Football Field Valuation Chart: How to Build One

A football field valuation chart is the one slide every M&A banker, sell-side advisor, and board director ends up staring at: a horizontal floating-bar visual that stacks every valuation method side by side on a common enterprise-value (or per-share) axis. This guide rebuilds that chart from scratch the way Allen & Company, Qatalyst, Goldman, and Centerview build it for live fairness opinions, with worked numbers on a $25M EBITDA services business, links to public proxy exhibits where you can read the real ones, and a step-by-step Excel recipe you can copy today.

The reason the chart matters is that no single valuation method is right. Trading comps drift with market mood. Precedent transactions go stale. DCFs are sensitive to terminal-growth assumptions to the second decimal. LBO floors depend on a sponsor’s debt tolerance in any given quarter. A football field forces a banker to put all of them on one page, calibrated to the same axis, and let the board decide where confidence is highest. Where the bars overlap, the price band tightens. Where they diverge, the deal team owes the board an explanation.

If you’re a founder running a sell-side process, a board director sitting through a fairness opinion read-out, or an analyst building the page in a real pitchbook, this is the operating manual. Read it once and you’ll never look at a proxy statement the same way again.

What a Football Field Valuation Chart Actually Is

A football field valuation chart is a horizontal floating-bar graph that displays the implied valuation range produced by each separate methodology, trading comparables, precedent transactions, discounted cash flow, LBO, 52-week trading range, and premiums-paid, side by side on a single axis. The axis is either share price (for a public target) or enterprise value (for a private company sale). The name comes from the visual resemblance to the yard lines of a football field, with each methodology stacked like a yard marker.

The chart is not a forecast. It is a triangulation tool. Each horizontal bar is bounded by a low estimate and a high estimate, usually generated by sensitizing the underlying model on its two or three most important inputs (low and high multiple, low and high WACC, low and high control premium). The combination of low and high bounds gives the bar its length. The overlap between bars across methodologies is where the football field earns its keep: if four of six methods cluster between $480M and $560M of enterprise value, the board has a defensible range. If they spray from $300M to $900M, the deal team has work to do.

Wall Street Prep’s teardown of an example football field uses ranges of 7.5x to 8.5x forward EBITDA for trading comps and 8.2x to 9.4x LTM EBITDA for precedent transactions, producing per-share values of $29.10 to $32.98 against a current $29.90 share price. Financial Edge’s tutorial walks through the same structure with WACC ranges of 7.8% to 8.8% and long-term growth of 1.2% to 1.8%. Macabacus has a technical Excel build guide that uses an Up/Down bar overlay on a line chart to render the floating bars.

Why Investment Banks Use the Football Field

The football field exists because boards do not approve a single point estimate. They approve a range. Delaware fiduciary duty law, codified through the Revlon line of cases, requires directors to get a defensible price when control changes hands. A fairness opinion is the documentary backbone of that defense, and the football field is the single slide that summarizes the opinion’s analytical foundation. McKinsey’s Valuation handbook (Koller, Goedhart, Wessels, 8th edition, 2025) calls this the synthesis step, the moment where every model gets reconciled against every other model before a recommendation goes to the board.

Three audiences read the football field:

• Boards of directors use it to sign the merger agreement and ratify the fairness opinion. The vertical “offer price” line versus the bars tells them whether the bid is at, above, or below each methodology’s range.
• Sponsors and strategic buyers use it to set walk-away prices and justify board approval on their side. The LBO bar in particular sets a sponsor’s pricing floor.
• Plaintiffs’ lawyers and Chancery Court judges use it in post-deal litigation to second-guess the process. If the offer price is below the midpoint of the football field on five of six methods, the deal team will spend the next eighteen months explaining why.

This is why every fairness-opinion proxy filing, from Allen & Company’s opinion on the Microsoft-Activision deal to Qatalyst and Morgan Stanley’s opinions on the Cisco-Splunk transaction, reproduces the methodology breakdown in narrative form. The court can re-create the football field from the proxy.

The Six Valuation Methods on Every Football Field

A serious football field has at least four methods and usually six. The standard set, in order of how often they appear in real proxy filings:

1. Trading comparables, public-company multiples applied to the target’s last twelve months and forward financials.
2. Precedent transactions, multiples from completed M&A deals in the same sector, with a control premium already baked in.
3. Discounted cash flow (DCF), intrinsic value from projected free cash flows discounted at WACC, with sensitivities on WACC and terminal growth.
4. LBO analysis, the price a financial sponsor could pay and still hit a target IRR. This is the sponsor pricing floor.
5. 52-week trading range, for public targets only, the low and high of the stock over the prior year.
6. Premiums-paid analysis, control premiums observed in comparable change-of-control transactions applied to the unaffected share price.

Some pitchbooks add liquidation value (for distressed targets), sum-of-the-parts (for conglomerates), analyst price targets (for public targets), or a 5-year DCF with synergies (for strategic buyers). The CFA Institute’s curriculum on private company valuation treats trading comps, precedent transactions, and DCF as the irreducible three; the rest are situational.

Method 1: Trading Comparables (Public Company Multiples)

Trading comps apply the EV/EBITDA, EV/Revenue, or P/E multiples of publicly traded peers to your target’s financials. The output is an enterprise-value range. The judgment lives in two places: which peers go in the set, and which multiple band (low to high, usually 25th to 75th percentile) you apply.

The peer set should be tight. Five to eight comparables is the sweet spot. Pull each peer’s enterprise value from a current trading screen (Bloomberg, CapIQ, FactSet, or Damodaran’s free NYU Stern enterprise value multiples by sector dataset, updated each January). Divide each peer’s EV by its LTM EBITDA and forward (NTM) EBITDA. Calculate the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile of the resulting multiples.

For the football field bar, use the 25th-to-75th percentile as your range. Multiply both bounds by your target’s LTM and NTM EBITDA. You will get four numbers, the low and high implied EVs at LTM and NTM. The trading comps bar usually shows the wider of the two, or the LTM range as a separate bar from the NTM range. Damodaran’s January 2026 dataset shows, for example, that US software companies trade at a median EV/EBITDA of roughly 18x to 22x depending on the sub-sector, while consumer staples cluster around 11x to 13x. Picking the right peer group is the entire analytical lift.

For more on how bankers build the peer set and rationalize the multiple band, see our deep guide on how investment bankers value a business.

Method 2: Precedent Transactions

Precedent transactions apply multiples from completed M&A deals, not trading multiples, to your target. The deals must be (a) in the same sector, (b) of comparable size, and (c) recent enough that market conditions match. A 2019 software deal at 24x EBITDA tells you almost nothing about what a 2026 software deal will clear at.

The two best sources for transaction multiples are BVR DealStats (29,300+ acquired private companies, six valuation multiples, fully reviewed by BVR analysts) and PitchBook’s quarterly Global M&A reports, which publish median EV/EBITDA by sector and deal size band. For public targets, you can pull individual deal multiples directly from S-4 filings and proxy statements on EDGAR, every fairness opinion discloses the comparable transactions the financial advisor relied on.

Precedent transactions tend to produce higher multiples than trading comps because they include a control premium and, often, synergy assumptions. That premium is the entire reason the bar sits above the trading comps bar on most football fields. If your precedent-transactions bar is below your trading-comps bar, something is wrong, either the precedents are stale or the trading multiples are inflated by speculative momentum.

Method 3: DCF (Discounted Cash Flow)

DCF is the only intrinsic-value method on the football field. The other five are all relative. Done well, DCF tells you what the business is worth if the buyer ignores the rest of the market and just discounts the company’s own future cash flows at a defensible cost of capital. Done badly, DCF tells you whatever you want it to.

The mechanical recipe:

1. Project unlevered free cash flow for 5 to 10 years. Start from EBITDA, subtract taxes on EBIT, add back D&A, subtract capex, subtract change in working capital.
2. Calculate weighted average cost of capital (WACC). Use a CAPM-based cost of equity, a current after-tax cost of debt, and a target capital structure.
3. Apply a terminal value. Either a Gordon growth model (FCF in year N+1 / (WACC minus g)) or an exit-multiple approach (terminal EBITDA times an exit multiple).
4. Discount every cash flow and the terminal value to present value.
5. Sum to get enterprise value.

For the football field bar, sensitize on WACC (typically plus or minus 100 bps) and terminal growth (typically 1.5% to 3.0% for a mature business). Each combination produces a corner of the sensitivity table. The low DCF bound is the high-WACC, low-growth corner. The high DCF bound is the low-WACC, high-growth corner.

For the full mechanics of a defensible DCF, see our standalone guide on DCF (discounted cash flow) explained. For the EBITDA reconciliation work that feeds the DCF’s first year, see our piece on amortization in EBITDA.

Method 4: LBO Analysis (Sponsor Pricing Floor)

An LBO analysis tells you the maximum price a financial sponsor can pay for the business and still hit a target IRR (usually 20% to 25% over a 5-year hold). It’s the sponsor pricing floor, the price below which a private-equity bid becomes credible competition to a strategic buyer.

The LBO model works backward. You fix the target return (say 22.5% IRR on a 5-year hold), the exit multiple (often the same EBITDA multiple you bought in at), the debt tolerance (typically 5.0x to 6.5x EBITDA in current credit markets for upper-mid-market deals), and the EBITDA growth path. Then you solve for the purchase price that delivers the target return.

On the football field, the LBO bar usually sits below the precedent-transactions bar (because sponsors are price-disciplined relative to strategic buyers chasing synergies) but above the trading-comps bar (because sponsors are paying for control). When a deal clears below the LBO bar, sponsors didn’t bid or didn’t have debt capacity. When a deal clears well above the LBO bar, a strategic buyer paid up for synergies.

For the full LBO model mechanics, sources and uses, cash sweep, exit waterfall, see our LBO model step-by-step guide.

Method 5: 52-Week Trading Range (For Public Targets)

For a public target, the 52-week trading range is the simplest bar on the football field: the low and high of the stock price over the prior 52 weeks. It doesn’t require a model. It just says, “the market itself thought this stock was worth between $X and $Y at various points last year.”

Bankers include it for one reason: it is the market’s own admission of the target’s value range, untouched by the advisor’s assumptions. If the offer price sits above the 52-week high, the board can tell shareholders the deal beats every price the market had been willing to pay. If the offer price sits below the 52-week high, the board owes shareholders an explanation, often that the market was overheating during a brief window or that the company’s fundamentals changed.

The 52-week range bar does not apply to private targets. For a private sell-side process, this bar is replaced by either a “comparable private transactions” bar or a “management-case DCF” bar.

Method 6: Premiums Paid Analysis

Premiums-paid analysis takes the control premium observed in comparable change-of-control transactions and applies it to the target’s unaffected share price (typically the price one trading day, one week, or 30 days before the deal leaks or is announced). It is mostly used for public targets where there is an unaffected price to apply the premium to.

Sector-specific control premiums vary widely. FactSet’s mergerstat data typically shows median one-day premiums of 25% to 35% across most US deals. Technology deals often clear at 35% to 45% premiums. Highly contested deals can hit 60%+. The premiums-paid bar is calibrated to the target’s sector.

For the football field, take the unaffected price, apply the 25th-to-75th percentile of observed premiums in your sector and size band, and you get a price-per-share range. Multiply by shares outstanding and add net debt to get the enterprise-value range for the bar.

How to Build the Football Field in Excel Step-by-Step

Macabacus, CFI, and Wall Street Prep all teach variants of the same Excel recipe. Here is the cleanest version that works in any modern Excel build.

Step 1: Build the data table. In a worksheet, lay out four columns: Methodology Name, Low EV, High EV, and Bar Length (High minus Low). One row per methodology. Order the rows from top to bottom in the order you want them to appear on the chart, usually trading comps at the top, then precedent transactions, then DCF, then LBO, then 52-week range, then premiums paid.

Step 2: Insert a stacked bar chart. Highlight columns A (Methodology) and B (Low EV). Insert a 2-D stacked bar chart. Then add a second series, column D (Bar Length), to the same chart. You now have two stacked series per row: the invisible “Low” bar that pushes the visible bar to the right, and the “Bar Length” that shows the actual range.

Step 3: Make the first series invisible. Click the “Low EV” series on the chart. Format the fill to “No Fill” and the border to “No Line.” The bars now appear to float, starting at the Low EV value and extending to the High EV value.

Step 4: Add data labels. Show the Low value at the left end of each bar and the High value at the right end. The Macabacus build does this with two helper columns and the “Value From Cells” data label feature.

Step 5: Add the offer-price reference line. Insert a second chart series as a scatter plot with two points at the same x-value (the offer price) and y-values that span the full plot area. This renders as a vertical line across the entire football field. Format it red or bold black.

Step 6: Format the axis. Set the horizontal axis minimum and maximum to bracket your bars with a small margin on each side. Reverse the vertical axis category order so trading comps appears at the top. Add gridlines at meaningful intervals ($50M, $100M, $1.00 per share, etc.). Hide unnecessary tick marks.

The Corporate Finance Institute publishes a free Excel football field template that follows this exact pattern. Wall Street Prep’s tutorial covers the same build with screenshots of every step.

Worked Example: $25M EBITDA Services Business Football Field

Let’s build a real football field for a hypothetical sell-side mandate. Target: a US commercial services platform doing $25M of LTM EBITDA, $26.5M NTM EBITDA, growing 8% top line, with $5M of net debt and a defensible recurring-revenue mix.

Trading comps. Peer set: five publicly traded commercial services platforms. 25th percentile trading at 10.5x LTM EBITDA, 75th percentile at 13.0x. Implied EV range: $262.5M to $325.0M. NTM range at 9.8x to 12.2x: $259.7M to $323.3M. Trading comps bar on football field: $260M to $325M.

Precedent transactions. Pulled from BVR DealStats and EDGAR S-4 filings, 12 comparable deals from 2024-2026 in commercial services platforms with $15M to $50M EBITDA. 25th percentile at 11.5x, 75th percentile at 14.5x LTM EBITDA. Implied EV range: $287.5M to $362.5M. Precedent transactions bar: $290M to $365M.

DCF. 5-year forecast: $25M EBITDA growing to $36M by year 5 at 8% then 5% then 4% then 3% then 3%. WACC sensitized 9.5% to 11.5%. Terminal growth sensitized 2.0% to 3.0%. Exit multiple cross-check at 11x year-5 EBITDA. Implied EV range from sensitivity corners: $295M to $375M. DCF bar: $295M to $375M.

LBO. Target IRR 22.5%, 5-year hold, exit at 11x year-5 EBITDA, 5.5x debt at close, modest dividend recap in year 3. Solve for purchase price. Implied EV range across debt sensitivities (5.0x to 6.0x): $270M to $310M. LBO bar: $270M to $310M.

52-week range. Skipped, private target.

Premiums paid. Not applicable, no unaffected public price.

Reading the football field. Four bars stack on a single axis. Overlap zone: roughly $295M to $310M is inside every bar. Tight zone: $290M to $325M is inside three of four bars. The board’s defensible range is $290M to $365M with an “expected outcome” zone of $295M to $325M. If a strategic buyer bids $340M with synergies, the deal is fair on three of four methods and above the LBO floor, sponsors will not match without strategic synergies. The football field has done its job.

This is exactly the analytical work behind how to price a business for sale in a real sell-side process. The football field is the boardroom artifact; the methodologies are the work product.

How Banks Present the Football Field to Boards in Fairness Opinions

A fairness opinion is a written letter from a financial advisor stating that the consideration in a proposed transaction is fair, from a financial point of view, to the relevant stockholder group. The opinion itself is two pages. The supporting board book runs 60 to 100 pages. The football field is usually slide 4 or 5, right after the executive summary and the transaction overview.

The Allen & Company fairness opinion to the Activision Blizzard board, disclosed in the Microsoft-Activision PREM14A, performed three core analyses: a selected public companies analysis (trading comps), a selected precedent transactions analysis, and a discounted cash flow analysis. The DCF alone produced a per-share range of $84.73 to $123.87 with a $104.30 midpoint, well above Microsoft’s $95.00 offer. The football field implied in that disclosure is a four-bar chart with the $95.00 offer sitting at the lower end of the DCF bar and inside the trading-comps and precedent-transactions bars.

The Qatalyst Partners and Morgan Stanley fairness opinions to the Splunk board, disclosed in the Cisco-Splunk PREM14A, ran the full six-method football field. The $157 offer landed near the middle to top of most bars, slightly below the upper end of Morgan Stanley’s transaction-comps bar, a textbook outcome for a clearly fair deal.

The mechanics of board presentation are mostly script: the lead banker walks the directors through each methodology, explains the range, then points to the football field slide and says, “the consideration of $X per share falls within the range implied by each of our analyses, and is at or above the midpoint of [N] of [M] methodologies.” The board asks a few questions. The fairness opinion is delivered orally, then confirmed in writing. The recommendation goes to a vote.

Reading a Football Field in a Public M&A Proxy Statement

If you want to learn how to read a football field for real, go to EDGAR and pull any major public M&A proxy from the last three years. The fairness opinion section of a PREM14A or DEFM14A, usually titled “Opinion of [Bank]’s Financial Advisor”, reproduces every analysis in narrative form, with tables showing the implied valuation range from each methodology.

Three filings to start with:

• The Microsoft-Activision PREM14A (Allen & Company fairness opinion).
• The Cisco-Splunk PREM14A (Qatalyst and Morgan Stanley fairness opinions).
• The Capital One-Discover S-4/A (Centerview and PJT Partners fairness opinions on a $35B bank merger).

When you read these, look for four things:

1. Methodology selection. Which of the six methods did the advisor use? Why? Did they skip 52-week range? Did they add a sum-of-the-parts? The choice tells you what the advisor thought was relevant.
2. Multiple bands and percentile choices. Did the advisor use the full peer set or trim to a tight subset? 25th-to-75th percentile or 10th-to-90th? Wider bands produce wider bars, which makes any offer look more “fair.”
3. Sensitivity choices in the DCF. What WACC range and what terminal growth range did the advisor sensitize on? A WACC band of plus or minus 25 bps is aggressive; plus or minus 150 bps is wide.
4. Where the offer price sits. Is it inside every bar? Above every bar? Below the DCF midpoint? This is the punchline of the entire fairness opinion.

For investors, the football field embedded in a proxy is the closest thing to an honest valuation of the deal, because it’s the advisor’s defensive record if the deal is later challenged. Bankers don’t put numbers in a proxy they can’t defend in deposition.

How CT Acquisitions Builds Football Fields for Sell-Side Mandates

On any sell-side mandate above $5M of EBITDA, we build a football field before the first management meeting. The purpose is internal, to set the seller’s expectations on a defensible range, and external, to anchor the buyer universe to a price band that the data supports.

Our process:

1. Peer set construction. We pull 8 to 12 trading comps from CapIQ, then trim to the 5 or 6 that are genuinely comparable on size, growth, margin profile, and recurring-revenue mix. We then pull 10 to 20 precedent transactions from BVR DealStats, PitchBook, and EDGAR S-4 filings from the prior 36 months, trimmed to the deals that match on size band, deal type (strategic versus sponsor), and sector.
2. DCF model. We build a 5-year operating model with three cases (downside, base, upside). WACC is built from CAPM with sector-specific beta from Damodaran’s beta data. Terminal growth is 2.0% to 2.5% for most US services platforms.
3. LBO model. We solve for the price that delivers a 22.5% IRR to a sponsor at current debt levels (typically 5.0x to 6.5x in the upper middle market through 2026). This sets our floor on a sponsor-led bid.
4. Football field synthesis. We render the four bars in a one-page chart, then overlay our recommended marketing range, typically the overlap zone of three of four bars.
5. Calibration through process. As IOIs come in, we re-mark the chart against the bid distribution. The football field becomes a live document, not a one-time pitch slide.

The football field is downstream of the buyer-side strategy, which is downstream of the auction design. For the full sell-side process flow, see our guide on how investment bankers run a sell-side auction. For the bridge between enterprise value (what the football field shows) and equity value (what the seller actually receives), see our enterprise value to equity value bridge.

Football Field Valuation: Frequently Asked Questions

What is a football field valuation chart?

A football field valuation chart is a horizontal floating-bar graph that displays the implied valuation range from each of several valuation methods, trading comparables, precedent transactions, DCF, LBO, 52-week trading range, and premiums-paid, on a common enterprise-value or per-share axis. The chart is the standard synthesis tool in investment-banking pitchbooks, fairness opinions, and M&A board presentations.

Why is it called a football field?

The chart gets its name from the visual resemblance to the yard markers of an American football field. Each methodology’s bar looks like a yard line on the field, and the chart resembles a top-down view of the playing surface. The name is universal across Wall Street and London.

How many methods should a football field include?

A serious football field has at least four methods and usually six. The standard set is trading comparables, precedent transactions, DCF, LBO, 52-week range (for public targets), and premiums paid (for public targets). Private-target football fields skip 52-week range and premiums-paid and often add a management-case DCF or a comparable-private-transactions bar.

What’s the difference between trading comps and precedent transactions on a football field?

Trading comparables apply current public-market multiples to your target. Precedent transactions apply M&A deal multiples to your target. The key difference is the control premium, precedent transactions include a premium for change of control, which is why the precedent-transactions bar usually sits above the trading-comps bar on most football fields.

Where should the offer price sit on a football field?

For a fair deal, the offer price should sit inside the range of at least three of the four to six bars on the football field, and at or above the midpoint of the DCF bar. If the offer price is below every bar, the board has a fiduciary problem. If it is above every bar, the buyer has overpaid. Most cleared deals land in the overlap zone of three to four methodologies.

How do banks build the DCF range on a football field?

Banks sensitize the DCF on two inputs: WACC (usually plus or minus 75 to 150 basis points around the base case) and terminal growth (usually 1.5% to 3.0%). The low end of the DCF bar is the high-WACC, low-growth corner of the sensitivity table. The high end is the low-WACC, high-growth corner. Some advisors cross-check against an exit-multiple terminal value as a sanity check.

What sources do banks use for precedent-transaction multiples?

The two most common databases are BVR DealStats (29,300+ acquired private companies, fully verified by BVR analysts) and PitchBook. For public-target transactions, advisors pull individual deal multiples from S-4 filings and proxy statements on SEC EDGAR. Mergermarket and Refinitiv are also widely used at bulge-bracket banks.

Do you include a football field in a fairness opinion?

Yes. Every fairness opinion includes a football field, either as a single summary slide or as a series of methodology-by-methodology tables that reproduce the same information. The Allen & Company opinion on Microsoft-Activision and the Qatalyst and Morgan Stanley opinions on Cisco-Splunk both include the analytical detail behind a football field in the public proxy filings.

Can I build a football field in Excel?

Yes. The Excel recipe is a stacked bar chart with two series: a “Low” series with no fill (which pushes the visible bar to the right) and a “Bar Length” series with the actual range. Add a scatter-plot series with two points at the offer price to render a vertical reference line. Wall Street Prep, CFI, and Macabacus all publish step-by-step tutorials and free templates.

What’s the difference between a football field for a public company and a private company?

Public-target football fields use a per-share axis and include 52-week trading range and premiums-paid bars. Private-target football fields use an enterprise-value axis and skip those two bars, often replacing them with a management-case DCF or a comparable-private-transactions bar. The methodology selection adapts to whether there is an unaffected market price to anchor against.

Ready to build a football field for your own business?

If you’re considering a sale, recapitalization, or strategic exit and need a defensible valuation range built the way real M&A bankers build one, CT Acquisitions runs sell-side processes for owner-operated and sponsor-backed businesses across the US. Schedule a call and we will build the football field together, on your business, with your numbers, using the same six methods every fairness opinion uses. No obligation, no marketing book, just the chart and the range it implies.