Why We Stink: How Nepo Babies and Wealthfare Cheats Wrecked New York Sports, Part IX.

 ...and don't worry, the Grande Finale! (There's only so much moaning and groaning even I can do!) But here it is:

Once it became possible to make a fortune in the sports business with no known capabilities in either sports or business, the quality of ownership inevitably declined. Nowhere is this more inescapable than in New York.

No need to have a financial wizard like Charlie Dolan in charge of the Knicks, the Rangers, and Madison Square Garden anymore; a superannuated adolescent like James Dolan, living out his fantasy of fronting for the Eagles, will do just fine. 

No need for a George Steinbrenner, with his Barnum-like instincts for showmanship and a maniacal desire to win; pleasant, distracted Hal Steinbrenner can do the job from Tampa. John Mara is a long way from his roguish grandfather, Tim Mara, a teenaged newsie-turned-bookie, who supposedly won the Giants in a hand of poker. 

Robert Wood Johnson IV, heir to Johnson & Johnson, owns the Jets with his younger brother, who will likely succeed him. Jeff Wilpon would likely have succeeded his father as principal owner of the Mets, save that he was so inept that even his fellow nepo babies rebelled, and insisted that Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz sell the team before he wrecked it.

 

Our other owners are all venture capitalists by trade, most of whom seem more interested in real estate and finance than sports (or any other real business). Hence Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov buys and flips the Nets, and Steve Cohen launches an effort to get a casino in Flushing, immediately after buying the Mets.

Sports has become simply another pillaging opportunity for such magnates of today’s paper capitalism. They make this abundantly clear at the ballpark, where all save the Yankees—for obvious reasons—have sold naming rights to faceless corporations. Where ads are stuck on the players’ jerseys, and more ads dinned into the ears of fans at brain-splitting decibel levels, blasting away any remaining chance of quiet or conversation.

These are owners who, with a few exceptions, have only the faintest, passing interest in the sports their clubs actually play. They look, instead, at expanding their footprint into similar “entertainments,” that can be synergistically leveraged to create bigger killings in real estate and finance.

(Just take a look at these amazing, power faces...

...the visages of men who built inherited empires!

And, to be fair, some who actually are first-class grifters in their own right!)

Hence Cohen’s lust for a casino—and hence the Yankees, after failing for years to develop the “Soccer City” complex they wanted to build at the Bronx’s Harlem River Yards for the NYCFC soccer team they partly own…are putting up a 25,000-seat stadium in Willetts Point. It is expected to cost the city $516 million in tax abatements over the next 50 years.

(Please note, too, how different the finished products of these Wonder Stadiums and their surrounding neighborhoods look from the bait-and-switch "models" on which they are sold.)

Harrison, New Jersey, has already built a “soccer-specific” stadium for the Red Bulls—who do pay taxes—after a bitter court fight. Soon, no doubt, we will begin to hear that a separate facilities are needed for the NJ/NY Gotham FC team in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), or the New York Liberty, in the WNBA. 

The possibilities are almost endless. Climate change will doubtless lead to demands for new stadiums and arenas that are sturdier, elevated, domed—and climate-controlled. The next round of construction will begin in a few years, with the heirs of heirs of heirs of our sports owners demanding and getting what could be the last buildings left standing in this coastal city.

 

But hey, when it's all over, we will have proved that wildly subsidized sports teams and their billionaire owners can con us here, just as much as they can con them anywhere!