It’s a big weekend for those hoping to bag the final golden tickets to Paris 2024. Like me, many aspiring athletes have made their way to Budapest for the second instalment of the Olympic Qualifier Series, a new event designed to get young people more excited about the pending summer games.

The OQS debuted in Shanghai back in May, and brings together four “urban” sports — climbing, skateboarding, BMX freestyle and break dancing — that are new (or newish) to the Olympics. Played out in a single open-air venue, the four-day gathering is where the final few qualification spots will be decided. In breaking, for example, 80 competitors will be whittled down to just 20.

This is an experiment for the International Olympic Committee, which spies an opportunity to liven up the countdown with actual sport, rather than the usual flame relay set pieces. Urban sports lend themselves to the format — they can be hosted in city centres and do not come with so much of the long-standing sponsorship baggage of more established disciplines.

The early results are positive. In Shanghai, 45,000 turned up to the four-day “festival”, which also included musical performances and fashion shows. The OQS could now become a fixture of the Olympic calendar.

This week we’re telling the tale of the billionaire fighter pilot who has set his sights on struggling Premier League club Everton. Plus, the FT’s New York-based legal correspondent Joe Miller asks if Team USA’s cricketing success will help the sport crack America at last. Do read on — Josh Noble, sports editor

There’s something about indebted, lossmaking football clubs that attracts the attention of Houston-based billionaire Dan Friedkin.

The Friedkin Group has its origins in Gulf States Toyota, distributor of the Japanese carmaker’s vehicles, founded by his father. It made revenues of roughly $13.3bn in 2023, according to a person close to the conglomerate.

It’s not a bad revenue stream to have when you’re trying to turn around financially wobbly football clubs. Friedkin’s €591mn acquisition of Roma in 2020 is an ongoing turnaround project.

But it is his daring in the cockpit that distinguishes Friedkin from your average American billionaire. Director Christopher Nolan sought his advice before filming Dunkirk. Friedkin even landed a Spitfire on the beach as Tom Hardy’s stunt double in the film.

“We got in touch with a chap called Dan Friedkin who owns six Spitfires and is a fantastic flyer,” Nolan wrote at the time. “We got him to talk about the characteristics of the planes, how they flew, what g-forces the pilot can really sustain.”

That appetite for risk will come in handy if he converts exclusive talks with British-Iranian owner Farhad Moshiri into the acquisition of Everton. But so will his desire to conserve.

As well as collecting military planes, Friedkin has a charitable organisation that protects wildlife in Tanzania. Football clubs are increasingly viewed as investments, but owners who don’t behave like custodians are despised by fans.

Everton’s indebtedness has risen in recent years, the result of balancing investment in a new stadium against the cost of competing against the some of the wealthiest clubs in the world.

The coronavirus pandemic didn’t help. Then Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine forced Moshiri to cut sponsorship deals with companies linked to his former business partner, Uzbek-Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov.

Friedkin has experience thanks to his ownership of Roma. Since acquiring the Serie A club, he has cut external debt, extended shareholder loans and increased revenue. Cost control is also a priority.

“Further growth on the commercial side and qualification for the Uefa Champions League will be key to ensuring the club’s continued growth,” says Andrea Sartori, founder of data provider Football Benchmark.

On the other hand, Everton has suffered “stagnation in operating revenues”, “worsening profitability” and “a constant worsening” of the balance sheet.

Sartori says Everton’s plans to complete the construction of a new stadium will be “key for the club’s future growth”, with just one season left at its current home ground, Goodison Park.

However, due diligence is ongoing. “It’s absolutely not a done deal,” one person warned.

Read our full profile of Dan Friedkin here.

Even the White House has been getting into cricket. After Team USA scored a stunning victory at the T20 World Cup against Pakistan and lost only narrowly to India, the Biden administration hailed the team’s performance as “tremendous” and said it was “cheering them on”.

Much of the American team came to the US from cricket-loving India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. In search of good jobs, some even abandoned fledgling cricketing careers in their home countries. In India, the press has dubbed them the “H1-B” team, a reference to US work visas for foreign workers.

India-born fast bowler Saurabh Netravalkar, for example, had to delay his return to work as a coder at software giant Oracle after Team USA reached the final eight of the tournament. That progress came as a shock to cricket fans — the US only qualified because the country is co-hosting.

The question of whether the team’s World Cup success will lead to greater local interest in the game is now the big question, especially for those who have bet millions of dollars on cricket’s growth in America, where it was once more popular than baseball before fading into obscurity. 

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and Texan billionaire Ross Perot Jr are among the backers of Major League Cricket, a T20 franchise that will enter its second season soon after the World Cup.

Big name corporate names have been signing up too, including MLC title sponsor Cognizant, while global stars including Australian bowler Pat Cummins and Afghanistan’s Rashid Khan have been lured to the tournament by outsized pay packets. 

Organisers claim there are as many as 20mn cricket-starved fans in the US, itching for more matches in their backyard. But there are just three dedicated cricket stadiums in the country — in Dallas, Texas; Morrisville, North Carolina; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Several more are expected to be built in time for 2028, when cricket will return to the Olympic Games, hosted in Los Angeles, although progress has been frustratingly slow. 

Journalist Peter Della Penna, who covers American cricket, this week offered a damning assessment of the US game’s current economics. 

“What does it say about the legacy of cricket in the country”, he told the Columbia Journalism Review, “if the only person who was a full-time paid professional journalist to cover cricket in the USA is gonna be five thousand dollars in debt at the end of the World Cup?”

If hosting a major tournament, witnessing a fairytale success story and being on the receiving end of a wave of money isn’t enough for cricket to crack America, then perhaps nothing will.

• Former US Olympic champion Michael Johnson has vowed to revolutionise athletics as he unveiled a new competition designed to elevate the profiles of elite athletes. Grand Slam Track, which is scheduled to begin next April, will select top athletes to spearhead Johnson’s new track league.

• No more diesel generators to power live broadcasts, less meat on the athletes’ menus and very little construction of new venues — these are just some of the ways organisers of the Paris Olympics Games want to prove that the world’s biggest sporting event can go green.  

• With the snap election in full swing in France, the country’s star footballers have had their say — urging their countrymen to reject the “extremes”, as FT columnist Simon Kuper explains.

• Baseball said farewell this week to Willie Mays, who died aged 93. The former Giants centrefielder, dubbed the “Say Hey Kid” by the press, was widely regarded as one of the standout star’s of the sport’s golden age.

• If you’re looking for some sporting books to read this summer, here’s Simon Kuper’s three top picks of the year.

• However, you can probably skip Twelve Final Days — the new Roger Federer documentary — if this FT review is anything to go by.

Belgian midfielder Amadou Onana effortlessly glides between countries.

Born in Senegal. Raised in Belgium. Plays in Liverpool for Everton. And when one journalist got his name wrong, he quickly swapped from rapid-fire French to an English accent that got social media talking. Just listen!