Sunday, January 28, 2018

Should leagues make investments?

 Though as a fan sports may look as an enjoyable form of entertainment, however this is not the only thing. Sports as a whole are one of the most profitable businesses around. Teams in general never pay for their stadiums and they bring in 100,000s of thousands of fans each year for outrageous amounts of money. Every single thing a team or league does makes money, whether that is tickets, merchandise or specialty events. With sports being such big money makers, should we see more investments by them?

MLBAM was a huge investment made by all 30 teams in the MLB. Each team invested a small amount of money for a stake in the company. Bamtech was used as the technology side for the MLB, as well as other sports. It is basically the high-tech running of things like the website, analytics, and advertising. Though MLBAM had been very profitable for the MLB teams over the years, the real payout came in 2017. The Walt Disney Company, who already owned a stake in the company decided to purchase the rest of Bamtech. This purchase was valued at about $1.5 billion. Each team would get $50 million in pure profits to use on whatever they would like for the upcoming season. This was seen as a very strong investment. Throughout the entire process it made good financial sense for the teams to invest in the up and coming company. Every step of the way Bamtech made the MLB money, and should be viewed as the overall picture of how to invest.

But, will we see other leagues do things like this in the future? That I am unsure of that, due to the fact it takes many steps along the way to get the process done. Major League Baseball did it right, they showed that they could invest in something and turn it into a profitable business. Sports leagues are basically large investment brokerages with their entities underneath them. So it would be wise for each league to expand their businesses further. In the short-run it could save money throughout the year, but in the long run we could see even more profits from investing.

No comments:

Post a Comment