Is possible Earthquakes sale part of a scheme to save the A's?
Photo by Noah Salzman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Field of Schemes* website contends that the A's are in trouble financially, and that selling the Earthquakes (same owner) may be part of a series of maneuvers to keep the ex-Oakland franchise afloat.
Oaklandish A’s owner John Fisher, as has been covered here ad infinitum, has gotten himself between a rock and a hard place: He’s burned his bridges in Oakland, his team’s temporary home in Sacramento is not working out well at all, and while he has about $600 million in public cash and tax breaks waiting for him in Las Vegas, that’s still around $1 billion shy of what he needs to build a stadium there so his team doesn’t have to play in a vacant lot.
Most of Fisher’s family wealth is tied up in Gap stock, which is not doing great itself, leaving his only assets the A’s themselves — which Fisher has been trying and mostly failing to sell minority shares in — and the San Jose Earthquakes MLS team.
Even if you haven’t already read social media this morning, you probably see where this is going:
San Jose Earthquakes owner John Fisher has hired an investment bank to sell his MLS club, according to multiple people familiar with the billionaire’s plans.
In January, the Earthquakes ranked 20th in Sportico’s MLS team valuations at $600 million.
It is certainly possible that Fisher could sell the Earthquakes, take the $600 million in proceeds (less capital gains taxes on the profits from the $20 million he paid for the team in 2007) and his $600 million in Nevada subsidies and $100 million in Aramark concessions contract money and a $300 million Goldman Sachs loan and use that to hire contractors to build his vaporarmadillo, then hope like hell it doesn’t go over budget and that he doesn’t have to then sell the A’s to pay for his stadium’s gold watch chain.
Or he could just be trying to keep enough funding balls in the air to convince MLB not to issue him an ultimatum to sell the team to someone who has an actual place for it to play. Not that MLB seems eager to do so — his fellow owners just put Fisher on their executive committee, after all, which isn’t the kind of thing you do with someone you’re about to drum out of the club — but half of raising money is pretending you already have a financial plan, so maybe there’s a method to Fisher’s madness. Or just madness all the way down, either remains possible!
Read the whole thing here.
* Field of Schemes.com is the companion website to Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit, by Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause.
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