Two Americans who chose Portugal now try to build something that wasn't supposed to exist.
Documentary Series · 6 Episodes · Season One
Two Americans who moved to Lisbon four years ago attempt to do what no one has done before — build a cultural investment fund that acquires struggling Portuguese football clubs, restores forgotten theaters, backs Portuguese startups, and creates a new model for how global capital can serve local communities, not extract from them. Along the way, they confront Portuguese bureaucracy, skeptical communities, hungry founders, their own naivety, and the question every immigrant eventually faces: can you ever truly belong to a place you chose?
LEGADO follows Shane Howard and Benjamin White — two American entrepreneurs who have lived in Lisbon for the past four years — as they attempt to launch the Raize Legado Cultural Innovation Ecosystem Fund, a first-of-its-kind investment vehicle designed to acquire and restore Portugal's overlooked cultural assets: lower-league football clubs, crumbling theaters, startup accelerators, and the communities that depend on them.
This is not a show about wealthy outsiders buying a sports team. Shane and Ben aren't parachuting in. They live here. They've navigated the immigration system themselves. They know the neighborhoods, the bureaucracy, the rhythm of Portuguese life. They built a business from Lisbon. Now they want to build something bigger — a fund that treats football clubs, cultural venues, and innovation ecosystems not as financial assets but as civic infrastructure, creating a new pathway for global talent and capital to flow into Portuguese communities in a way that's welcomed, not resented.
The fund invests across three interconnected pillars: Sport (lower-league football clubs as community anchors), Culture (theaters, heritage venues, and documentary production), and Innovation (startup accelerators and technology ventures that create jobs, attract talent, and build the economic engine that makes everything else sustainable). The startups aren't a side bet — they're the growth engine. Ben built Brazil's first startup accelerator and invested in 40+ companies. Shane built the largest international athletic recruiting platform. Together, they see what most fund managers miss: that sport, culture, and startups aren't separate asset classes — they're an ecosystem where each piece feeds the others.
But the gap between a beautiful thesis and a functioning fund is enormous. Season One follows Shane and Ben from the moment the idea solidifies into a plan — through the agonizing process of learning fund regulation, approaching communities that have every reason to distrust foreign investors, scouting startups in a tech ecosystem that's booming but still underestimated, pitching a concept that doesn't fit any existing category, and confronting the reality that building something genuinely new means there is no playbook.
The show lives in the tension between ambition and humility. Shane and Ben believe they see something nobody else sees — that Portugal's lower-league clubs, abandoned cultural spaces, and early-stage startups are undervalued civic anchors, not distressed assets. But believing it and proving it to regulators, communities, founders, and investors are entirely different things. LEGADO is the story of that proof.
Can two immigrants build something that belongs to the community — not to them?
The show is rooted in Lisbon, where Shane and Ben live and work. Not the postcard Lisbon of travel influencers — the real city. The coworking spaces where deals get planned. The corner cafés where the anxiety of entrepreneurship gets metabolized over a bica. The immigration office queues they've stood in themselves. The neighborhoods where they've become regulars, recognized by name. Lisbon is not a backdrop. It's a character — a city in the middle of its own identity crisis, simultaneously courting global capital and resenting what that capital does to its neighborhoods.
Below the famous clubs — Benfica, Porto, Sporting — there is another Portugal. The segunda liga, Liga 3, and the district leagues are where football still means what it meant before television money: community, identity, Saturday ritual. These clubs operate on shoestring budgets. Their stadiums need repair. Their youth academies produce talent that gets hoovered up by bigger clubs for nothing. Their supporters are fiercely loyal and fiercely suspicious of outsiders. This is where the fund wants to invest — and this is where the show finds its most compelling human stories.
Portugal is dotted with cultural venues — theaters, performance halls, cultural centers — that are either closed, crumbling, or barely surviving on municipal grants. These spaces were once the social centers of their communities. The fund's thesis is that restoring them creates civic infrastructure that's as important as a football club. The show follows Shane and Ben as they discover these spaces for the first time, learn their histories, and try to imagine what they could become.
Portugal's regulatory environment is a character unto itself. CMVM fund registration. AIMA immigration processing (400,000+ case backlog). GEPAC cultural certification. Municipal governance. Football federation politics. Every step forward requires navigating a system that was not designed for what Shane and Ben are trying to do. The show doesn't shy away from the tedium and frustration — because that's where the real story lives.
Portugal's tech ecosystem is one of Europe's fastest-growing — 4,700+ startups, 16% year-on-year growth, Web Summit's permanent home. But beneath the conference glamour, there's a scrappier story. Early-stage founders working out of incubators in Lisbon, Porto, and Braga. Teams building AI, fintech, healthtech, and oceantech on shoestring budgets while competing for attention against Berlin and London. Ben knows this world intimately — he built it from scratch in Brazil. The show follows Shane and Ben into pitch meetings with Portuguese founders, into startup hubs and coworking spaces, and into the conversations about which companies to back. The startup sleeve of the fund is where the financial returns live — and where the innovation jobs get created that make the entire ecosystem sustainable. Without startups, the clubs and theaters are cultural preservation. With startups, they're economic regeneration.
The show constantly cross-cuts between Shane and Ben's intimate Lisbon life — the domestic, the familiar, the daily — and the scale of what they're attempting. One scene they're at their neighborhood spot debating fund structure. The next they're on a video call with a Gulf family office. The next they're sitting across from a 24-year-old Portuguese founder who just pitched them on an AI company. The contrast is the show's visual engine.
He was VP of Digital Media at MTV and Chief Creative Officer at Sling Media. He founded Platform Network, a pioneering youth culture portal with 50+ brand partners serving MTV, Miramax, the NBA, Timex, and Activision. He was the Founding Chief Creative Officer and Editor-in-Chief at Complex Media, where he built a 30+ person organization and helped lead Complex to profitability as the #4 media brand for millennials on the web.
Then he did something that directly foreshadows the fund: he moved from New York to Rio de Janeiro and co-founded 21212 — Brazil's first startup accelerator. He invested in and advised 40+ startups across e-commerce, education, entertainment, fintech, media, health, transportation, tourism, retail, and big data. He built an ecosystem from scratch in a country that wasn't his by birth — exactly what he and Shane are now attempting in Portugal.
Most recently he co-founded Gold Front, a category creation studio that helps founders build new market categories (clients: Uber, Robinhood). He is also an active angel investor. Ben is the builder-operator — the person who takes a thesis and turns it into infrastructure. Where Shane sees the ecosystem, Ben sees the execution path.
Shane and Ben are complementary, not identical. Shane is the ecosystem architect — he sees how sports, culture, talent, and capital connect into a single platform. Ben is the execution engine — he's built organizations, shipped products, scaled teams, and done it in foreign markets before. Shane comes from athletic recruiting and talent strategy. Ben comes from media, culture, and startup infrastructure. The fund lives at the intersection of their skill sets. The tension — when it arrives — will come from the difference between seeing the vision and building the machine. That tension is the show's creative engine.
Season 1 will introduce a rotating cast of real people whose lives intersect with the fund's ambitions. These are not "supporting characters" — they are the show's emotional anchors, the people who make the abstract thesis concrete.
Shane and Ben chose Portugal. They live there, work there, pay taxes there. But does choosing a country make it yours? The fund is, in some ways, their answer — an attempt to earn belonging by building something that serves the community. But that very act of building exposes the tension: the harder they try to contribute, the more visible they become as outsiders. This is the universal immigrant experience magnified through the lens of capital and ambition.
Every foreign investment in every local institution triggers the same question: are you here to take or to tend? The fund's entire thesis rests on the claim that it's stewardship — that the capital, the talent, the global networks will serve the community, not strip it. The show tests this claim relentlessly. It holds Shane and Ben accountable to their own rhetoric. And it lets the communities decide whether they believe it.
Starting a fund is not what it looks like on LinkedIn. It's regulatory filings. Rejected phone calls. Lawyers who bill by the hour for telling you what you can't do. Government offices where you wait. Spreadsheets that don't balance. The show commits to showing the unglamorous reality — because that's where character is revealed. How do Shane and Ben behave when nobody is watching, when progress stalls, when the dream feels naive?
"Legado" means legacy. But legacy isn't something you declare — it's something that gets judged by the people who inherit it. The show is about legacy being built in real time, with no guarantee it works. The clubs that might be saved. The theaters that might reopen. The communities that might be transformed. Or might not. The uncertainty is the drama.
Football in Portugal is not entertainment. It's social architecture. A lower-league club is a meeting place, an identity marker, a youth development system, a Saturday ritual, and a multi-generational bond. The show explores what happens when that infrastructure is failing — and what it means to try to restore it with foreign capital and foreign ideas.
Season 1 covers the journey from thesis to first commitment — the most uncertain, most emotionally volatile, and most cinematic phase of building something from nothing.
We meet Shane and Ben in Lisbon — their life, their rhythm, the city they've made home. The idea for the fund takes shape. We see the brainstorming sessions, the early excitement, the first phone calls to people who know more than they do. The thesis crystallizes. The scale of the ambition becomes clear. And so does the scale of what they don't know.
Shane and Ben enter the regulatory world — CMVM registration, GEPAC certification, legal structuring, government meetings. Simultaneously, they begin visiting potential acquisition targets — clubs, theaters, cultural spaces. They meet the communities. Some doors open. Others close hard. The emotional high of the vision collides with the grinding reality of execution. Doubt enters. The partnership is tested.
The pieces either come together or they don't. A specific opportunity crystallizes — a club, a venue, a community that feels right. Shane and Ben go all in on making it happen. The community weighs in. Investors respond. The government either facilitates or blocks. Season 1 ends not with a tidy resolution, but with a real, consequential decision that sets up everything that follows — whether that's triumph, setback, or the uncomfortable space between.
By the end of Season 1, the audience will know these two men, understand what they're trying to build, have met the communities whose futures are at stake, and be emotionally invested in whether this improbable idea can actually work. The hook for Season 2 is already built: whatever happens in the finale, the consequences are just beginning.
Each episode runs 45–55 minutes. The following are structural outlines — the real content will be shaped by events as they unfold.
We open in Lisbon. Not the tourist version — the real one. Shane walks to his regular café. Ben is on a call at a coworking space. Through their daily lives, we understand what it means to be an American who chose Portugal. Four years of building a life, navigating a foreign system, finding community. We learn their backgrounds — how they got here, why they stayed, what they built (Custom College Recruiting, EIR).
Then the conversation shifts. Over dinner, over walks through Alfama, over late-night calls — the idea for the fund emerges. Not as a business plan, but as a question: What if the things that made us fall in love with Portugal — the clubs, the culture, the community — could be the investment thesis? What if we could build something that makes it easier for other people to do what we did?
The episode ends with the first phone call to someone outside their circle — a lawyer, an advisor, someone who makes the idea real by taking it seriously enough to say: this is possible, but here's what you don't know yet.
Key beats: Lisbon daily life · Shane and Ben's origin stories · The immigrant experience, lived · The idea crystallizes · First call to an advisor
Shane and Ben go deeper. They map the landscape: 55+ competing golden visa funds in Portugal, all selling the same product. They research the clubs, the cultural spaces, the startup ecosystem, the regulatory framework. They build the pitch decks (we watch them argue over every slide). They call their advisory board — Steve Cadigan, Brad Shuck, Latasha Gillespie — and the advisors challenge them. Hard.
The episode introduces the competitive reality: why would anyone invest in their fund over the 55 others? The answer starts to take shape — this isn't a fund, it's an ecosystem. Culture, sport, startups, and residency in one platform. Ben walks us through what he built in Brazil — 21212, the country's first startup accelerator, 40+ companies funded — and explains why Portugal's tech ecosystem reminds him of Rio in 2011: bursting with talent, starving for infrastructure and patient capital.
B-roll: Portuguese lower-league football matches — the atmosphere, the passion, the crumbling infrastructure. A Lisbon startup hub at midnight, founders coding. The contrast between the beauty of what exists and the fragility of what holds it together.
Key beats: Competitive landscape research · Advisory board calls (real, unscripted) · Pitch deck creation (the arguments, the revisions) · First lower-league match attended · Ben's Brazil flashback (21212 parallels) · Startup ecosystem visit · The thesis sharpens
The regulatory gauntlet begins. CMVM fund registration. Legal structuring meetings. GEPAC cultural certification research. Government introductions. Shane and Ben discover that the Portuguese system — beautiful in its theory — is punishing in its execution. AIMA has a 400,000-case backlog. CMVM has its own timeline. Every meeting generates three more meetings.
Simultaneously, they begin outreach to potential communities — clubs and cultural spaces that might be acquisition targets. Some conversations are warm. Others are cold. One community leader tells them, directly: "We've heard promises from foreigners before."
The emotional core: the first real moment of doubt. Is this actually possible? The episode doesn't resolve it. It sits in the discomfort.
Key beats: Lawyer meetings (the cost of compliance) · Government office waiting rooms · First community outreach · Rejection or skepticism from a target · The doubt conversation between Shane and Ben
Shane and Ben begin pitching — to investors, to government officials, to community leaders, to potential partners. Each pitch is different. Each audience wants something different. The investor wants returns. The government wants jobs. The community wants respect. The show follows multiple pitch meetings, some successful, some painful. The audience sees the same story refracted through different lenses.
A key moment: a pitch to a community that goes wrong. Not because the thesis is bad, but because Shane and Ben misjudge the room, the culture, the unspoken rules. They debrief afterward — raw, honest, frustrated. And they learn.
Key beats: Investor pitch (video call or in-person) · Government meeting · Community pitch that doesn't land · The debrief · A small breakthrough that restores momentum
A specific opportunity crystallizes — a club, a town, a cultural space that feels right. Shane and Ben travel there. They meet the president, the local government, the supporters. They walk the pitch, tour the facilities, sit in the stands during a match. The episode immerses us in this specific place — its history, its people, its struggles, its pride.
The community story becomes the show's emotional center. We meet the youth coach who has been volunteering for fifteen years. The bar owner across from the stadium who has watched the club decline. The kids in the academy who dream of careers the club can't currently support. These are the people the fund claims it will serve. The camera lets us decide if we believe it.
Key beats: Travel to the target community · Meeting the club/venue leadership · Community immersion (the bar, the stands, the streets) · Youth academy visit · Shane and Ben's private conversation: is this the one?
The season finale. Everything converges. The regulatory process hits a decision point. The community makes its feelings known. The investors either commit or don't. Shane and Ben face the most consequential moment of their venture so far — and the outcome is real, unscripted, and on camera.
Win or lose, the episode widens the lens. We see what's been built beyond the specific deal — the relationships, the knowledge, the network, the reputation (good or bad) that Shane and Ben now carry in Portugal. The last scene returns to where we started: Lisbon. Shane and Ben, in their city, processing what just happened. The conversation is quiet, honest, and unresolved — because this is the end of Season 1, not the end of the story.
The final frame: a wide shot of Portugal. A country that has been absorbing outsiders for centuries. Two more just arrived at its doorstep with an idea. We'll see.
Key beats: Regulatory decision moment · Community response · Investor commitment (or not) · The partnership tested at its deepest · Return to Lisbon · The quiet conversation · Wide shot — Portugal
The show balances two registers. The intimate: Shane and Ben's daily life in Lisbon, their private doubts, their kitchen-table conversations, their walks through neighborhoods they know by heart. And the ambitious: the fund pitch, the government meetings, the stadium visits, the calls with global investors. The show never lets one register dominate — it constantly cross-cuts between the personal and the professional, the domestic and the global.
The humor is earned, never forced. It comes from the absurdity of bureaucracy, the culture clashes that even four-year residents still experience, and the self-awareness that Shane and Ben bring to their own ambition. The emotion is real — not manufactured through music or editing tricks, but captured in moments of genuine vulnerability, frustration, and joy.
Portugal is one of the most visually stunning countries in Europe, and the show leans into this without becoming a tourism reel. Golden hour light on Lisbon's tile facades. The green valleys of the interior. The concrete brutalism of lower-league stadiums. The faded grandeur of closed theaters. The camera treats Portugal with the same reverence and specificity that Chef's Table brings to a kitchen — every location is a character.
The core footage is observational documentary — cameras present during real meetings, real conversations, real decisions. No recreations. No scripted scenes. The drama comes from reality, which is always more complex and surprising than anything a writer could construct.
When Shane and Ben are in private — at home, on walks, in the car — the camera is close. Shallow depth of field. Natural light. The audience should feel like a trusted friend in the room, not a voyeur. These are the moments where the real story happens.
When the show enters a community — a club, a town, a neighborhood — it slows down. It watches. Match days filmed from the stands, not the press box. Conversations in Portuguese with subtitles, not dubbed. The camera earns its presence by being patient.
Expert context comes from real conversations, not sit-down interviews. If Steve Cadigan has advice, we hear it on the call. If a lawyer explains a regulation, we're in the meeting. The show trusts the audience to gather context from lived scenes, not exposition dumps.
| Title | Platform | What We Share | Where We Differ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome to Wrexham | FX / Hulu | Foreign investors acquire a lower-league football club. Community story. Character-driven. Emotional. | Reynolds/McElhenney are celebrities. Shane and Ben are unknown — the audience discovers them. The investment scope is broader (not just one club). And they're immigrants, not visitors. |
| Sunderland 'Til I Die | Netflix | The emotional devastation of a football club in decline. Community identity tied to sport. Unvarnished reality. | Sunderland is observation. LEGADO is participation. The camera follows people trying to change the outcome, not just document it. |
| Chef's Table | Netflix | Cinematic beauty. Deep character portraits. Cultural specificity. Each episode a world. | Chef's Table is portraiture. LEGADO is narrative — there's a through-line, stakes, and an unresolved outcome. |
| Drive to Survive | Netflix | Made an insider world accessible to a global audience. Turned a niche sport into mainstream drama. | DTS has a pre-existing season structure. LEGADO must create its own momentum from scratch. |
| The Playbook | Netflix | Leadership philosophy through sport. The human behind the strategy. | The Playbook is reflective — looking back. LEGADO is happening in real time. |
LEGADO sits in a white space: it has the community heart of Wrexham, the visual beauty of Chef's Table, the insider access of Drive to Survive, and the emotional stakes of Sunderland — but it adds something none of them have: the immigrant founder story. Two Americans who aren't visiting. They live here. They're building here. And the audience watches them try to earn the right to reshape something that predates them by centuries.
Sports documentaries are the fastest-growing category on every major streaming platform. Welcome to Wrexham delivered FX's most-watched unscripted premiere. Drive to Survive added 73 million new Formula 1 fans. The audience appetite for sports-as-human-story is at an all-time high — and the supply of fresh, original takes is not keeping up.
More high-net-worth individuals are moving across borders than at any point in history. Portugal is one of the top 10 destinations globally for millionaire migration. Golden visa programs are front-page news. Immigration is the defining political issue of the decade. LEGADO enters this conversation from a completely different angle — not as a policy debate, but as a human story about what it actually means to build a life somewhere new.
Portugal is at a crossroads. A booming tech scene. A housing crisis. A tourism-dependent economy trying to diversify. A government that simultaneously courts foreign investment and responds to populist backlash against it. The country is asking itself who it wants to be — and LEGADO is a show about two people who are living inside that question.
Portugal's startup ecosystem has exploded — 4,700+ startups, 16% year-on-year growth, Web Summit's permanent home in Lisbon, the European Investment Fund pouring hundreds of millions into Portuguese venture capital. But the ecosystem is still young, still fragile, and still missing the kind of patient, ecosystem-connected capital that turns a cluster of startups into a self-sustaining innovation economy. Ben built exactly this infrastructure in Brazil a decade ago. The timing for Portugal is now.
Foreign ownership of football clubs is one of the most debated topics in global sport. Newcastle, Chelsea, PSG, Inter Milan, Wrexham — the pattern is accelerating. But the conversation is almost always about mega-clubs and billionaires. LEGADO tells the story at the other end of the spectrum — small clubs, real communities, early-stage startups, investors who aren't oligarchs but entrepreneurs. That's a new story.
This show can only be made by us. Shane Howard and Benjamin White are the subjects AND the creators. There is no access negotiation — the cameras are in the room because the founders invite them in. Every boardroom conversation, every investor call, every government meeting, every private moment of doubt — it's all available because it's their story to tell.
Specifically, the production has exclusive access to:
The Fund's Internal Operations — Every strategic decision, from CMVM registration to club evaluation to investor outreach. The pitch decks being built. The financial models being argued over. The calls that go well and the ones that don't.
The Advisory Board — Real-time counsel from Steve Cadigan (former LinkedIn CHRO), Dr. Brad Shuck, Latasha Gillespie (former Global Director, Amazon Prime Video), Mike Williams (former CFO, Electronic Arts), Geoff Miller (MLB psychological evaluation), and Bisco Smith (culture and brand ecosystems). These are not staged conversations — they're working sessions where real decisions get made.
Government and Regulatory Meetings — Subject to institutional consent, the show follows Shane and Ben into meetings with Portuguese government officials, CMVM, municipal leaders, and football federation contacts.
Community Engagement — From the first handshake with a club president to the supporters' reaction, the show has embedded access to the communities the fund engages with.
The Personal Story — Shane and Ben's lives in Lisbon. Their families. Their friendships. The daily texture of being an American immigrant in Portugal. No PR filter. No brand management. The real thing.
LEGADO is not just a documentary series. It is a structurally integrated component of the fund it documents. This creates a unique commercial architecture that benefits every party — the production, the platform, and the fund itself.
Portugal's Golden Visa program includes a cultural production route: investors who contribute €250,000 (€200,000 in low-density areas) to a GEPAC-certified cultural production — including film and documentary — qualify for Portuguese residency. This means the documentary itself can serve as a qualifying investment vehicle, creating a second entry point into the fund's ecosystem at half the cost of the primary fund route (€500K).
Investors in the documentary production receive associate producer credit, potential profit participation from distribution, AND a pathway to European residency. The show tells the story of the fund. The fund creates the story for the show. The documentary investment creates a residency pathway that feeds back into the fund's community.
€500K Fund Route: Diversified investment in clubs, cultural infrastructure, and innovation — ARI residency via CMVM-regulated fund.
€250K/€200K Cultural Route: Direct investment in the documentary production — ARI residency via GEPAC-certified cultural activity. Associate producer credit. Potential profit share from distribution.
Same ecosystem. Same story. Two entry points. One community.
Portugal offers significant production incentives that make this project financially attractive:
PIC Portugal Cash Rebate: 25–30% cash rebate on eligible Portuguese production expenditure. Minimum €200K spend for documentaries.
RIPAC Program (2026–2029): New €200M program (€50M/year) for film and audiovisual production. Launches 2026 — aligned with production timeline.
ICA Support Schemes: Portugal's national film institute offers 20+ funding programs including documentary production support.
Creative Europe MEDIA: EU's primary audiovisual funding program. €2.44B budget (2021–2027). European co-development strand available with Portuguese production partner.
The fund's operational timeline naturally maps to multiple seasons:
Season 1: Founding → first acquisition attempt, first startup investments scouted. The idea becomes real.
Season 2: Operating the first club. First portfolio startups growing (or struggling). Community integration. The theory meets practice.
Season 3: Scaling — additional clubs, cultural venues, accelerator cohorts launching. A startup in the portfolio hits a milestone. Does the ecosystem model work beyond one community?
Season 4+: The ecosystem matures. A portfolio startup exits or scales internationally. The first investors' five-year residency cycle completes. Did the "legacy" promise hold?
Each season has a natural arc because the fund has real milestones, real deadlines, and real consequences. The drama is built into the business structure.
For the acquiring platform, LEGADO offers a rare combination: a proven genre (sports documentary), a fresh angle (immigrant founders, not celebrities), a visually stunning location (Portugal), a built-in audience (the investment migration, expat, football, and entrepreneurship communities), and multi-season structural durability. The show doesn't depend on a single match or season outcome — it depends on whether two people can build something lasting in a country they chose. That question sustains for years.