It’s a popular saying that good ownership is the most important competitive advantage in sports, but to affirm that you only need to look at bad ownership, something New York teams have been plagued by. It seems like Knicks fans may never get Jim Dolan out of ownership, but their baseball counterpart Mets fans just got a massive win with the Wilpon family agreeing to sell the team to a previous stakeholder Steve Cohen and investment firm Sterling Partners. The team released a statement on their Twitter account announcing the deal, but there has yet to be official comments made by both sides of the deal which was reportedly finalized for $2.475 billion, a North American record.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is one of the few open cheerleaders of the deal, seeing dollar signs no doubt. “Major markets generally have an outsized effect on the economics of the game, and I think it’s important for us to be strong in our major markets,” he said. “I think that a change in ownership at the Mets is an opportunity to make that franchise as strong as it can possibly be, and I think over the long haul it’ll be something that will be good for the game.”
The Wilpons have been an incredibly dysfunctional organizational group, and it has been reflected in the Mets’ lack of success with the team floundering over the past decade and intermittently over the course of the Wilpons reign over them. There is still a lot of work to be done for the Mets, but fans are hoping that when the deal is finalized, a new sun will shine over the organization.
