A Saints legend is selling fans a piece of professional sports for $500

A handful of billionaires own the Knicks. A few private equity firms own slices of the rest of the league. Marques Colston thinks the fans should get a turn—and he’s selling them an in at $500 a share.

Colston, the famous underdog receiver of the New Orleans Saints, and former mixed martial artist Nick Edwards have launched the Champion Fund, an investment fund built so that anyone—not just the Mark Cubans of the world—can buy into sports for as little as $500. The idea is to give regular people a stake in an industry they love—and have paid into their whole lives, but have never owned—with buckets in teams, sports technology, real estate around stadiums, and other private deals, including a stake in the English soccer club Ipswich Town.

The idea began a little after Colston retired in 2015, when he realized that after all the value he’d created for the ecosystem “there is no more value to extract,” he told Fortune exclusively. The fans, the players, the coaches, “have no ownership in it. So it just continues to get funneled to a select few ultra-high-net-worth owners.”

A ballooning industry

Over the last decade or so, the sports industry has gone from sizable to Herculean. The four major leagues are now worth close to $500 billion combined, and the average NFL team is worth about $7 billion. Measured by average team value, the leagues have beaten the S&P 500 since 2014 on the back of a........

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