Collingwood president Eddie McGuire has revealed a major American sports franchise approached him to see if they could buy into the club.
While he didn’t reveal the name of the club, McGuire said he had to reject the offer, given AFL teams are not privately owned enterprises, meaning they cannot be purchased by outside enterprises.
“I was approached in the last 10 days by a major American sports franchise asking whether or not they could buy into Collingwood,” he said on Footy Classified.
“The answer was no because we’re a members’ club, but they don’t understand the members’ club over there. They go ‘what do you mean? You’re not owned by somebody? How does this work?’”
AFL teams can’t simply be bought into, but GWS has weighed up the idea of becoming a privately owned team.
Giants CEO Dave Matthews told SEN in April that while they haven’t had formal discussions, it is something they have considered.
"In the past Gil and I have had the occasional discussion about how things could work given we have got very similar models to the NFL in a lot of things, we’ve got a lot of centralised revenue, we’ve got salary caps, we’ve got drafts," Matthews said.
“I guess one of the things that begs the question is what would be possible and I think what we’ve also thought about is previous examples of private ownership in the VFL/AFL are a long, long time ago under very different circumstances to where the game is at today.
“I just think when you’re setting up a club like ours and we’re nine years in and you’re thinking how do you continue to make sure we’re underpinned and we’re secure and it’s just worth having discussions along those lines, but there hasn’t been anything formal at this point.”
The Giants have a strong relationship with US millionaires from Pimco.