The Curious Case of Professional Sports Owners

The world of sports owners is one of the most curious, conniving, confusing worlds out there.  It's a world full of deceit.  You go to sleep one night with a professional football team in your city, and wake up in the morning without one.  It's a world where your team gets bought by a new owner and fills you with hope about the future, only to pack up your team and move them to Oklahoma City.  (Really, OKLAHOMA CITY!! (Which actually turned out to be a pretty good idea in hindsight, although Seattle never deserved that).  It's a world where selfish, negligent owners blow their teams apart and then hold them in a state of limbo.  Why do these horrible things happen to perfectly fine cities?  Two reasons.  Selfishness, and money, which actually go together quite well.

A childhood dream of mine is to own, and/or manage my own NBA team.  You want to build a contender from nothing, bring championships to a city that doesn't have one.  Be a trailblazer, a dream owner that the city can be proud of, one willing to do anything for the betterment of their team, and not themselves. Make the game more enjoyable for the fans, and not the owners pockets.  Unfortunately this type of owner is extremely rare, and by rare I mean borderline nonexistent.  But why? Consistently  you hear stories about greedy owners, whether it be milking every cent out of a fan base, holding a city hostage by threatening to move a team if the city doesn't give them a new one, or the worst, just being cheap and consistently putting an awful product on the field/court (See Los Angeles Clippers).  What drives owners to be like this?  Is there something we, the fan base are missing?  Or is it just part of the job that as soon as you become an owner, any good in your personality disappears.

Owners, owners, owners. They are all millionaires, some billionaires, and seem to be the biggest penny pinchers out there.  Now I understand that to make money, you have to be responsible with your spending, but these people take it to another level.  A fan will pay, let's say, $40 for a ticket, and that's being cheap.  Then when they get to the game, $15 to park. $7 for a beer or soft drink, and another $8 for a burger and fries. Add in gas money and it cost about $100 for one person to go to a game. The problem here, is that usually a person doesn't go to a game by themselves.  If they are bringing a family, it's a small fortune being spent just to come to one sporting event.  I understand that you can hike up prices in a stadium because the fan has no where else to go to spend money, but have some respect, my goodness.  The worst part about this is that this isn't the worst part. Even if you go through all this, there is a fair chance that the next time you want to go see your team play, they wont be there anymore.

Owners are the most hypocritical people in the world.  All of them, millionaires and billionaires.  They complain when they are taxed high, and say that they shouldn't have to take their hard earned money and have it "redistributed" to the less prosperous.  Then they buy a sports team, and expect the city that they are located in to figure out a way to take the public's money in an effort to subsidize them a new stadium for their private teams so that they don't have pay for it.  OK.

Why?  It's because they've been enabled by other cities in the past.  Cities give in, and present ridiculous offers to spoiled owners, which in turn force other cities to do the same, at risk of the fan base revolting if the city doesn't do what the owner wants.

Owners! Stop the madness.  Just be a good owner.  You want to make money, put a good product on the court/field.  Amazing thing is, that there seems to be a positive correlation between team performance, revenue, and popularity. Quit robbing fans and cities out of their money and hijacking teams.  We, the fans, would greatly appreciate it.