Could a professional sports team be traded publicly?

Factual Questions
1

I was talking with my brother last night, and somehow this came up. I got to wondering, could a sports team become a public company? How would the stocks be affected by the teams performance in any given season? Would the leagues be against it?

I had a bunch more questions on this, but I can’t think of them right now.

2

Absolutely. The Boston Celtics were once publicly traded.

3

The Angels and the Mighty Ducks are owned by Disney, which is publicly traded.

4

As Shagnasty said, the Boston Celtics were once publicly traded. I had a couple of shares, and I remember the stock doing pretty well when the team made a run to the conference finals a couple of years ago.

Other teams that have experimented with being publicly traded were the Cleveland Indians and Florida Panthers. Manchester United is publicly traded as Malcolm Glazer (owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) recently increased his stake while considering buying the team.

On preview, I see the Ducks and Angels mentioned. I know Disney was exploring selling the teams, but I don’t know if the deal has been completed yet. If we want to use that as a criteria, there are a lot of teams that are owned by corporations. The Cubs are owned by the Tribune Company, The New York Times is a partial owner of the Boston Red Sox, the Rangers and Knicks are owned by Cablevision, the Dodgers are/were owned by News Corp. I’m sure there are others, but I can’t think of them right now.

5

I believe the rules for Major League baseball and the NFL require that teams be owned by an identifiable person or group with an actual managing partner.

So while the Tribune Company as an entity can own the Cubs, they can’t spin the Cubs off into a separate corporation.

6

Aren’t the GB Packers owned by the municipality?

7

I’m reasonably sure that Manchester United is publicly traded.

8

The Packers are owned by the Green Bay Packers Corporation, a non-profit entity. It does issue stock from time to time, and has over 111,000 stockholders. The stock isn’t publicly traded, and shareholders can only sell shares back to the corporation (at a fraction of what they paid for them) or transfer them to relatives or heirs.

9

…and recently the subject of a potential takeover bid

10

Okay, so obviously they can be publicly traded. Is the stock price tied just to the financial results of the team, or can they be affected by a really great (or really terrible) record and offseason roster changes?

For instance, let’s pretend that Daniel Snyder decided to turn the Washington Redskins into a publicly traded entity. Since the modus operandi of the team since he bought it has been to make a whole bunch of splashy roster changes in the offseason, then to fail miserably at acually winning games. Yet the whole time the team has been one of the most financially successful sports franchises in the world.

So would the stock price remain constant based on how much money the team is making, or would the stock price go up in the offseason and down once they start losing games? Or is it a combination of the two?

11
      • They could be, except that the team organizations will not allow it. There are different reasons for this, depending on who you ask. …A few years ago one of the team owners in one (US) pro league wanted to transfer their team to a publicly-traded company, with normal stock that fans could buy. The organization blocked the transfer. I don’t know the reasons the organization gave, but the suspected reason was that if one city was allowed to own their own pro sports team, then all cities would demand the right–and one of the most valuable tools that US pro sports team owners have for getting sweetheart tax deals and big fancy stadiums built with taxpayer money is to move their team–but if the team is publicly owned, then it would take a majority stockholder vote to approve a move.
        ~
12

You are all a little out-of-date about the Angels being owned by Disney. They were bought last may by Arte Moreno.

13

I believe it would be a combo of the two. If sports teams were traded publicly, I would imagine their would be two main groups investing in them - business people, looking to make money, who would be mostly concerned about the teams financial performance, and fans of the teams, whose interest would probably depend on how well the team is doing on the field.

14

The Cleveland Indians were also publicly traded for a brief time.

I believe the stock price of any sports franchise would depend less on the individual W-L record of the team as it would on the general health of the league it plays in.

Owning an NFL team is pretty much a license to print money with the most recent TV contract being approved. However, NFL revenues are pooled to a much greater extent than any other sport, so there isn’t a great disparity between the haves and have nots.

With their recent labor woes, I would doubt any baseball team will have an IPO anytime soon or else they would have to release REAL audits of their books and that would really upset other owners. Baseball also specifically prohibits municipal ownership of a team in the Green Bay model.

I also doubt any NHL franchise would want the financial scrutiny of an IPO during its current lockout.