People walk past the Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment headquarters in Toronto on Sept. 18. Rogers Communications Inc. acquired Bell’s 37.5-per cent stake in (MLSE) for $4.7-billion.Yader Guzman/The Globe and Mail
Sports has always been reducible to numbers, but the sort of numbers have changed. Batting averages are out. Ledgers are in.
That’s the reason most people were getting worked up on Wednesday morning about a boardroom shuffle at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. Bell is out, Rogers is in and oh man, have you seen that number?
Rogers Communications Inc. is buying out Bell’s 37.5-per-cent share of MLSE for $4.7-billion, giving it 75-per-cent ownership of the sports conglomerate.
Even by today’s out-of-whack standard, a total valuation of $12.5-billion sounds like a lot. If you didn’t know better, you’d assume Toronto teams must be really good.
Reading the semiotics of news releases, Toronto now has two principal sports owners – Rogers heir Edward Rogers, and his telecom CEO, Tony Staffieri. Call them the accounting fist inside the inherited glove.
Digging into those documents, there’s stuff that Bay Street observers will want to hear more about – Who are these “private investors” they refer to? What’s this about debt leverage? How exactly will they surface value for shareholders?
And for sports fans, what exciting new developments should they be looking out for?
Nothing. There’s nothing useful in this for them.
Yesterday, MLSE’s teams were a collection of middling content producers existing in a magical media market with inelastic demand.
Tomorrow, the year after and – God help you if your investment is emotional – 10 years from now, they will continue to be so.
You could charge Taylor Swift prices to the Maple Leafs all year long, then have the team stage a mass retirement before the final game of the opening playoff round and the city would erupt in rage. But there would still be a waiting list the next year.
If I could buy into that sort of consumer hysteria, I would, too.
No one person can change that. No one person with enough money to buy it all should want to.
As a sports owner, Mr. Rogers, 55, is the human embodiment of the median. He hasn’t done anything to make people warm to him, but nor is he a chaotic force. He sort of just is.
This is where you’d like to able to tell a fun, representative story about what Mr. Rogers is like behind the scenes. That time he did X and the guy who was coaching at the time still talks about it. You can tell them about Mr. Rogers’s soon-to-be former partner, Larry Tanenbaum.
There are no stories like that about Mr. Rogers. Sometimes he comes to games – not often – and exists there for two or three hours. He showed up when they were giving out championship rings and looked as though he was meeting the Raptors for the first time.
People who work for the teams he controls speak of him respectfully, but without feeling, which is unusual for sports types. They love bending the knee to extreme wealth.
It doesn’t seem to be that they don’t like the guy. It’s that they don’t know him. Not even a little.
Mr. Rogers is equally responsible (or not responsible) for a lot of good and bad things that have happened on the Toronto sports scene over the past 10, 15 years.
If you liked the bat flip and the 2015 Jays team, that was Mr. Rogers. If you don’t like the club’s new dictator-for-life hiring policy, that’s him, too.
He signed off on Raptors president Masai Ujiri, who won an NBA championship. Then he dickered with his partners over giving Mr. Ujiri a huge raise, and he hasn’t won anything since.
As an aggregate, Toronto teams haven’t been amazing during Mr. Rogers’s time in charge/partial charge, but nor have they been bad. They are mostly okay.
Okay ownership, okay teams, masochistically committed fans – that’s a précis of the Toronto scene.
Despite a lot of talk about moving forward with a single, cohesive vision, that will continue. It’s good for revenue and, let’s face it, Toronto doesn’t like winners. It likes teams that might win, who they can complain about when they don’t. It’s a regional kink.
If you don’t think Mr. Rogers will be a great owner, then ask yourself: Who is?
The first name that leaps to mind is New England Patriots principal Robert Kraft. He’s got the numbers.
Mr. Kraft isn’t perceived as great because he’s a visionary. He’s great because he hired a guy who hired a guy who hired a guy who tapped Tom Brady for the 199th pick in the NFL draft. Then Mr. Kraft put on a sweet, blue, pinstriped suit and started getting photographed at games.
That employee of the employee of the employee takes a linebacker instead of a quarterback and Kraft is just another bum with a billion dollars in the bank.
At any level above the ice/field/court, sports isn’t science or art. It’s luck. Those who tell you different are trying to sell you tickets.
The only appreciable sports effect of this deal will be focusing the city’s frustration on one man. I’m not sure Mr. Rogers appreciates yet how much cover he got from a corporatized structure.
Whenever things go wrong now – and they will always be going wrong – it’s the cheapskate on top’s fault. Even if the cheapskate on top is spending close to the maximum amount anybody spends on a hockey/basketball/baseball team.
You can’t yell too long or too hard at the players because that would eventually sour you on the whole enterprise. Who wants to root for people they hate?
But the owner is an automatic target lock. You can fire on him all day long and never tire of the exercise.
Trading deeds at MLSE will not change its direction. None of these teams will get better or worse because someone decides to spring for a new bank of cryotherapy pods. They will be as good as their players.
The only thing that changed on Wednesday was a couple of numbers – a new dollar valuation on the country’s most observed sports property and a new No. 1 villain for Toronto sports fans to blame.