Perhaps you missed this one on July 4th, I sure did. Â I struggled with what to title this one, so let me set the tone with a quote from the article:
Investment bankers who sell sports teams believe the Amazin’s owners, the Wilpon family, are so cash-strapped that they will have to sell the Flushing franchise if the team has a losing season or two and attendance falls.
I’m no finance guy, so I will leave it to others to interpret but according to the Post:
- The franchise is losing $10 million a year.
- Attendance is on pace for 2.6 million (we knew that)
- SNY is profitable but “owes money equal to roughly six times its earnings before interest.”
I’m not sure how much of this was new or why it popped up yesterday, but it’s a fairly strongly worded article.
As I have said before, I would fear new ownership. Â There’s another millionaire family in these parts that needs cable programming….ask some Knicks and Rangers fans if they’d like to have the Wilpons buy the garden.
Unless Howie Rose wins Lotto, I’ll stick with what we’ve got.
Read more about this in the Post, definitely worth the look.
the thing about this is that we’ve heard this story before, at least once, since the Madoff scandal, and nothing’s happened.
As a fan of the Knicks and Rangers, I would welcome Dolan buying the Mets because Dolan has shown that he will spend what it takes to win. Where Dolan fails is that he does not appoint the right people to run the operations of his franchise . . . sound familiar? So basically, if Dolan were to buy to the Mets, the Mets would have the second highest payrollin baseball and would stare the Yankees down on every major free agent.
Agreed, though I will say this will be tough to do as the Mets may as well be the Nets of the NBA in regards to NY area interest. Dolan will never get the corporate fan base he has to fill up the Garden.
Maybe if it was in a real newspaper.
a month ago people were ‘reporting’ that the Wilpons were going to buy the Islanders, now they can’t afford the team they have?
Since the team is privately held I am very doubtful anyone outside the organization knows the finances. Given how rarely sports team change owners, how can there be investment bankers who specialize in that? Also note that 10 million loss includes depreciation, a non-cash item. If they include the new stadium the depreciation will of course be high.
I’m not all that enamored of the Wilpon’s ownership, but this is just fishwrap, like anything else in the post.