In some sports, such as association football, money has always been a major factor in the success or otherwise of a given team.

When Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League in 1995, for example, it was seen as being a brilliant moment for the club and something of a ‘fairytale’ moment in the history of the competition. In reality, however, it was the success of a club that had been bankrolled by millionaire Jack Walker.

Nowadays, that kind of story is becoming more and more prevalent, with billionaires getting involved in countless different sports for all sorts of different reasons.

Sports-Washing

One of the biggest problems in sport in general, although it is particularly an issue for football, is nation states buying football clubs in order to sports-wash their reputation on the global scale.

When Newcastle United defeated Liverpool in the League Cup final of 2025, it was sold as being a brilliant moment for the club and its supporters, finally winning a major trophy after more than 70 years without one. The truth of the matter was that it was the first trophy of the club’s sports-washing era, having been bought by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia a few years before.

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Similarly, Manchester City’s relentless success in the Premier League was often sold by newspapers and media reporters as being a rise to the top for a team that had long lived in the shadow of Manchester United. As with Newcastle United, however, the reality was simply that the nation of Abu Dhabi had bought the club and ploughed money into it in order to ensure that criticism of the country’s human rights abuses would be drowned out.

In both cases, the arrival of nation states into the sport of football was disastrous for the wider game, allowing them to simply buy their success.

It Isn’t Just Football That is Suffering

Although association football is one of the most obvious sports to suffer at the hands of billionaires and nation-states, it isn’t the only one. Golf has always been a sport primarily aimed at the rich, but in theory, anyone could pick up some clubs and learn to play the sport.

When LIV Golf came along, operating as another sports-washing arm of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it changed the game entirely. Suddenly, even mediocre players on the PGA Tour were being offered astronomical sums in order to switch their allegiance and take the huge amount of money that they were being offered.

Anyone wearing those stupid LIV golf team logos should be escorted from the premises at the golf.

Disgusting Saudi funded nonsense.

— PercyToplis (@percytoplis.bsky.social) 18 May 2025 at 22:42

Lovers of NASCAR in the United States of America will tell you that the sport is being ruined by a billionaire family. Car racing in the US had long been considered one in which those involved wouldn’t make any money, with even the most successful team in the sport, Hendricks Motors, struggling to turn a profit.

Teams and the drivers were losing money, all whilst the billionaire family who own the sport continued to get richer. It all started in 2016, when NASCAR introduced 36 charters to the sport. This allowed for the lopsided nature of the sport by design to keep the rich getting richer.

Why Do Billionaires Get Involved in Sports?

Whether you’re a baseball fan or a lover of the National Football League, an association football supporter or someone who likes to spend their time watching tennis, you will know better than most the manner in which billionaires are all but ruining the competitive nature of the game that you have become emotionally invested in.

Even back in 2017, research carried out by Price, Waterhouse Cooper showed that the wealth of billionaires in the world had grown by 17%, rising up to $6 trillion. Since then, the figures have only become worse for the rest of us normal people.

Those billionaires have begun to turn their attention to sport, largely because they are becoming the only ones who can afford to do so. Wealthy people being patrons of sports clubs isn’t anything new, of course. Yet it is the reason why they are getting involved that has changed. Gone are the days of people being willing to invest in sports because it was a philanthropic enterprise.

Instead, billionaires are buying sports teams if the local community has an interest in what made them rich in the first place, allowing them to appeal directly to the market. Mainly, though, it is about becoming richer through sales and merchandise.