In infrastructure, more than €620 billion in high-yield bonds and leveraged loans reach maturity globally in 2026–2027, concentrated in precisely the mid-market renewable, grid and digital infrastructure assets where bank balance sheets are retreating fastest under Basel IV. That is not a forecast; it is debt that already exists, coming due on a fixed schedule, into a lending market with less capacity to refinance it than existed when it was written.
In industrial assets and critical minerals, the mispricing is policy-driven rather than cyclical. A small number of jurisdictions, China chief among them, control the overwhelming majority of global rare earth and critical mineral processing capacity, and the EU’s own Critical Raw Materials Act now sets binding targets for domestic extraction, processing and recycling, with a ceiling on how much of any strategic material the bloc can source from a single third country. That policy sets a floor under European and allied projects that would not otherwise exist, independent of the commodity cycle, and it is compounded by energy-intensive European industry relocating and consolidating as firms prioritise supply security over marginal cost. The scarcity here is regulatory and geographic, not a bet on commodity prices.
In sport, the mispricing is structural for a different reason: most clubs below the top tier are owned by individuals or families for whom the asset is a passion, not a balance sheet, run with undiversified revenue, no institutional governance, and commercial and media rights worth a fraction of what a comparable, professionally run asset would realise. That gap between what the asset is worth and what its current ownership can extract from it is the opportunity, not a bet on the sport, but on the difference between amateur and professional capital.
In special situations, the margin does not come from finding an underpriced asset, it comes from solving the specific problem that made a sound asset unfinanceable or unsellable through a conventional process: a seller facing a loan maturity with no refinancing in place, a fund under pressure from its own LPs to realise before end of term, an insolvency or restructuring process running against a court-imposed timetable, or a cross-border ownership structure that fails a generalist buyer’s or lender’s standard KYC and consent-right timelines. Each of those is a specific, identifiable constraint, not a vague distress narrative.
