08-26-2007, 09:03 AM
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#7
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Minuteman Target
Join Date: Sep 2004
Posts: 5,044
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Re: Pats Finance For Dummies (Me)
The NFL is, to the best of my knowledge, unique among sports leagues in that owning a franchise is not, from the income point of view, a bad investment.
Economics 101 tells us that, in equilibrium, different businesses will generate the same rate of return -- so-called "normal profits". If a business is generating more, it will attract more entrants and competition. But, as with so much in economics, that only holds "other things being equal". In the case of a sports franchise things are not equal.
Rich men would much rather own a sports franchise than, say, a chain of hardware stores, giving the same rate of return. So it follows that the price of sports franchises goes up relative to that of hardware stores (the rate of return goes down). There are often articles here in the UK about the fact that soccer clubs lose money, as if this were an exceptional state of affairs that cannot continue. But, if you look at it from the economic point of view, so long as there are rich men who want to own clubs for non-economic reasons, that is how it will continue.
Why isn't this also so in the NFL? Three things about the NFL stand out: barriers to entry (the number of franchises is fixed and there are some restrictions on buying and selling them), the salary cap (which prevents very rich owners, like Roman Abramovich in soccer, from driving up the costs for other teams by ramping up salaries) and revenue sharing.
The bottom line, I think, is that NFL franchises are rich men's toys, but, very unusually, they are, at least in the medium to long term, profitable ones.
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