In 1978-9 teams of Russian, Czech, and Finns played a total of 13 games in the WHA which did count in the standings for the regular WHA teams. At that time the WHA was a top level hockey league and the best teams were probably better than some NHL teams.
It’s very hard to say what the “value” of a sports franchise is. Like anything else, it’s ultimately worth what someone is willing to pay for it. And almost always, that will be a “bad” deal, because people aren’t buying sports teams because they think it will give them the best possible financial return on their investment, they’re doing it for ego-tripping/publicity-seeking/getting-people-to-associate-their-country-with-something-other-than-horrific-human-rights-violations reasons.
And sales are relatively rare events, so there isn’t enough data to clearly establish a market. So all those lists of “most valuable sports franchises” are really just guesses; Forbes can say Man United are “worth” 4.6 billion USD, but that doesn’t mean the owners would definitely sell it to you for that much. Maybe they’d take less, maybe they just don’t want to sell for any amount. It’s especially odd in the case of fan-owned franchises which could never actually be sold.
Well, we can bound the problem at least. For the EPL there has been one massive sale last year (Chelsea) for about $3B. Reporting has that as high as $5.5B, but that includes “promises of investments into the club”, not money actually going to the previous owner.
So if Chelsea are worth $3B I don’t think it’s at all unrealistic to say that ManU are would fetch $4.5B. The very poorly run (previously) Newcastle United was sold to the Saudi PIF for $400M. So that pretty much bounds long-term EPL teams. That’s in line with the recent rumors that another poorly-run but long-standing club, Everton, may be up for sale for around $500M.
Recent MLB sales include the Mets two years ago (clearly one of the more valuable baseball franchises) for $2.4B. At the other end the Kansas City Royals (clearly one of the least valuable) also sold two years ago for $1B. So I think its reasonable to bound MLB values at $4B+ (Yankees, Dodgers) and $1B (Royals, Brewers). The Dodgers sold for $2B ten years ago, as a point of reference.
The NFL is in a whole different world. The Broncos just sold for over $4.5B, and at best you would figure that’s a middle-of-the-road franchise from a value perspective. The lowest-value team is worth at least $2B I would assume.
ETA: I would add the Chelsea FC sale was under some duress, but there were plenty of bidders so I think it’s probably a fair valuation.
That’s certainly the case now but the economics of owning a team have changed dramatically. Now the worth of the teams is calculated knowing what all the current revenue streams are. It’s hard to impossible to buy a team on the cheap now and reap the rewards of appreciating value. When the group headed by George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees for $10 million they bought it cheap but no one knew it would be worth $4 billion. Much of the families wealth is from the value of the team. Mark Cuban was on the forefront of streaming when he bought the Mavericks for $265 million. They are worth $3 billion now. It’s hard to imagine a return on investment like that now. The teams will appreciate but I can’t see it happening at that rate anymore.
IIRC Chelsea had to be sold too, so Abramovich didn’t have much bargaining power. A fair price might well be higher.
That’s my recollection, as well – it was essentially a forced sale in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.
Well, yes it was a “forced sale”. But I don’t think that necessarily means the buyer got a discount. There seemed to have been quite a few bidders, and the sales price was in line with the previous estimate.
Forbes 2021 estimate for Chelsea FC: $3.2B (cite: World’s Most Valuable Sports Teams 2021)
Sales price to Todd Boehly and co.: $3.2B + a promise to “invest” $2.2B (hence the oft-quoted, even by me, price of over $5B)
Now maybe in a less hostile environment Abromovich could have gotten more, but I definitely don’t remember anybody claiming it was a steal at the time.
ETA: I don’t want to erase this post, but now I wonder if that 2021 link is good. It links to a current estimate based on the sale. I will try to dig up a valid pre-sale estimate from Forbes.
ETA2: Wikipedia has a pre-2021 estimate of $2.58B. So I think the point stands that Boehly didn’t get a steal because Roman had to sell.
Why would expanding the number of teams require expanding the number of games they play?
The Toronto Blue Jays are one of the richest teams in MLB and spend asstons of money. The Raptors have always done extremely well.
Currency is not the same thing as money. Yes, it’s a different currency and they’re usually around 25% apart, but then Torontonians are used to paying 25% more for most stuff because that’s just how currency works. I assure you that in a city as big and wealthy as Toronto you can find MORE than enough people to pay NFL rates for tickets. Toronto is rather self evidently more flush with wealthy sports fans than cities like Cincinnati, Indianapolis or New Orleans that are much smaller.
If London, UK got a team, they would of course be doing local business in a currency that is MORE valuable than the US dollar. Actually, that’s true of any team you stick in most of Europe, too, since the Euro is more valuable than the greenback That doesn’t really confer an advantage, though, because that’s not how currency works (and the NFL has a salary cap anyway; the Dallas Cowboys aren’t allowed to spend $500 million a year on salaries.)
The obvious challenges to the NFL in European expansion are
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The travel. Even assuming your European teams are playing each other more they gotta play teams from the rest of the NFL sometime and that would suck, and
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The scheduling. If the Niners are playing the Frankfurt Panzers, they’re playing in a city NINE HOURS different on the clock. So… do all games in Europe have to be played a night so US fans don’t have to get up ridiculously early to see the game? Does it make Monday Night Football impossible? Surely US fans don’t want to watch MNF at noon, right?
You forgot Vancouver, which gives Canada seven teams, which, of course, rather disproportionate to the size of Canada’s population, especially given that most of those cities are amazingly small markets in terms of population. Canada is of course actually under-served, since really the Toronto area should have two or three teams.
And only two Canadian teams have moved to the USA, the first Winnipeg Jets and the Quebec Nordiques - which is the same number of American teams than have moved to Canada. Both from the same city, weirdly enough, the Atlanta Flames, now in Calgary, and the Atlanta Thrashers, who are the Winnipeg Jets 2.0. I dunno what the hell is up with Atlanta.
That said, all of this is sports specific and what is true of the NHL is not true of the NFL, or NBA, or MLB. Canada is a hockey market to an extent NO sport is in the USA. It is absolutely, positively inconceivable that a city like Winnipeg or Ottawa could support an MLB or NBA team. Toronto is just on another tier from places like that in terms of the size of the city and available fanbase and corporate sponsorship. That’s why the Blue Jays and Raptors work.
Conversely, the NFL is a weird sport, being mostly a TV product and having very few games; if you had an investor with stadium and expansion money, you could quite possibly have a successful NFL team almost anywhere. (Hello, Green Bay Packers.) You could set up a team in some fourth tier city like Kingston or Peterborough and make money and still draw a lot of fans from big cities - and that is why NFL teams rank so highly in value. It’s all that TV money, baby.
Exactly so, and the NFL has, since the early 1960s, had TV contracts that both (a) ensure that every regular season and postseason game is carried by a national broadcast network (or, more recently, cable channel or streaming provider) and (b) that revenues from those contracts are split evenly among the league’s franchises.
To answer your tangential question, bad ownership group. At least in regards the Thrashers. What the Atlanta Spirit Group were really interested in were the Hawks, and the rights to Phillips (now State Farm) Arena. The Thrashers were just a side hustle, from their point of view. Atlanta Spirit Group milked them for what revenue they brought in (and in a year they only won 14 games, their attendance was 11th in the league - Atlanta would have supported them if the owners did), refused to spend anywhere near the money the franchise needed to compete, and pretty much admitted to trying to sell the team from the minute they bought them. I was dating a woman who was a fanatical Thrashers fan - had gone to see the very first game, and saw three or four games every season, and every time she took me to a game, the arena was full of pennant-waving and blue jersey-clad fans. The team had some talent - Danny Snyder, Ilya Kovalchuk, Marion Hossa, Kari Lehtonen - but those players all eventually fled for bigger paychecks, or a chance to play for the Stanley Cup. The failure of the Thrashers was a failure of ownership and management, not fans.
Lots of football fans follow college players that turn pro. Is it similar in Europe with college athletes?
At least for football (soccer) there is no prominence to college teams at all in England, Netherlands, France or Spain. No one knows or cares about playing football in university. Same with field hockey.
Clubs have youth programs. You might play at school, but club participation is where all the top talent is identified and developed.
England used to have high standard teams from Oxford and Cambridge universities playing in their First Class cricket competition (top domestic level professional cricket). But that ended in the 70s or 80s.
Isn’t it not uncommon for promising young players to skip university all together and enter pro teams’ training programs? I’m thinking of the scene in Ted Lasso, when Roy Kent talks about his grandfather driving him up to Newcastle at the age of nine. Is that an actual thing?
That’s the norm. Maybe not 9, but yeah, players come through academies associated with a pro club.
Going to college is seen as a big part of what holds the US back, and it’s less and less common for Americans soccer players to play in college too.
This isn’t unusual for Canadian hockey players, either. Elite prospects are identified very young.
Not sure I understand this. How does going to college hold US athletes back? It gives them better options later in life (coaching, broadcasting, etc). Not to mention that college-educated fans tend to spend more money on sporting events. Soccer really hasn’t caught on here, except in elementary school, i.e. ‘soccer moms’. I’d rather watch ice hockey than soccer.
I’m referring to players going to college, not people in general.
It’s because the premier teams and coaches are elsewhere. If they want to compete on a professional level then they need to get the best training and experience available.
It’s like asking how a doctor is held back by going to a law school rather than a medical school.
I was referring to student fans rooting for their college team (sometimes passionately) and following those players when they turn pro. This educated fan base typically has money to spend on sports. Which addresses the OP question.
Ok? The side conversation about professional academies had moved beyond that.