• You never have a billionaire owner who destroys the team with meddling
  • You never have a billionaire's failson in your personnel department or something
  • The city never gets extorted into building a billion-dollar stadium for a billionaire owner
  • The team never moves
  • You never have an ownership group that prioritizes profit maximization over on-field competitiveness
  • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    On field results matter only insofar as we perform well enough for the sponsorships to keep rolling in.

    Here's a good article on how this works in the NFL. The whole thing is pretty long but the "sacrifice competitiveness to maximize profits" part is at the beginning and fairly short.

    Probably the most egregious league for this is the MLB. Every team is worth at least $1 billion, and you don't get that sort of valuation unless you have large, consistent revenues (unless you're a tech startup, but that's another story). Yet you still see tons of teams spending relative pennies long-term -- it's not even a tanking strategy, it's just being cheap.