentum.

Portland was, in some ways, a natural fit. The city is home to Adidas North America, and neighboring Beaverton hosts Nike's world headquarters, creating another link between the family and the sports lifestyle industry. Portland had also already demonstrated its appetite for women's soccer, with the Thorns consistently drawing some of the NWSL's largest crowds at Providence Park. Lisa watched the Thorns play there while Alex began drafting 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 seized the opening.

"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 promoting women's sports. It is both a display of confidence in the future and an acknowledgment that the structure of women's leagues still carries some uncertainty. Beyond each league navigating questions of growth and sustainability, there are issues around increasing pay to match leagues' success, infrastructure to accommodate training and games, and politics—most recently the WNBA having to address the eligibility of transgender athletes. How the leagues resolve those questions will go a long way toward determining whether the recent valuation surge is sustained.

That is where having two growing teams in Portland is an advantage, according to Alex: 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."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.