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Daddy Warbucks

Sugardaddies: the fifteen richest owners in the sporting world

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the richest of them all? Abramovich is only at number four, so who’s got more moulah?

Reproduced with permission from BusinessInsider.

EVERY PERSON ON this years’ edition of Forbes Magazine’s world billionaire rankings owns something extravagant like a yacht, an extensive art collection, helicopters, or even a garage full of cars with unpronounceable names … but only a select few can own a major sports team.

Wouldn’t owning a sports team be fantasy sports come to life, but infinitely better? Instead of slaving away on your computer every night, you could hire someone to manage all that stuff while you hang out in a luxury box eating fresh caught seafood. The fantasy sports comparison rings even more true for owning a Major League Baseball team, which has no salary cap.

Weirdly enough, only three people on this list own a baseball team, and all of them are technically partial ownerships. Soccer has become the favored game of billionaires, as more and more non-American businessmen move their way up the money list.

Microsoft’s Paul Allen remains the top American sports billionaire owner, but he’s not the richest NBA owner since Russian madman Mikhail Prokhorov took over the New Jersey Nets.

In order to make this list, each individual had to own a substantial chunk of a major sports team, so league owners and commissioners didn’t make the list. (All data via Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires.)

Sugardaddies: the fifteen richest owners in the sporting world
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  • 15. Joe Lewis

    Source: BusinessInsider
  • 14. Richard DeVos

  • 13. John Malone

  • 12. Hiroshi Yamauchi

  • 11. Lester Crown