After shaking up the staid world of American baseball six years ago when he bought the last remaining family-owned baseball franchise in the US, Rupert Murdoch has sold the Los Angeles Dodgers for $US430 million ($563 million).
However, his News Corp subsidiary Fox Entertainment retains the valuable broadcasting rights to Dodgers games.
The sale comes nine months after Mr Murdoch finally clinched a $US6.6 billion purchase of US satellite TV operator DirecTV and its 11 million subscribers. Analysts had long expected Mr Murdoch to sell the Dodgers to help finance the DirecTV purchase.
Over the past decade, sport has proved crucial to making pay TV work, because of its ability to attract the mass audiences advertisers love.
Mr Murdoch worked out early that many people preferred to watch their favourite sporting teams than just about anything else and were happy to do that from their living rooms rather than from the grandstand.
As well as the Dodgers, Mr Murdoch has had minority stakes in UK soccer teams including Manchester United, Leeds, Chelsea, Sunderland and Manchester City. News Corp's 35 per cent-owned UK pay TV group, BSkyB, built its 40 per cent market penetration through exclusive broadcasting rights to the UK's Premier League football.
In Australia, Mr Murdoch established Super League, a rival rugby league football competition in 1996, hoping to lure fans to Australia's pay TV operator Foxtel, which he part owns. News Corp also owns 70 per cent of the Brisbane Broncos.
Not all of the investments have proved commercially viable. In Australia, Super League was forced to merge with its rival, the National Rugby League, in 1997, after both sides had spent millions of dollars wooing players, teams and fans.
Fox bought the Dodgers in 1998 to provide programming for its cable TV networks, but the team lost $US68.9 million in 2001, according to baseball figures, and hasn't made the play-offs since 1996. So, in recent years, News Corp has been focusing on broadcasting rights while selling sporting teams.
In this latest deal, Fox will remain a minority partner in the Dodgers by purchasing a $50 million share that will have to bought out within two years.
A group of investors led by Boston real-estate developer Frank McCourt has bought the team, its 56,000-seat stadium on 120 hectares north of downtown Los Angeles, a training academy in the Dominican Republic and a lease on a spring-training camp in Vero Beach, Florida.
Fox bought the team and stadium from the O'Malley family in 1997 for a then-record price of $US311 million, doubling the previous record for a baseball team, according to US reports.