The owner of the Detroit Lion, Sheila Ford Hamp, has sold the team out to…

Detroit is known as both the Motor City, the global center of automobile manufacturing, and Hitsville, the cradle of Motown and the sound of adolescent America throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, the Lions, the city’s football team, have strong and unbreakable ties to the auto sector, which is no coincidence. Members of the Ford family, an esteemed family, have owned the franchise for the past sixty years.

Established in 1933, the Detroit Lions were owned by a number of different people and syndicate groups from their inception until the early 1960s, when Berry Gordy was establishing his Motown record company. For $4.5 million (about $43 million today), William Clay Ford Sr., the last living grandson of Henry Ford, the man who founded the Ford Motor Company, acquired a majority interest in the business in 1961. On November 22, 1963, the day of US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the operation was authorized.