by Paul Semendinger
January 11, 2022
***
MLB made 10.8 billion dollars last year alone?
When I put that number into a calculator and divided it by 30 teams, it read, "The Yankees can well afford to spend way above the luxury tax thresholds."
(I think Steve Cohen knows this - that he can spend tons and tons of money and he'll still make tons and tons of money.)
But, who knows, maybe I'm wrong...
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Are these the revenues that are shared equally among all franchises, e.g., network TV contracts, MLB advanced media, etc? Do they include revenues from local media, regional sports networks, etc.?
" Major League Baseball has seen attendance drop nine straight seasons when taking 2020 out of the mix. Since the last increase (+1.97% from 2011 to 2012) league attendance has dropped -14%. yet revenue keep growing". My question is how much of that 10.8B came from gambling and their FTX sponsorship?
That's $360 million per team. I have no idea what it costs to run a baseball team in toto -- that is, beyond player salaries. I don't know how much a farm system costs, or the front office, or what kind of debt service or fixed costs there are. I agree that it seems likely teams could spend more on MLB payroll, but unless the owners actually open the books, we can't know for sure.
as if $10 billion is a lot of money or something
You're not wrong. The CBT is an artificial device the owners invented based on the fiction of achieving "parity" (aka controlled mediocrity) among teams in markets of varying sizes. The real purpose was to give them an excuse for not spending to the level of their revenues and thus keep a larger piece of the pie. Of course this imaginary "parity" has never been achieved because some owners have realized that they can make a profit without competing on the field. The CBT thresholds have not even remotely kept pace with the growth (explosion?) in revenues in recent years which, like the universe, is going to expand even faster with the exploitation of sports gambling which teams in all sports…