You may be right. I also seem to recall that Lew was friends with Alan Rothenberg or something like that....
I can’t believe there are so many people in music and other sports willing to pump MLS to exorbitant values. Can anyone really imagine an MLS club being worth more than an EPL club? Mind-boggling to me. Rapper Yo Gotti has reached an agreement to purchase a minority stake in D.C. United, valuing the Major League Soccer club at roughly $730 million https://t.co/iqARynmQ7D— MLS Buzz (@MLS_Buzz) September 12, 2021
Kind of is, considering the extremely lucrative TV contracts the EPL, but, many of those teams have to spend themselves into debt to maintain their EPL status. I think MLS club valuations are like overpriced stocks with terrible price to earning ratios. I think we are in a bubble right now. And who, or what the hell is Yo Gotti? Sounds like a new yogurt brand.
I think there are two reasons for this. First, owning sports teams in the U.S. is not about sports, financially speaking. Second, it helps tremendously when your wage bill is $15 million per year rather than $250 million per year.
It helps even more knowing that even if your wage bill was 100M, one bad season will not result in your team being relagated to a lower division and you stuck with a bunch of highly priced players while your earnings ara a fraction of what they would be in the top division.
Ok, those are excellent points about lower wage bills and pro/rel. But does having a lower wage bill make a 7-11 store worth 2x a Whole Foods store? I just feel like MLS owners have colluded to pump up the value of the current franchises that are for sale, and they are finding dummies with big wallets to purchase those. The MIA purchase is especially suspicious, since it is 2 co-owners selling to i think — the other co-owners — or did they find new victims...
It's not just MLS but all major US sports leagues are part of a "closed system" with some form of a revenue sharing model guaranteeing good annual profit margins as there is no way for teams to be kicked out or relegated out of those leagues if they provide a poor product. In fact, they get rewarded with top picks in the draft which is, however, not nearly as important in the MLS as other sports leagues. That is incredibly appetizing to an investor as the risk factor is pretty much at zero. This is not the case in world soccer thus the recent push by some of the top team accross the pond to jump-start the Super League which was going to have a similar framework to the US sports leagues.
I would venture to guess that the single entity nature of MLS means that there has been nothing illegal with regard to the sale prices of MLS teams. I have a hard time imagining that MLS owners have not technically colluded, but collusion is only illegal if the nature of that collusion actually violates a law. Single entity gives MLS essentially an exemption from anti-trust laws in key areas, the most important being labor costs. I don't care if a billionaire gets bilked for hundreds of millions of dollars (in fact, I'd be delighted), but the thing is, owners going in to MLS are relatively low risk. They have better revenue sharing schemes than pretty much any other league in the US because they are all one thing. So it doesn't really matter all that much if you bought a team for a ton of money because so long as the price of admission keeps going up, you will reap those rewards. At some point, the league will hit a price point where they can no longer attract new investors, but because the potential pool of MLS team owners is so small, I don't foresee the bubble bursting the way it would with commodities or whatever else. The only way MLS would cause a real problem for itself is if it expanded indefinitely, but that's not going to happen and they can always contract if they have to (and they will have to eventually).
Watching the EPL this morning , I had no idea the Niners had ownership stake in Leeds United! Wouldn’t it be nice if Fisher got on the phone , made a local call to get some former 49ers players and/or potential owners involved in the Quakes? John Lynch revels in Leeds United ownership stake, Ted Lasso | RSN
Yes, yes I can. I'd take every MLS club over say Norwich City. Because MLS clubs don't get relegated! And those Euro leagues don't have a salary cap, or a single entity structure to pay players, so they can end up in massive debt. There are "Premier League clubs" sold for almost zero dollars, just the new owner paying off the considerable debt (I think Blackburn Rovers a decade ago unless I'm confusing them another mostly-irrelevant "B" club?)... Buy a non big 6 Premier League club and you could soon be the proud owner of a Championship club, or even a League One club. See numerous examples (where's Bolton these days?), most recently the protagonists of "Sunderland Til I Die"...
Why? Getting more owners involved won't change anything so long as Fisher directs the budgets, which he will always do. So long as he has controlling shares of the team (and he will), there could be a thousand owners and it would be exactly the same. Also, not all MLS fans care about or are interested in NFL owners getting involved in MLS. The NFL's horrific history of labor abuse at the behest of their owners is not something I'd want to see more of in MLS, which has its own long history of similar issues.
No that wasn't really the point. I'm saying getting other investors aboard so then can come in , have a say in how to run the club and spend money in a better way than Fisher has. Maybe they can do better? Anyway, they can't do worse than 12 out of 14 failed seasons.....
Honestly, after thinking it over more and the fact that we are seeing the Quakes go through another losing and/or failed season, I am no longer convinced that Fisher will keep the team in San Jose. Even though we have a stadium intact and built, I am now starting to believe John Fisher could end up moving the team or even selling to someone who could move it. I mean he is contemplating moving the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas and I could easily see a scenario on moving the Earthquakes there too. The dismantling of Pay Pal Park won’t be that difficult and the he could probably find a way to sell or leverage the land for more money. We saw our championship winning Quakes move in 2005 and the Raiders move twice in 39 years. Losing the A’s could be in the works soon so why not this edition of the Quakes? I hope I'm wrong but as opposed to years past, I could see it happening.
This is aggressively ignoring the long and tortured history of building another baseball venue in the Bay Area. What advantage does Fisher and the league get by moving a team in one of the most populous cities in the most populous state to Las Vegas? The threats to move the A's there are an effort to coax Oakland into paying for things they should not be paying for and have no money to pay for in any case. It's MLB bullying a municipality to give them the best break possible. I applaud Oakland for essentially telling them to go eff themselves. The stadium in San Jose is a done deal. Fisher owns the land and the stadium. He has total control It would make no sense to pack up and move to a worse location with likely even fewer fans (assuming the team is still run the same way). The 2005 team was also an issue with venue/the then owners not really giving a crap because they also owned other teams. Fisher owns just one team in the league. It's his. He has an incentive to keep it, and it keep it where it is. The A's deal is essentially not related at all to the Quakes. They may be owned by the same person, but they are operated wholly independently (you can tell because one organization knows how to put a good team on the field while the other one doesn't have a clue). So no, I really don't think the Quakes are going anywhere unless fans totally stop showing up and never come back regardless of how well the team performs. And given how many people I've seen at games this year, I don't see that happening any time soon.
It amazes me that Raiders fans follow that vagabond circus wherever it goes, including to Las Vegas. The antithesis of a community-based club.
I was a fan of the Raiders (and Niners) growing up in the Bay Area, but after they moved to LA, I rooted against them, and have ever since, even after they moved back (before moving away again). I was thinking that if the Quakes moved to Las Vegas we'd be maybe the first franchise to be relocated twice, but then there's the Raiders. So I guess not. Brutal.
That would be great news in my book. Again I was mostly speculating and hoping I’d be wrong. Honestly , the Quakes belong in San Jose. I just wish Fisher would produce a winner for once! We have gone way too long without winning anything.
Honest question Don. IF the Bills were ever to move would you still be a fan, and would the Mafia follow?
Yeah, but LA didn't lose them then get them back and then lose them again, did they? That's what I was referring to.
Cannot speak for others, but I absolutely would not follow them to a new city. (When the Braves left Buffalo after the 1978 season, the NBA became dead to me.) The Bills are all about Buffalo. Right there on the helmet. Over 27,000 donations and more than $1 million dollars raised to honor @JoshAllenQB's grandmother and her family. The Patricia Allen Pediatric Recovery Wing at @OCHBuffalo is officially open. ❤️💙 pic.twitter.com/MKdsbY9oRb— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) October 26, 2021