(Fulham's Michael Brown misses a chance on goal during his team's match with Aston Villa.)

On March 6, private equity baron Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars and a frequent attendee of University of Texas football games, was exposed to some real sports fans. Hicks was at Anfield, the home stadium of Liverpool Football Club, the British soccer team he and his business partner George Gillett acquired for $920 million, to watch his club face off against Spanish rival Barcelona in the prestigious Champions League.

Liverpool lost 1-0. But at the close of the game, 42,579 fans stood, Liverpool scarves and banners outstretched, and roared the team’s theme song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” A few thousand Barcelona fans sang along out of respect. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Hicks recalls, speaking on the telephone from his plane a week later. “It gave me goose bumps.”

The rendition of the Rodgers & Hammerstein standard isn’t the only thing giving goose bumps to Hicks and Gillett. “Liverpool has 28 million registered fans around the world,” Hicks says, referring to the team’s website. “They have huge numbers of fans in the U.K., in Europe, and in Asia.” The game he witnessed was broadcast in 183 countries.

This combination of intense local support and huge global appeal is a key reason why Hicks and other prominent American investors have purchased well-known British soccer teams. Last summer, Randy Lerner, who inherited the N.F.L.’s Cleveland Browns and billions of dollars from his father, former MBNA head Alfred Lerner, bought Aston Villa, a middling club in Britain’s Midlands, for $120 million. And in 2005, Malcolm Glazer, the corporate raider who owns American football’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, bought Manchester United, the most popular and richest soccer club in Britain, for $1.5 billion.

What gives? For one thing, these guys have simply run out of teams to buy on their own soil. Franchises in big-money North American sports are like Vermeer paintings: There aren’t many (among them, the N.F.L., the N.B.A., the N.H.L., and Major League Baseball count 122 teams), virtually all are in private hands, and on the rare occasions they do come on the market, the bidding is frenzied. And financially speaking, soccer in the United States is small beer. Major League Soccer, now in its 12th year (oh, you didn’t notice?), remains a financial midget. The hoopla surrounding David Beckham’s late-career move to the Los Angeles Galaxy, which could earn him up to $250 million, has more to do with merchandising than with the beautiful game.

But there’s a larger business story here, one that echoes the argument of Franklin Foer’s 2004 book How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. For sports investors, the U.S. market—vast as it is—has limited growth potential compared with the rest of the world. “There are by far more soccer fans globally than there are American-football fans,” says Hicks. Countries such as China and India are minting countless new consumers every year. Alas, few are interested in following the onfield exploits—or buying the licensed merchandise—of U.S. sports stars like Peyton Manning and Derek Jeter.

Meanwhile, the English Premier League has landed huge television contracts. In 2006, it inked a three-year, $3.1 billion deal for domestic television rights with Setanta, a pay-per-view company, and BSkyB, a unit of News Corp. (Half of the revenue is shared equally among teams, while half is awarded on a sliding scale based on where teams finish in the standings.) Earlier this year, the league made another deal, which nearly doubles the fees it receives for international rights—about $1.25 billion for the 2007-2008 season, part of the $5.3 billion it will earn from selling its broadcast rights from 2007 to 2010. “We think the Premier League will have the biggest television revenue of any sport in the world over the next 20 years,” Hicks says.