Team Wales captain Olivia Breen earned the first Welsh medal of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in athletics with a silver in the T38 100m final with a season’s best of 12.86 seconds.

Breen, the defending champion, was beaten by England’s Sophie Hahn to the gold.

Breen, who turned 30 on the eve of the final, edged England’s Maddie Down in a photo-finish.

It is the fourth Commonwealth medal of her career. Wales have now won seven Games medals in Glasgow, with two silvers and five bronze.

Breen says the medal means more after battling concussions and injuries this year.

“I’m really happy with the performance – I kept myself together, kept my form and it was a really good start and can’t ask for any more, it felt really good.

“I’m so happy that I got a medal today, it was obviously going to be a really tight race, I was determined, I left it all on the track.

“That wait around [for confirmation of silver] was nerve-wracking, but it was amazing and I’m really happy with how I ran the heat this morning and saved myself for tonight.

Breen has since gone back into her captaincy duties.

“It’s really nice to see how well Team Wales are doing,” she said.

“The swimmers are doing really well, the gymnasts and there’s many more to come and I’m really excited to go and support the team tomorrow and go and see what Wales can do.”

The German Bundesliga has held discussions with a U.S. investment firm about a €1billion (£855.6m; $1.1bn) loan.

At a meeting held in New York in June, representatives from the Bundesliga met with Apollo Sports Capital to discuss the framework of a loan over 20 years, guaranteed against the league’s future domestic broadcasting earnings.

According to sources granted anonymity to protect relationships, the proposal was not the result of any tender process, nor would it involve any transfer of equity. Any potential agreement would also be subject to a vote among the 36 member clubs of the two Bundesliga divisions and require a two-thirds majority to be accepted.

Even at an early stage, it represents the latest development within what has been a long-running, contentious saga within German football. The prospect of external investment is hugely divisive and yet the financial inequities facing clubs outside the English Premier League remain a problem without a solution.

In Germany, teams are run in accordance with what is known as the 50+1 rule. It means that 50 per cent of all voting rights, plus one share, must remain in the hands of club members. While there are exceptions, this prevents teams from ever falling under the control of a single, external investor and enshrines supporters as stakeholders to whom, ultimately, those who make decisions are accountable.

The positive implication of that law is the affordable tickets that keep Bundesliga stadiums full and their atmospheres febrile. Both are major selling points for the league. It also, in the broader sense, protects the identity of clubs, keeping them ideologically tethered to their regions and prevents them from being used for means other than sport — reputation laundering, for instance.

The negative, from a certain perspective, is that the lack of external investment prevents German clubs, Bayern Munich aside, from being competitive in European competition or having the finances necessary to pursue the world’s best players. There is also a competitive element. Bayern operate on a different financial plain to even their nearest rivals and have won 13 of the last 14 league titles. Such dominance makes the league less attractive and, in turn, arguably inhibits international growth.

This is one of the tensions at the heart of German football: how to maintain the league’s virtues while simultaneously challenging the financial dominance of the Premier League, where clubs profit from enormous broadcasting contracts and, in several cased, are bankrolled by sovereign wealth funds, private equity, or billionaires.

Nobody really has an answer for it.

The Bundesliga, the organisation that runs the top two professional leagues, known until 2026 as the DFL, have had two prior attempts, both of which sought to draw external investment at a league level.

In 2023, a first initiative proposed that 12.5 per cent of the league’s future domestic broadcasting contract over 20 years be sold to a private equity firm in return for €2bn ($2.28bn). The revenue generated was to be used to fund central marketing initiatives, to subsidise overseas tours by members clubs and to fund various infrastructural improvements, with the overall, long-term aim of increasing German’s football’s global appeal.

In an example of the 50+1 rule in action, fans protested vigorously. The opposition was loud and varied, but a familiar line was that selling a portion of shares would cede control from fan groups to private investors, diluting the influence of supporters over time.

The proposal needed a two-thirds majority among its 36 member clubs to be approved, but it failed to gain enough support. It was rejected, only to return in modified form a year later. In December 2023, the Bundesliga’s member clubs approved a proposal that — this time — would have seen 8 per cent of future broadcast rights over the same 20-year period sold for a €1bn ($1.14bn) investment.

The initiative passed by a two-thirds majority, but was subsequently abandoned in February 2024 after sustained, country-wide protests had disrupted weeks of matches. Supporters hung banners in stadia that denounced the proposed deal and, memorably, threw tennis balls, chocolates, and sweets onto the pitch during matches, causing long delays and highly negative coverage.

In the face of that opposition, the Bundesliga backed down. Hans-Joachim Watzke, then the CEO of Borussia Dortmund and speaking on behalf of the league’s executive board, conceded that the “successful continuation of the process no longer seemed possible in light of current developments”, before referencing the “large majority in favour of the business necessity of the strategic partnership”.

And this is the latest chapter. If any deal were to be formalised and then be accepted, it’s unclear whether the funds received would be used for the same purposes as intended under either of the previous proposals. With the Bundesliga not due to begin until the final week of August, supporters will also have to wait before expressing their reaction to this latest news.

In sports cards, as in many things in life, big money can mean big problems.

In June, accusations of a nearly half-million-dollar sports card deal gone bad became public.

The salient issue for collectors is how to avoid being scammed when dealing with a private transaction outside of a reputable auction house, where both buyer and seller have protection. That goes for six-figure transactions, but every day there are many private deals done via social media platforms for far less money where the seller doesn’t want to pay fees to a third-party marketplace and payment is conditioned on proof of receipt of the item.

The Athletic spoke to one of the biggest collectors in the hobby and also one of the country’s top criminal defense lawyers, New York-based Jeffrey Lichtman, on how to navigate these issues so that you’re less likely to get scammed.

First let’s describe the nightmare scenario of an alleged $478,000 loss, according to the parties involved. The card in question was the one-of-a-kind 2012 Panini Prizm Tom Brady Black Finite, one of the hobby’s most coveted cards. The buyer, Steve Pocklington, in an appearance on a four-hour episode of Sports Cards Live, said he paid the seller, who was supposedly based in Mexico and may or may not actually exist, after a third-party broker vouched for the transaction. The broker also appeared on the show and said he had done hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of transactions with Pocklington before the Brady card deal, but when Pocklington sent the seller the massive sum for the card, the broker forwarded a FedEx box that had no Brady card in it. The broker claimed he had held the card, but the box was packed by the seller and he just added a label.

The broker added that the deal happened over a year ago now and that FedEx denied the insurance claim on the package. Pocklington said he’s still working with law enforcement to try to recover his money, but the broker said he’s never been contacted by law enforcement.

How could this alleged transaction have been managed better to mitigate this monumental risk? How do buyers protect themselves when not using an auction house or public marketplace as an intermediary? Lichtman says, the best way is using an auction house as a broker.

“Let’s say you are buying a million-dollar card or even a $100,000 card privately. The seller wants to avoid 20 percent fees from the auction house. But with a transaction of this size, they can contact an auction house and negotiate away the fee. What people don’t realize is that in a lot of big-dollar sales, the auction house gives back most and sometimes all of that buyer’s fee to the seller. Lichtman says sellers can negotiate that away because the auction house gets the publicity of selling the card.

The Tom Brady card that Steve Pocklington thought he was buying for almost $500,000. (Photo courtesy of Panini)

Auction house as a broker

Lichtman says the auction house will probably agree to serve as the broker in the transaction — in other words, receiving the payment before forwarding that to the seller and sending the buyer the card — for a nominal fee of something like five percent. Think of how much better off the Brady Black Prizm buyer would have been if the parties arranged to have an auction house serve as an intermediary. The broker on Sports Cards Live said his fee for the transaction was $5,000 (1 percent), money he claimed to have never received.

What if the transaction isn’t big enough or unique enough to interest an auction house to serve as an intermediary? Lichtman advises finding an escrow agent, typically used in real-estate transactions where their fee for a $500,000 house could be as high as $2,000. An escrow agent is a neutral third party who holds money or property in trust until all transaction terms are met.

If neither of those work, Lichtman says to just pack a bag and fly to the card. “If I’m paying six figures for a card in a private transaction, I’m flying to the card or just telling the person we can complete the transaction at The National (card show).”

That brings a whole other set of problems. Lichtman warns that carrying that much cash on a flight is very dangerous. Not just because of the threat of having it stolen, but also the probability of having it seized by the government as evidence of drug dealing. (One of Lichtman’s most famous clients was Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.)

“I’ve had cases where I represented people where they flew on a plane on a one-way ticket with $150,000 in cash and they (had all of it) seized,” Lichtman says.

He advises doing the deal at a bank and only after filling out all the proper forms so that the transaction doesn’t trigger a loss or suspension of banking privileges. He says he always tells the buyer, who may not want a record of the transaction, that he’s documenting the purchase or the sale when he’s the person selling the card.

A three-percent tax for peace of mind

With more “normal” transactions of hundreds or thousands of dollars, private sellers sometimes balk at paying the fee for business transactions, which protects the buyer against the card not being received. A common method for completing these private transactions is PayPal, which charges the seller a fee that’s typically three percent, but that protects the buyer in the event the item is not received for any reason. Litchtman advises that the buyer should just offer to pay the fee and view it as the cost of peace of mind. If you don’t get the card, even due to no fault of the seller, you are financially protected. Cards can get lost and have been stolen by people in the delivery process who have their eye out for packages likely to contain a card.

Lichtman says he had an issue with a relatively low-cost Cooper Flagg transaction where tracking wasn’t provided and the cards were never received. The seller balked at refunding the money, assuming the cards were delivered. Lichtman says he went to the post office and asked about it and it turned out the package was being held for insufficient postage, which he paid for the seller. So insist on tracking for your purchase, too.

Much of the hobby operates on the vouch system. But what’s the value of having a third party vouch for a seller when the buyer and broker in the Brady Black Prizm transaction had a relationship involving previous high-value deals? For $100 a vouch may be sufficient. For $500,000, it seems to be worthless.

Litchtman says the measure for using these various methods to protect yourself should be what the impact on your life would be if you lost the money. If it would be significant, protect yourself.

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