When the Dodgers and Yankees take the field to battle it out for the 120th World Series championship, the players won’t be the only ones with trophies on the line.
Behind the teams are their billionaire owners, who have built two of baseball’s most valuable franchises.
Mark Walter, the CEO of investment firm Guggenheim Partners, is the Dodgers’ controlling owner. The financier is worth $6 billion, according to Forbes.
In 2012, Walter led a team of investors, which included now billionaire Magic Johnson and former Atlanta Braves president Stan Kasten, among others, in putting together a $2.15 billion bid for the Los Angeles team and the land around its stadium. At the time, the deal broke records with a sales price more than double that of the previous highest MLB team sale.
Under the new ownership, the Dodgers underwent a turnaround. Decisions were made to appeal to fans’ in-stadium experience — parking prices were lowered, for example; there were investments in the Dodgers’ farm system and its roster; and since 2013, the team has made the playoffs every year, including in 2020, when it won its first World Series in over 30 years.
“I’m not trying to save a dollar,” Walter told The Los Angeles Times in 2012. “I’d rather say we have a great team and maybe spend a little too much.”
In the 12 years since Walter’s group purchased the Dodgers, the team’s value has nearly tripled to $6.3 billion, and in the last year alone, its value has increased 20%, according to Sportico.
Unlike the likes of Walter and Johnson, who purchased the Dodgers after becoming wealthy, the billionaires behind the Yankees are rich because of the team.
The Steinbrenner family has owned the Yankees for decades. George Steinbrenner led a group that bought the team from CBS for about $10 million in 1973, and over the next 27 years, he expanded his stake to 57%.
Now, the team is owned by George’s kids, Hank Steinbrenner, Jessica Steinbrenner, Hal Steinbrenner, and Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal. The siblings are each worth $1.5 billion, per Forbes.
The bulk of the Steinbrenners’ fortune is tied up in the Yankees, which is MLB’s most valuable franchise, worth $7.93 billion, according to Sportico. In addition to owning the team, the Steinbrenner family owns more than 25% of the franchise’s YES Network, as well as stakes in Major League Soccer’s New York City FC, stadium operations company Legends Hospitality, and Italian soccer club AC Milan, Forbes reported.
Professional sports teams have become popular toys for the superrich — and good investments, as the spike in the Dodgers and Yankee valuations shows. In recent decades, the valuations of US sports franchises have outpaced the S&P 500, according to PitchBook.
The growing valuations are due to streaming services driving up the cost of broadcast rights, the influx of revenue from sports betting, and the asset’s recession-proof reliability.
“I’ve got a company that no matter how bad it does, I don’t lose a customer. No matter how much I underperform, I still have that customer. That’s a pretty unique asset. And so that’s why we’re investing in sports,” billionaire Marc Lasry, who sold his stake in the Milwaukee Bucks last year, told Sportico earlier this month on owning a team.
Banks have seen a flurry of activity from private equity firms and billionaires alike who want to get into sports — so much so that Goldman Sachs launched a new unit to advise on sports deals last year.
Sports teams are “assets that used to be thought of as nice-to-have trophy assets that you could talk about at cocktail parties,” Ivo Voynov, the head of sports finance at Citi Private Bank, told BI last year. Now, there’s a sense of “building up real companies around these assets.”
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