What's the fastest way to boost the revenue for a team? Move them. Profit off of new merchandise and a new fan base. Seems like a great idea. Quickly you rise to the top because everyone needs to have the latest gear and local media needs to hire mass amounts of staff to keep up with the new team.
So now it's a few years after you moved. The honeymoon is over and you're kind of lost. You say to yourself "perhaps we should have thought about this one." Pretty much every time a franchise moves to a new city that's supposed to be great, it ends up costing so much money that new management is needed and the original investors never see the benefits of their work.
I get it that it can work and their are examples, but leagues are spreading themselves too thin and new old franchises end up coming back anyways.
The Seattle SuperSonics have new ownership and have officially applied to move the team to Oklahoma City. Just wait and see on this one. I understand that after Katrina the Hornets called O.K. home, but this is just another gamble that I do not see paying off.
Baltimore moved the Colts, but later came the Ravens.
The Ravens are the old Browns, which came back after a few years of absence.
The Raiders were Oakland, were L.A., are Oakland again.
Nashville made an NHL home, threats to move the team have been relentless.
North Stars moved to Dallas, Wild came later.
Expos went to D.C., yeah, they can't sell tickets.
Professional baseball in Florida, do I really need to explain?
There are plenty of more examples, but I'm sure you get the picture by now. It's a bad idea in the long term, no matter how great the cash flow is at the start.
The Bills are soon to be the next team in the discussion. The Bills want to play 2 games a year (one pre-season, one regular) until 2012. I'm sure that was well calculated with the approximate date that Ralph Wilson is set to expire. Now, not a few weeks later, the owner of Rogers media group is expressing interest in buying the team. I called this one weeks ago and everyone told me that I was crazy. Well, call me crazy, but get ready to start the petitions and rallies because it's going to be one hell of a fight to save this team.
Long Live Sports (while you have a team to root for),
DG2
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment