The Real Reason Sport is Being Politicized

Nike’s gotta love people like the mayor of Kenner, Louisiana.

Everyone’s saying they’re playing politics with sports. And why not? It’s just next in line.

First, we politicized religion. Then, we politicized science. Then we politicized education. Then we politicized the news. Sports, the last bastion, had to fall.

We’d like to take you on a tour of just how big a phenomenon this is.

All over the world, the people who are manipulating the global economy to serve their purposes are using sports as a tool to do it.

Let’s take just 2017 as an example. Here’s the 5 biggest financial transactions in sports during 2017. We visualized them as gears for a reason you’re about to see.

Before we get started, it’s worth noting why the Neymar deal is listed at $600 million, when his transfer fee was $263 million. That’s because the total contract payout from Paris St Germain was six hundred — which includes the player’s $53 million annual salary.

Now let’s locate these five deals on the global map, and as we do so, the much, much bigger gears begin to appear.

Paris St Germain is owned by the sports authority of the country of Qatar. At the time of the Neymar deal, Qatar was having all its ports in the Persian Gulf blockaded. The other Arab Sunni countries hated the way Qatar shares the South Pars/North Dome natural gas field with Shia Iran. The blockade was costing Qatar $6 billion in trade every month, and they needed the world’s help.

The $600 million they offered Neymar was just a conversation starter, an ice-breaker, to get everyone’s attention.

And what country gets 19% of its natural gas from Qatar? China.

China meanwhile had its own problem internally. Everyone getting rich in China was moving their money out of the country, beyond the government’s control. $60 billion was leaving China every month. So, as part of its One Belt, One Road sweeping policies, the government made removing money from the country illegal (with exceptions for the cases where it’s “good for China.”)

When that happened, Alibaba’s planned purchase of AC Milan was halted. Instead, a new Chinese buyer emerged, a puppet that nobody had heard of.

The actual money for the Milan purchase didn’t come from the guy nobody had heard of. Instead it came from someone everyone had heard of: a New York investor named Paul Singer, often called The Most Feared Investor in the World. His activism inside Samsung led to the Korean president being jailed. He owns lots of sovereign debt … he bosses entire countries around. He once impounded a navy ship that belonged to Argentina. He’s also a huge, huge player in … can you see it coming? … natural gas.

Wait, there’s more!

Because Paul Singer was also the activist investor who forced the sale of Cabela’s, saying they weren’t selling enough guns. Then Trump was elected, gun sales fell, and the deal nearly fell apart.

Meanwhile, casino money sold UFC, and casino money bought the Rockets. Cousins from the same family. But the Rockets deal wasn’t cash. The Golden Nuggets casinos floated $1.5 billion in high yield BBB bonds to pay for the Rockets (even though the NBA had a rule against debt financing.) Who bought those bonds? We don’t know. We know who sold them though: Capital One, the same company who helped finance the Cabela’s deal.

UFC meanwhile was bought by WME, William Morris Endeavor. A year earlier, WME had spent another 4 billion buying IMG, the talent agency that represents tons of sports stars. WME had decided on a strategy (a very smart one) that in the globalized world, sports stars will make more money than movie stars will.

But WME didn’t write the $8 billion in checks for UFC and IMG.

In both deals, the money came from Silicon Valley’s private equity fund, Silverlake Partners.

And where’s Silverlake’s bottomless pit of money come from? From their investment in …. can you see it coming? … Alibaba.