[Syd Thrift]

I agree that where this is far more likely to happen is in an individual as opposed to a team sport. The Saudis buying out Dana White wouldn’t strike me as crazy, for example, nor would the McMahons selling their stake to foreign nationals (although I think they already got tied in to the Mouse). I think Khan is really unlikely to sell AEW to the Saudis because he dislikes them as much as American billionaires say they do. Tennis, of course. Boxing would be super easy, as easy as buying one of the big 3-letter organizations or even going off and creating their own. The only real issue with that is that everyone is very aware that boxing is corrupt to its core and they’d have to do a lot of heavy lifting to make it a sportswashing experience the way they want these to be.

I think it’s super unlikely that US sports franchises get sold off because of the aforementioned requirement that everyone has to be voted on. That’s just plain not how soccer works. Outside of demonstrating that the team itself has a given stream of revenue - and the consequences for that are assessed to the team, not the owner - pretty much anyone with the cash can buy teams at any level, and that’s if anything more noticeable at the lower levels where you don’t need a great deal of money to own and operate them. Lower level teams are owned by local millionaires but also local communities and businesses (there’s a long history of the English system having teams composed of a bunch of guys who work at a given factory and some of that lives on today). There’s even a team called Hashtag United (it being England you’d think they’d call it Octothorpe United but I think an American owns it).

I want to say the German system either requires partial community ownership or there just happens to be a ton of teams in it that are owned by local communities.