Welcome to NET WORTH WEEK here at Undrafted! In a trio of posts this week, I’ll be looking at what sports reveal about what things and people are supposedly “worth” in our current economy. Today I’m starting with team owners, and a pet peeve of mine: namely, the credulous way we invoke owners’ “net worth” when discussing what they bring to the sport.
Speaking of what things are worth, though, allow me to make a plea: If you like this Substack, please consider sharing it with a friend or two. It is free and will remain free, and so if you think it’s any good at all, I hope you’ll pass it along. I really enjoy writing it and want to reach as many people as possible. Thanks and enjoy!
At this point, it has become a cliché to bring up an owner’s net worth when a team does something cheap.
I understand the impulse to do this. The owners are incredibly wealthy, so it seems cruel when they pinch pennies, especially when the ones who suffer are minor leaguers or arena staffers, who are often struggling to get by and have little to no safety net if they are fired or cut. Citing “net worth” figures seems like a good way to draw attention to the inequity of the system.
But we need to break this habit. As tempting as it is, it important to resist the urge to bring up these figures. “Net worth” numbers only undermine the points about inequality people citing them usually want to make. There are two basic reasons for this:
1) These numbers are basically made up.
The concept of a “net worth” is enticingly straightforward. It seems rather objective: You’re just adding up assets and deducting liabilities. Check someone’s retirement account, their stock portfolio, subtract their credit card balance, etc. Probably the hardest part, for most people, would be valuing their home. That is most people’s biggest asset, and the housing market is hard to gauge. It can be volatile, not especially liquid, and lacking easy comparisons, so it entails a degree of subjectivity.
But as you move to the upper strata of wealth, where you find the owners of pro sports teams, that subjectivity completely takes over. A great deal of their wealth is held up in privately traded assets that are difficult to price fairly. The markets for these things are opaque and complicated, so the values are easy to manipulate. Steve Cohen, for example, has supposedly invested $1 billion in his art collection—but art dealing has become a notorious playground for tax avoidance and money laundering for the wealthy. Should we really take that $1 billion figure at face value?
Even for plutocrats like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, whose fortunes are mostly made up of stock in publicly traded companies, it is not as simple as just looking up the stock price. That price, after all, is often contingent on the behavior of the rich people themselves. When Bezos and Gates got divorced, when Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, when Bezos announced he wanted to go to space—all of those things impacted the stock prices of the companies they were invested in, and therefore affected their “net worth.”
Sports owners face an additional complication, given that for most of them a significant source of their wealth is the team itself, and teams are incredibly hard to value.
So when you see the numbers that get thrown around as the “net worth” of any team owner, you should probably just ignore them. The figures are so imprecise as to be little more than guesstimates that the owners themselves will manipulate to their own ends. Rich people will often cite one value for assets when trying to get a loan, or impress other rich people, and then turn around a cite a much lower value to minimize their tax bill or pay less in spousal support. Donald Trump famously said in a deposition that his net worth was based on his “general attitude at the time that the question may be asked,” which like so much of what Trump says is both incredibly stupid and refreshingly honest.
The concept of a personal “net worth” is a capitalist myth meant to propagate the idea that there is some objective standard of value, and that inequality is merely a result of some people providing less value than others. In reality, “net worth” is really about the whims of the uber-wealthy—their “general attitudes at the time the question may be asked”—because they are the ones with the power to decide what is valuable. If you are trying to make a point about inequality, then you should avoid language that obscures that fact.
2) “Net worth” numbers make team owners sound like benefactors.
The other problem with bringing up these figures is that they’re kind of irrelevant to the issue of team spending. The subtext of these comparisons is usually, “Can you believe Owner X won’t pay for this player/staff member/renovation/etc. when he has SO MUCH MONEY?” But this framing makes it seem like the owner should spend the money out of charity. It’s the same logic for giving spare change to panhandlers: You won’t miss the money, and it will mean so much to the recipient.
But that gives owners too much credit. It suggests that professional sports only exist due to the largesse of owners, but that’s total bullshit. Professional sports teams MAKE money. Maybe not as much as you might think—the owners are constantly crying poverty, after all (poor them)—but the precise profit margins are not the point. The point is that there are huge sums of money in team sports: Steady ticket sales, lucrative TV contracts, tons of merchandising opportunities. THAT is what allows athletes to sign huge contracts, and teams to invest in top-notch facilities, not the “net worth” of owners.
When Steve Cohen purchased the Mets last year, his personal fortune was a source of optimism for Mets fans. Supposedly worth over $14 billion, fans were hopeful that he would therefore be willing to spend big on free agents. But this ignores the fact that the Mets themselves make money. They play in the biggest market in the country, and despite constant mismanagement, have a loyal and dedicated fanbase. They don’t need to be subsidized by a wealthy patron to afford free agents. Indeed, some of the wealthiest owners in baseball, like John J. Fisher in Oakland or Jim Pohlad in Minnesota, are routinely among the lowest payrolls.
Because the ownership class is not contributing value to the teams—it is sucking the value from those teams. Any money that goes to team owners or investors is money that is being siphoned out of the game, away from players and fans.
This is the fundamental problem with “net worth” discourse. It hides this fundamental truth of capitalism by presenting “worth” as something innate that capitalists simply possess more of, as opposed to something created when it is taken from workers by the ownership class.
Invoking “net worth” suggests that the best team owner is the wealthiest team owner you can find. But that’s not true. The best owners in sports tend to be dynastic families without significant other sources of wealth, like the Rooneys, the Steinbrenners, or the Buss family. Because the best kind of owner is the one who does the least. Actually, no: That’s the second-best kind of owner. The best owner is none at all.