MLB owners looking to invest in other sports leagues as lockout continues

It was just over a year ago that RedBird Capital put down $750M for shares in Fenway Sports Group, the parent company of the Boston Red Sox, as well as the Liverpool Football Club and NESN. MLBTR’s TC Zencka wrote about the investment offer at the time.

Michael Silverman of the Boston Globe profiled RedBird CEO Gerry Cardinale, noting that the group has made some big moves since that time, purchasing the Pittsburgh Penguins and investing in LeBron James’ SpringHill entertainment company. There are still plenty of other big moves being considered as well, with Cardinale saying that buying an NBA franchise is “a real top priority,” with other options on the to-do list including a cricket team, another soccer team, a WNBA team and an NFL team.

As noted by Silverman, FSG is now valued around $10 billion by Forbes. That’s a big jump from the time of RedBird’s investment a year ago, when the value was around $7.35 billion.

Elsewhere, Tim Stebbins of NBC Sports Chicago reports that the Ricketts family, who owns the Chicago Cubs, is considering a purchase of Chelsea FC of the English Premier League. As Stebbins reports, “Chelsea owner and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich announced this week the club is up for sale amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” He points out that estimates of the value of the club are between $2 billion to $4 billion and highlights that the Ricketts purchased the Cubs in 2009 for $846M, with the value of the franchise since ballooning up to $3.36 billion, according to Forbes.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that all of this is happening amid MLB’s lockout, which has seen transactions frozen and players cut off from team facilities and personnel for over three months now, leading to the cancellation of the beginning of the season. It was one month ago, as part of this ongoing dispute, that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred was asked if he thought owning an MLB club was a good investment, responding in the contrary and saying that the “return on those investments is below what you’d expect to get in the stock market” and that there was greater risk in owning a team.

During the course of the lockout, it has often been described as a “billionaires versus millionaires” fight. While the details above clearly illustrate that billion of dollars are involved in owning a team, the players have pushed back against this framing of the situation. Giants pitcher Alex Wood recently spoke on this exact topic to Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s definitely one of the more frustrating stigmas that surrounds what we’re going through,” Wood said. “To make a blanket statement like that, it’s just false. Lots of people work for companies, but not everyone is in a union — we just happen to have a pretty strong union to fight for us and do what we morally think is right, and that’s all we’re asking for.”

As laid out by Slusser in that piece, “a 2019 study determined that 40% of players earned less than $1 million in their careers, and the median earnings in that group was $357,718, and that’s before being taxed in every state in which the teams play, union fees or agents’ percentages.”

MLB and MLBPA met again Sunday in another attempt to make progress toward resolving the lockout. The MLB responded unfavorably to the union’s proposals, attempting to frame Sunday’s proposal as a step backward and saying that the sides are now deadlocked. However, Bob Nightengale of USA Today reports that the sides could meet again as soon as Monday.