Twenty franchises are worth more than $2 billion.
There are some journalists who have a lot of time on their hands and those people put out their assessment of what a sports franchise is worth. But a sports franchise is worth only what a potential owner thinks its value is when thinking about buying the business. Sportico ranked the value of each franchise in the National Hockey League from one to 32. The Toronto Maple Leafs’ business is at the top and the Columbus Blue Jackets franchise is at the bottom worth $1.5 billion. The Blue Jackets franchise original ownership spent $80 million in 1997 to join the league. That $80 million figure would be about $167 million in today’s money. For whatever reason, there is still some good feeling about the NHL’s “Original Six” which was not the NHL’s “Original Six” teams and actually could be viewed as a business failure as the league stayed at six teams from 1942 through 1967 and did not grow the business. Toronto, the New York Rangers, Montréal, Boston and Chicago are five of the “Original Six” and top the valuations list. Los Angeles is the only non-Original Six franchise in the top six and comes in at four.
Sportico has the Leafs’ franchise worth $4.8 billion. James Dolan’s New York Rangers business comes in at $4.15 billion. Twenty of the NHL’s 32 teams have valuations of more than $2 billion dollars. A possible Texas NHL expansion franchise will cost $2 billion, Philadelphia is number 7 but the real surprise in the Sportico list is the small market Edmonton Oilers business, a franchise that deals in Canadian money, which is about 72 cents US it comes in at number eight. The other two New York City area teams, the New Jersey Devils and the New York Islanders round out the top 10 and are at nine and 10.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
https://evanweiner1.substack.com
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
