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Bruce Dowbiggin

Celebrity Owners– Fun, Yes, But The Equity Is Even Better

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In case you hadn’t noticed. Celebrity Sports Ownership is all the rage. When the Ottawa Senators were for sale Ryan Reynolds, Snoop and The Weeknd were all mentioned among the bidders (that eventually went to Montreal businessman Michael Andlauer). LeBron James now holds a minority position with Liverpool FC.

Jay-Z owns part of the Brooklyn Nets, Usher a piece of the Cleveland Cavaliers while Fergie of Black Eyed Peas fame also partly owns the Miami Dolphins. Gloria and Emilio Estefan, Marc Anthony, and tennis superstars Serena and Venus Williams are owners of pro sports teams. Famously, Elton John owned Watford FC, although he’s now just an honorary chairman.

And, of course, Reynolds and Rob McElhenney used a documentary TV series that showed their Welsh Wrexham soccer team promoted to the FA’s League Two. What’s the attraction?

Clearly a little PR is always a good thing. But sports team ownership has also become a lucrative equity play. As BMO reports, “The average compound annual growth rate since the last purchase price…  is 15 percent, a meaningful outperformance to the TSX and S&P.  Forbes estimates the Toronto Blue Jays are currently worth US$2.1 billion or roughly C$2.85 billion.

Based on recent sports franchise transactions, expansion fees and annual estimations of franchise values by Forbes Magazine, an $8 billion enterprise value is easily defendable for the Jays’ owners MLSE (who also own the Maple Leafs, Toronto FC and Argonauts).”

It’s the same across the major pro sports leagues. The estimated average franchise value in the NFL since 2013 is $5.1B with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16 percent; in the NBA it is $2.9B with a CAGR of 18 percent. For MLB it is $2.3B with a CAGR of 12 percent; the NHL is $1.0B with a CAGR of 11 percent; while MLS is $0.6B with a CAGR 21%.

But, BMO cautions, owning a sports franchise is considered “an equity investment strategy rather than a cash flow or income play.” In other words, don’t think that ticket sales and hot dogs are going to make you rich. (Although the NHL’s salary cap, which guarantees owners’ profits is a sweet deal.) The key is sports media which is thriving despite the move to cord cutting..

Sports media rights contracts have grown in tandem with franchise valuations. Not to be ignored in the advertising growth and viewer interaction is the bear knowns as legalized sports betting. Betting companies are flooding the airwaves with commercials while bettors tune in to watch how their selections work out. The casinos and online shops have replaced lower-paying traditional advertisers who’ve dropped off.

In Canada, league or team ownership of broadcast properties is still common. For that reason the real value of those broadcast rights is often opaque. (We had some irritated pushback from Rogers and Bell for writing on this tidy arrangement in the mid 2010s, forcing some limited disclosures). Rogers Sportsnet and TSN own (via MLSE) own a stable of teams in MLB, NHL, CFL and MLS. Good luck finding out what they pay themselves for media rights.

It’s more open in the U.S. Since the New York Yankees pioneered the YES network in 2002— sparking multiple imitators in other markets—the move in the U.S. has been away from outright ownerships of regional sports networks. A number of RSNs in the U.S. are either in bankruptcy or nearing it. Digital and network sources are now absorbing these sources. ESPN, via its owner Disney, is looking to find partners for its many broadcast properties as their bottom line in general has suffered.

Still, ESPN’s legacy business generates revenue and operating income of approximately $12.5 billion and $4.0 billion in 2023. It remains to be seen what new model emerges in the U.S. to answer cord cutting and the death of conventional TV. The NFL’s experiment on Monday, having two MNF games compete on separate networks is one experiment.

In Canada’s monopolistic market, “TSN/RDS penetration rates have declined at a quicker pace than ESPN over the past 10 years. ESPN penetration has dropped from 81 percent of U.S. households in 2013 to 56 percent in 2022, while TSN/RDS penetration has decreased from 89% of Canadian households in 2013 to 49 percent in 2022.

In addition, BMO admits that cord cutting is a thing. “SportsNet subscribers have decreased -23 percent to 5.8 million over the same period. Subscriber and advertising revenues are 60 percent and 40 percent of total revenue, respectively. Since 2017, TSN revenues have increased 13 percent. TSN subscribers have decreased -29 percent to ~7.8 million over the same period.”

But! In the last five years, TSN and SN have increased advertising revenues by 13 percent and 15 percent respectively. The same figure for the top five Canadian non-sports channels (collectively) is six percent. Thank you legalized wagering in Ontario. So who wouldn’t want a piece of this action, especially in Canada?

The red flag in this surging equity market comes in the form of smaller Canadian NHL markets. The Senators sale for $950 suggests a healthy interest in owning, but the Sens sale was also tied into the new LeBreton Flats arena. Ownership or control of a Canadian arena means more than NHL games. It also includes revenue from concerts, rallies, monster-truck events etc.

Even with that can Andlauer produce a winner just two hours from the Montreal Canadiens market? Likewise, the Winnipeg Jets are desperately in need of a larger arena to replace the 15,321 Canada Life Centre. Having Canada’s richest man, David Thomson, as an owner is no guarantee of getting one. And should Thomson tire of being the saviour of a losing Jets hockey property, who in that market has C$1-2B lying around needed to fund the franchise properly?

Likewise, the Calgary Flames. Despite the political press conference this summer about as new agreement the arena that management promised by 2013 has still not seen a shovelful of dirt turned over. The latest gaffe was architect’s drawings for the rink being rejected by the NHL due to inadequate dressing-room space. Start again.

Should the rink not be available till 2025-26 will an evolving ownership group still be interested in shelling out the money to keep the Flames (and Stampeders, Roughnecks and Hitmen) operating in Calgary? And if they don’t, because losing sucks? While energy-rich Calgary has plenty of billionaires, few will want to risk the money needed to keep a competitive team in a small market.

Connor McDavid’s brilliance plasters over the same small-market crack in Edmonton. Yes, they have their new building, but can owner Darryl Katz fund the moves need to keep his stars and build a winner? Vancouver, owned by the Aqulini family, has a larger market base, but with Seattle Kraken just two hours away can they too write the cheques needed to create the first Stanley Cup winner since the Canucks entered the NHL in 1970.

If these Canadian markets do survive longterm it might have to be with foreign ownership. Certainly there is money to be made riding the equity train. But there also no guarantees that those carpetbagger owners might replicate the Montreal Expos and scoot to richer markets.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Canadians Thinks America Owes Them. Trump Has Other Ideas

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Breaking: It’s now being reported that in the 2024 U.S. election, zero Canadians voted for Donald Trump. In fact, zero Canadians voted for anyone on the ballot. They’re not allowed to. And yet rage monkeys in the Canadian media seem to have the idea that Canada is— and should be— an immediate priority of POTUS 47.

Here’s Globe & Mail/ CBC wind therapist Andrew Coyne about ten exits past normal on the idea of Donald Trump on Canadian soil. Okay, on Alberta soil. “We’re going to roll out the red carpet for the wannabe dictator of America at the very moment he is moving to suppress dissent with armed force?” (You mean like the Truckers Convoy?)

Cartoonist Michael DeAdder, who likely cries if you use improper pronouns, says “Hold my kombucha”. His latest etching has Trump asking a veteran what he did in the war. The witty retort is “Fought against people like you”. Get it? Trump murders six millions Jews. But The Hill keeps this guy working, and the laughs just keep on coming. Free speech!

The presumption is jaw-dropping. Even as Trump’s approval rating hits 53 percent, Canadians online were echoing Democrats’ fever dreams of forming a shadow government to take over from Trump via coup. This sense of impunity at a distance is why the Canadian government— along with other drive-by virtue signallers UK, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia— have imposed sanctions on two sitting members of the Israeli cabinet. They know it will rile Trump’s America.

For ordinary Canadians, Trump became a post-it note to justify giving Team Liberal another swing at ruining the nation. “We used to be such friends! He’s a tyrant.!” This just in: Love him or hate him Trump is employed by Americans to do their bidding. He’s not a sentimental buddy of Canada who’ll cut us some slack for old time’s sake. He has no remittance from Canada to please the Laurentian elites. If your defence is non-existent and your military gender-obsessed: you had it coming.

Are his policies jostling Canada? Absolutely. Read Art of the Deal. The 51st state jibe when Justin soiled himself was rude. But it worked on pliant Canadian liberals. Now the The Little Banker is disavowing the dissolute decade of Trudeau while employing Conservatives’ policies on defence spending, inter-provincial trade and border security. Hell, he’s naming longtime Tories to his personal staff.

In the end Carney knows this ain’t mock Parliament. That his dossier begins and ends with satisfying the beast to the south. None of this should be a surprise. Yet Canadians dozed when Trump made clear in his election campaign that the American economy is the greatest in the world. If you want to fish in that pond it’s not going to be for free. That means tariffs for a range of U.S. industries that couldn’t compete in a Biden world.

We can argue how well tariffs work, but Trump wants them to reduce taxes on the people who elected him. Not the Canadians who fly first class but pay economy. And who have pushed his approval ratings into the 50s, higher than ever before. (Likely to spike higher after the No Kings Riot season peters out.)

No wonder Canadians preferred the guy before Trump, the senile sock puppet whose government was run by anonymous figures using the auto-pen. Sleepy Joe let Canada slide into mediocrity and financial peril without any judgement. It was comfortable. Then The Donald had the nerve to expose the ditch Canada was in.

Canada, Trump pointed out,  was delinquent on its defence, harbouring Chinese drug lords, printing money like Canadian Tire and its banks were involved in money laundering. That was the nice stuff. Try Organized fentanyl networks operating with impunity in the largest cities of the nation So dumping on Trump in salty cartoons allows Canada’s Mod Squad to ignore the real issues that should have been litigated in the April election.

We have written extensively about the ruse that was played on gormless Canadians in  “U.S. Voters Smelled A Rat But Canadian Voters Bought The Cheese” We have catalogued Canada’s drug and money laundering disgrace in “Chinese Gangs Dominate Canada: Why Will Voters Give Liberals Another Term?” We’ve described the real-estate bubble economy created by Trudeau and sidekick Carney that threatens to crash the economy and ruin seniors’ pensions in

In the end, it is still la-la-la-la We Can’t Hear You. Trump-obsessed Boomers more concerned with the equity in their jumped-up bungalows gave the finger to the next generations and blamed it all on Orange Man Bad. In the monotone of Canadian political comment it all seemed so easy. Turn against Trump. Cash another dividend. Cheer on MSNBC and CNN bitch sessions.

The Family Compact don’t get it. Their Antifa heroes down south plan demos and “nonviolent” activity to crater the public resolve. In Canada that still works. But in the U.S. the Covid reverb is hitting the natural governing class of the nation. While they craft fine phrases about democracy the consumers remember them using a virus to stop society.

The appetite for Gavin Newsom blovaitors and Jen Psaki fart catchers is crashing in America. Riots may be coming in the U.S., but it won’t be like  George Floyd and Covid and the pussy hats. At some point Canada’s docile classes better wake up, too. America owes them nothing. They need to earn the respect.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Simone Biles Fails To Stick The Landing Going After Riley Gaines

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Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. George Orwell

Or, in the case of Olympic legend Simone Biles, only gymnasts believe in the incendiary issue of trans men competing in women’s sports. Biles, who has made a secondary career as an object of pity, took exception when former swimmer Riley Gaines, an opponent of trans men competing against women, sent a picture of Minnesota softball team that recently won a state title with a pitcher who is reported to be transgender.

“Comments off lol,’ Gaines wrote in response to the post which wasn’t permitting any comments from the public. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”

That brought Biles into the fray. ‘You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. ‘You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! ‘But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!’

She then poked Gaines again, saying: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” (Gaines husband is 6-foot-4)

The loser reference was to Gaines having lost to a trans swimmer in an NCAA race. Since then Gaines has launched a campaign to outlaw biological males from competing with cisgendered girls and women. She has testified in the U.S. Congress and has appeared in numerous interviews espousing a position supported by the vast majority of Americans.

One might think the proof of this position— unquestioned as recently as a decade ago— would be obvious. But Biles and  gender radicals who’ve tried to make trans into the Emancipation Proclamation of the 21st century are not giving up the fight.

Here’s someone named Nancy Armour in USA Today. “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do..” When legislation banning trans men in girls/ women sports was presented in the U.S. Congress 106 Democrats voted against the motion. The chattering class on CBC, MSNBC and CNN likewise have a cohort of those opposing the ban.

But it was the outburst from Biles that most appalled fans who’d worshipped her as the GOAT of Olympic gymnastics and then sympathized with her victimization by Dr. Larry Nasser. Even when she bailed on her teammates at the 2024 Games they cut her slack. But suddenly a woman who’s preached against body shaming and intolerance was deriding a fellow athlete’s body and mocking her complaints.

Critics were quick to post Biles’ hypocrisy about compassion, citing her own tear-stained testimony about how she was taken advantage by a doctor. Here’s how we described her psychological distress last August during the Olympics. “Prominent among them was gymnast Simone Biles who described the abuse she’d suffered from a male trainer and on social media as the greatest female gymnast in history. Even as she added more golds to her mantle she’d seemed unable to find peace in her accomplishments.

“Due to mental blocks, she’d had to step away from the sport for a time to get her head straight. She had a lot of company from fellow competitors who described sexual harassment and intimidation on social media for their unhappiness. (Hence the constant mental health commercials on the TV broadcasts.)”

Now the same role model is mocking Gaines? It seems unthinkable. As for the claims that men have no advantage against women, it was pointed out that there are zero women who try to reverse the equation, going into men’s sports. They show the hard truths about competitive records of men versus women in a range of sports. They describe the physical risks for women playing against larger, stronger men. Here. Here. And here.

It’s still stunning to see Biles toeing the radical LGBTQ line while asking for traditional pity of a victimized woman herself. Or the amount of support that the cause has garnered from progressives throughout society. When did people became so obtuse about the growth this societal contagion?

We wrote earlier this year about how such notions take hold. MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….

“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way… Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.”

The new contagion is trans athletes. USA Today is just one example of how influencers try to legitimize campaigns to boost their own self esteem. As the battle to reverse the trans incursion shows, there are only too many willing to play politics in the gender debate. Like the pro-Palestinian movement in North America the trans athlete hoax exists is a bubble where reality and fiction can co-exist, knowing they’ll never be put to the test.

Orwell called it doublethink “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Biles and the liberal elites have it mastered. Nursing their grievance while finding it a fault in others.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/

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