Well yes; but I've been following the cricket on and off quite a bit recently and it appears the county game is going the same way- teams packed with foreign mercenaries uninterested in playing for anything except the greatest financial reward. What it does is to make sport meaningless as a shared cultural experience because teams have absolutely no connection with the counties or towns whose names they bear other than occasionally playing there. And the need to attract international players to stay competitive of course increasingly makes ticket prices unaffordable for ordinary people.

All that said, I think the choice of thread title is a little unfortunate because it's liable to attract opprobrium from all the predictable sources- perhaps a passing elf would consider changing it?