Last Updated on 08/30/2022 by てんしょく飯
Art Moreno’s announcement of his intention to sell the Angels came as an unexpected surprise to MLB insiders.
■Owners announced that they were selling themselves.
However, given the deteriorating relationship with the city of Anaheim, the home of the Angels, and the lack of active interest from his wife and children in the management of the team, it is not surprising that Moreno was concerned about the future of the team.
An assessment by Forbes, an economics magazine, puts the Angels’ value at $2.2 billion as of March 2022. This is the ninth-highest valuation among all 30 teams.
Moreno once joined the ranks of the wealthy when he sold his outdoor advertising company, Outdoor Systems, for $8 billion. It is quite possible that Moreno has a keen sense of market trends, analyzes the environment surrounding him from a manager’s point of view, and decides that now is a good time to let it go.
But why is the Angels’ value as a baseball team so high, despite their poor record, with a losing record in seven of the 10 seasons prior to last season?
Apart from the general phenomenon that the sports industry is recession-proof, there are four main reasons: high attendance, high broadcasting rights fees, the size of the market, and the supply-demand relationship.
Regarding the first point, “high attendance,” the Angels have had one of the best attendance records in the Major Leagues, with annual attendance exceeding 3 million for 17 consecutive years from 2003, when Moreno acquired the Angels, to 2019, before the “Corona Disaster. Since one of the important sources of revenue for each team is admission fees, the Angels’ high attendance means that their business base is stable.
The second point, “high broadcasting rights fees,” refers to the fact that the Angels signed a 20-year contract with FOX Sports in 2011 for a total of approximately $3 billion (an average of $150 million per year).
The broadcasting rights fees, which are among the highest in baseball along with the Dodgers and Yankees, represent half of the Angels’ annual revenue of about $300 million and contribute to the value of the team.
As for the “size of the trade area,” the key is the “Los Angeles metropolitan area,” centered on the city of Los Angeles, which has a population of approximately 330,000 and is about an hour’s drive from the city of Anaheim. The fact that the population of the region is the second largest in the U.S. at approximately 14 million and is expected to continue to grow suggests that even small cities may be able to capture an even larger market depending on their ingenuity.
Furthermore, the fact that the number of major league baseball teams is limited to 30 while there are many who wish to purchase a team gives sellers an advantage in terms of supply and demand.
Thus, when considering a baseball team as an investment, it is only natural that the Angels’ market value is high because of their stable management and development potential, even if they do not win or lose every season.
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