>I once heard someone quip: Michael Jordan (back
>when he was playing) isn't really rich; *the guy
>who signs his check* is really rich.
Here's a good summary of how it works. The only difference between this and now is Steinbrenner's dead:
http://nymag.com/news/features/2007/profit/32903/
How It Works: Yankees management plays two games. The first is the day-to-day running of the team. Fifty-one thousand fans pay an average of $28 to come to 81 home games, where they suck down sodas and hot dogs for $4.50 each, generating half the team’s sales. The other half comes from $140 million in ad deals and media rights. The largest expense is player costs, which run about $200 million a year, and then there’s league revenue sharing and the costs of flying the team around the country. But eking out a marginal profit on operations is hardly the aim. The bigger game they’re playing is maximizing the value of the team itself. No need to worry about last year’s $28 million loss, when its value rose $200 million, to $1.2 billion. “Like a piece of property in New York City, it’s really not an annual profit-and-loss-based business,” says Joseph Perello, former vice-president of business development. The Yankeesread Steinbrenneralso own more than a third of the YES network, which broadcasts Yankees games to 8.7 million subscribers. The network’s revenues top a quarter billion and its profit margin is 60 percent. Though a completely separate business from the Yankees, YES’s value is directly tied to how much interest people have in the team, making a $200 million payroll a very easy decision.