“These are actually good investments in the sense that the current business model for all major sports is a license to print money,” said Victor Matheson, a sports economist and professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Ta. “It’s hard to lose money in sports, especially in the NFL.”
The NFL is a special case compared to other leagues, not just because its teams are rated much higher. “I’d rather be a mid-market NFL owner than an MLB owner given the way media revenue is distributed,” Sankin said.
“The willingness of cities to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on entertainment facilities for sports franchises has helped increase the value of sports franchises,” said sports economist Michael Leeds, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. “There is,” he said. “I think this goes back to the 1950s when baseball started moving west.”
Escalating national television deals are also a big driver of the skyrocketing value of sports teams, especially in football and basketball.
“The media, the advertising, the sponsorships, these funds are so powerful. This is one of the few entertainment concepts that people see live,” Sankin said. “Advertisers know who is watching, and that leads to big rights deals.”
