In under a decade Lerner will have made enough net gains to completely pay off the team debt and also recover his initial investment, leaving him with a ~$500 million asset and nothing but gravy from that point on. All of this being done with near zero risk as MLB revenue sharing and the MASN contract provide him with quite a large guaranteed annual profit margin. It's amazing that the fool can even dress himself.
Where can I find the Nats' financials?
Context:
- few teams in any sport are owned by families that only have the team as income. The NY Giants Maras come to mind, but it's tough to name one after that.
- there might have been a long, long recession in baseball, but all the family-teams were sold: Connie Mack, Bill Veeck, the Griffiths, for instance.
- English Premier League teams are mostly public corporations; several of the biggest reported last year that their owners were subsidizing their teams because team revenue left them in the red. Chelsea and Manchu were some of the biggest losers.
Assumption, therefore, is that a sports franchise is not high margin, and certainly not big business. My back-of-the-envelope guess is that the Nats annual revenues are only about $100 million per year. That seems low, since the Redskins had total players salaries of about $84 million back in '92-93, when the NFL went to their salary cap.
My guess: 30,000 fans per game at 81 games at $25 per ticket. Maybe low on the ticket price, but over-generous on the total fans. Add hot dogs, beer, and souvenirs, and that's still not a lot from game-attendance. I don't remember what the Nats get from MASN, but people complained that it was not enough. Surely, the ratings are not very high with a dead-losing team. While there is some revenue-sharing around the league based on "high-spending" teams, it is not enough that small market teams can bid with the Yankees, or that the Yankees or Mets pay close attention to salaries.
Stretch guess: maybe $150 million per year in revenue.