Forbes has released its list of the fifty most valuable franchises in sports. Football teams dominate the top spots–European football teams.
Real Madrid ($3.4B), Barcelona ($3.2B), and Manchester United ($2.8B) wins, places, and shows. The Steinbrenners’s New York Yankees ($2.5B), at fourth on the list, comes in first among American franchises. Jerry Jones’s Dallas Cowboys ($2.2B) ranks first among thirty NFL teams on the Forbes list.
Forbes estimates the New York Knicks as the NBA franchise worth the most at $1.4 billion. But the Clippers, the second most valuable basketball franchise in Los Angeles, just fetched a bid of $2 billion. The magazine puts the troubled team’s worth at sightly more than a quarter of that amount. Might Forbes want to recalibrate?
Just one NHL franchise, the Toronto Maple Leafs, finds a spot in the top fifty. The magazine values the Original Six franchise at $1.15 billion even thought the team sold for $1.32 billion two years ago.
Though European football shut out American football at the top of the rankings, NFL teams dominated the rest of the richest. The list excluded just two NFL franchises, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Oakland Raiders. Put another way, two-thirds of the most valuable franchises in sports compete in one league.
“The average team in the top 50 is worth $1.34 billion, up 8% over last year,” Kurt Badenhausen writes. “There are 38 teams worth $1 billion versus 33 last year. There weren’t any teams worth $2 billion three years ago; now there are six. Minimum entry for the top 50 is $856 million (AC Milan) compared to $586 million four years ago.”
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