In what I presume is not a coincidence of timing, CNBC has a major piece on Major League Baseball for the second day in row. After yesterday’s wonder-who-pushed-this-out article about owners privately contemplating a salary cap fight in next year’s inevitable lockout, today CNBC has team valuations for the sport, and an attendant writeup (bonus notes throughout about how MLB valuations lag the other major sports in part because they don’t have a salary cap … ).
You can read the full write-up here, as well as a detailed explanation here of how the authors came up with their valuations. It seems a pretty reasonable approach to me, with as accurate information as any outsider is going to be able to get.
The Chicago Cubs are valued at $4.5 billion by CNBC, a figure that places them behind only the Yankees ($8 billion), Dodgers ($5.8 billion), and Red Sox ($4.7 billion), and lands closely to Forbes’ recent $4.6 billion valuation (which also trailed the Yankees, Dodgers, and Red Sox).
Once again, suffice to say, the Ricketts Family made a pretty smart investment when they bought the Chicago Cubs for less than $1 billion in 2009. I shoulda made an offer.
Interestingly, there’s a pretty large discrepancy in the revenue figure at CNBC ($528 million) and Forbes ($584 million), both of which say they are net of revenue-sharing, so that isn’t the difference. Without mentioning the Cubs specifically, CNBC notes that some of its revenue figures are netted out, so it’s possible that’s the difference (i.e., some revenue the Cubs receive has a substantial chunk they don’t get to keep – a big portion of what you pay for merchandise or concessions, for example, don’t actually go to the Cubs, a big chunk of ticket prices goes to the city amusement tax, etc.).
If I’m understanding correctly, it would seem like the CNBC number is more what we’d be interested in as fans, and would actually then change that payroll-as-a-percentage-of-revenue figure we discussed last week. This is not apples to apples – the revenue figures actually vary in both directions, sometimes wildly, at the two sources – but just to give you the context: if the Cubs’ 2024 revenue figure were $528 million instead of $584 million, then their payroll expressed as a percentage of revenue would bump them up a couple spots. Still bottom ten by that measure, but no longer bottom five. For what it’s worth!
