Bruce Dowbiggin
Celebrity Owners– Fun, Yes, But The Equity Is Even Better
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
The campy, trashy ceremony celebrating dysphoria at last summer’s Olympics spoke to how pervasive trans politics has become. So it’s no surprise that amid the avalanche of policies enunciated by Donald Trump in his first week as president is a ban on biological male athletes competing against women. Depending on the sports body this practice has already either been accepted wholeheartedly (swimming) or banned completely (world athletics). The recent Paris Olympics said they went by passport designation when they let Algeria’s Imane Khelif pound real XX biological females in boxing.
Trump’s EO mirrors the newly elected U.S. Congress which passed legislation banning trans athletes from competing against women. It also dovetails with orders that ban all U.S. passport applications with ‘X’ gender marker after Trump’s executive order.
As expected the trans lobby cranked up the outrage. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., the only woman in Congress who played Division I college sports, said Republicans were using the measure to “inject themselves into decisions they have no business making.” She had company as 106 DEMs voted against the bill. Along with the industry that has made children’s author J.K. Rowling a pariah for dissenting.
Society’s recent obsession with gender dysphoria would have been an unimaginable development even a decade ago for a community that’s a rounding error in the census. Monty Python hilariously spoofed a man wanting to have a baby in Life of Brian. The cool kids loved it. Then.
Now trans-as-victim is embraced by radicals in academia and media— and championed by the Trudeau prime ministership and the Obama and Biden presidencies. Such is the hysteria surrounding the issue that it was headline news that future Canadian PM Pierre Poilievre insisted to a CTV interviewer that there are only two genders. Blockbuster stuff in CDN media.
While Canada remains mired as deeply as ever in DEI politics conservatives and evangelicals in Trump’s base are demanding that the trans movement be treated as a manufactured crisis created by radical left-wing elements. Is it real or is it a product of social engineering gone bad? The Salem Witch Trials ? The dawn of a golden age of dysphoria or a hysteria like the McMartin Pre-School witch hunts ?
MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes has 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.
“Bulimia entered the lexicon via women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions
“In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion. A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of a social contagion
“Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010, and then, all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialized world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender. [Ed.: statistics show it rising by 500 percent] It was the perfect storm. In the 2010s, the media fascination with transgenderism began with ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and I Am Jazz; the political left became infatuated with trans rights, and schools started teaching gender ideology to children as young as kindergarten.
“Social media came on the scene and provided the perfect super-spreading environment. Teenage girls are now just one click away from 1000s of TikTok and YouTube videos of young women proudly showing off their mastectomy scars and extolling the joy of taking testosterone.
“Just as this new, atypical type of gender dysphoria was emerging, gender clinics, at the behest of activist groups, abandoned the psychotherapeutic approach of watchful waiting and adopted the affirmative model – fast-tracking these teens to irreversible medical procedures.
“We’re in the eye of the storm right now, so most people can’t see the damage being done. But soon, all the young people emerging from this contagion sterile and missing body parts will be visible for all to see, and people will be horrified that they supported such evil.”
Knowing the lunatic left’s penchant for denial the trans contagion evil will be suppressed and forgotten. The young women who lost Olympic medals and world records to biological men will be memory holed. The social suffocation employed to defeat its critics will be re-defined as an attack on the proponents of the movement. Not convinced? Veterans of the McMartin travesty in Los Angeles still remain astonished by the complete lack of accountability of those who perpetrated this fraud.
Hughes may be right that, just like bulimia, the trans contagion has peaked and is diminishing. But the people who cultivated it as.a tool to punish their enemies will still be in place, waiting for social media to embrace their next campaign of punishment. Their ruthless, recklerss grasp for power is the real contagion of modern times. Solving that will take more than a Donald Trump executive order.
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. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Stop us if you heard this before. Justin Trudeau talks tough but folds like a cheap lawn chair. His current spasmodic response to Donald Trump’s tariff threat should look familiar. He’s been here and backed down before.
The defining crisis of his time as prime minister– the 2022 Trucker Convoy in Ottawa– is the blue print for his handling of stress. For those with poor memories— or Liberals trying to forget—his arbitrary handling of the Covid vaccine crisis created a massive pushback among voters. Having forced everyday Canadians to take— under threat— an unproven vaccine he was faced with an unprecedented display of impertinence to his majesty.
In better times the pushback might have originated with a media offended by his high-handed ArriveCan fiasco and locking citizens into hotels against their will. By this time, however, PMJT had paid off large segments of Canadian media and was on his way to paying off many more. So it fell to independent truckers to expose Trudeau’s arbitrary undemocratic behaviour.
They came to Parliament Hill armed with truck horns and Bouncy Castles. There were no guns, no bombs, no assault vehicles. Just your garden-variety 18 wheelers who’d come from across the nation. This made Mr. Tough guy catatonic. As the truckers neared the capital he called them racists and Nazis intent on overthrowing the government. He baselessly claimed (in French) that their supporters were anti-science.
This faux-tough talk surprised many who recalled that, only months before, he’d blithely stood back, brows knit, as indigenous radicals blocked the main railway lines for months in protest of oil pipelines (more on this later). It was all soothing words and grovelling imprecations to understanding from Skippy. Maybe billions were lost, but at least he hadn’t upset Canada’s “first peoples”.
But when truckers protested in his home city, it was Code Red for our hero. Rather than meet protesters when the trucks arrived, hearing their grievances and agreeing to negotiate— as he’d done with the trainspotters— a cringing Trudeau hid, vilifying the invaders from inside his Covid cottage. It was all no quarter, no surrender, no show.
Canada’s media dutifully covered his flank, shopping numerous fake stories about Nazi/ Rebel flags and arson attempts. (For which they’ve never apologized.) In parliament he and his NDP service animals invented stories of huge donations from evil right-wing forces in the U.S.
Not surprisingly, giving Truckers the vaunted Trudeau middle finger did not send them scurrying back to their homes. Quite the opposite. Instead they hunkered down in an 18-wheel version of Woodstock. It was a rock n’ roll party that Ottawa police were dumbfounded how to stop. Noisy but non-violent.
This infuriated the burghers of Ottawa, those making their livings from government and the National Capital Commission. They were losing sleep in their cozy cribs. “Someone must pay!” A still-bunkered Trudeau then played the Dad card, sending in federal cops and suspending Canadians rights while seizing the financial livelihoods of the Convoy leaders.
His suspension of historic civil rights invited international censure. It would later be declared illegal in the courts. The use of the Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility,” Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley wrote. No matter. He’d proudly used a sledge hammer on a flea. People charged with mischief were off to jail for five years. Cosseted by the huzzahs of the purchased media he gave himself a W and went surfing.
Fast forward to 2024 when Justin was about as popular as scrofula in the polls . Entering 2025 he was trying desperately to hang onto power till the end of his term in the fall, when his handlers at the WEF would rescue him with sinecures and flattery. All domestic attempts to shame him into quitting failed. It seemed he had a clear path to make his own exit.
He never anticipated a re-elected, vindictive Donald Trump, never planned for the implications. Yes, this was the same Trump he’d casually ridiculed and insulted for most of the decade. Least of all, he was unready for a Trump armed with serious tariff threats unless the post-national PM shored up his defence and propped up the border. Oops.
Shades of the Truckers, the tariff skirmish could have been resolved by working with Trump on the border issue. But that’s not how PMJT rolls away. Trump invited him to Mar A Lago post-election, only to ridicule him as “governor” of a new 51st American state. A butt-hurt Trudeau then shut down Parliament and blamed Alberta’s energy cash cow, getting the other premiers to insist that the province block oil sales to the U.S.
Just like Dad in the old days there was no reciprocal ask of Ontario blocking its auto industry or Quebec its aluminum industry. Branch-plant Alberta would carry the burden. He coerced media and other parties to give him cover, vilifying anyone refusing to go along. He closed Parliament till March so his party could sort out its next move. This divide-and-retreat strategy has left the country on verge of dismemberment. But he acts like he had time.
Trump says Trudeau has till February 1 to cut a deal. Instead of negotiating Trudeau is threatening. The PM bravely supports “the principle of dollar-for-dollar matching tariffs” against the U.S. Conceding that this a terrible tactic he says the feds would be “there to support and compensate businesses”. Using public money to compensate for the negligence his progressive agenda has left behind. Can you say Covid.2?
What’s the difference from his Truckers Convoy dithering performance? Trudeau had simple truckers then, without power. In Trump, however, he has a freshly elected president with the hammer of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. Who can’t wait to crush Trudeau and his Liberal snobs as freeloaders on the American dime. “Exporters of terrorists, drugs and contraband into America”. Trump now has a unified front of social media billionaires while Trudeau has only a burned-out cabinet and Laurentian loyalists. What couldn’t go wrong?
If Trudeau lets this go past Feb. 1 without a deal or an election call it will be the worst constitutional catastrophe since conscription in WW I and II. Expect no mercy from down south. Every turn of the screw on Canada increases Trump’s polling. The Family Compact ain’t saving you, Skippy. And they won’t save the midwits who elected Trudeau PM three times.
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. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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