Should small market teams be own by corporations?
Question:if a corporation on a team they would improve the team so they could market it better with other products. they could have bigger payrolls has well. look at when disney own the angels, they were making the lowest revenue of all teams 10 year 50 million contract was there tv deal chupchange compare to other teams. They had a mid-size payroll around 60 million to 70 million. so what do you think?
Answers:
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If a corporation really thinks they can benefit from the ownership, absolutely. Some of the other corporate deals- the Angels in Anaheim, the Tribune Company owning the Chicago Cubs, make sense because of corporate synergy. If Kansas City, for example, had a corporate interest which would benefit from the attachment to a major league team, by all means it should be done.How good do you think Soriano is going to be?
No, I don't think it works well for the most part. After Ewing Kaufmann died, the Royals were basically taken over by a corporation. The board members from his pharmaceutical company were running the team. All they wanted to do was make a profit, didn't care about winning or losing and they didn't have anybody working for them that knew a thing about baseball. They denied George Brett a job in the front office because he wanted too much money. The Royals are still trying to recover from that disaster. The corporation turned what was once a franchise that was the envy of the small market teams and turned it into a laughing stock. Maybe if the corporations let baseball guys run the team it might be OK, but they'll be looking for profit, which doesn't necessarily translate to winning baseball.I though a little more on it and see what you're saying, but it would really depend on the type of corporartion. Some would be a lot better suited to own a team than others.
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Publically held corporations generally have a responsibility to the shareholder to maximize revenue and income. As a result, it is unlikely that a team owned by a publically held corporation will be wildly successful year after year.The tragic example of this would be the Tribune's ownership of the Cubs. The Trib owns WGN TV and Radio, the flagship stations of the Cubs long before the Trib bought the Cubs. The Trib now owns a chunk of Comcast Sportsnet in Chicago as well, who televises most of the Cub games that aren't on WGN. The Trib can artifically reduce the TV and Radio revenue the Cubs are making just by having WGN pay a lower amount to the Cubs, while WGN still gets to charge full price to the advertiser. The Cubs, then, can cry poor to the players when they want market value salaries. The seats will be full at Wrigley no matter how bad the team is, so the Trib has no incentive to spend huge amounts of money on payroll.
At the other end of the spectrum is the Packers in football. The Packers are actually owned by a public corporation, the only business of which is to operate the Packers. The problem, of course, is that the Packers lack the operating funds which could be provided by a rich owner such as George Steinbrenner, who could decide to win over making money. The Packer's formula, then, is probably bad as well.
Most sports franchises are better off owned by one owner, or a group of investors with one leader, rather than a corporation, so long as the owner wants a winner rather than to make money. The Cardinals are probably a good example of how it should work. The Busch family is making their money from selling beer; they are investing it in the Cardinals. Putting a good Cardinal team on the field is likely to help the beer company; but the beer company has no direct tie to the team, so it is not driven to maximize profit at the expense of the team. Everyone wins.
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