Bid to buy Amazin’s
fan from Long Island, has an estimated net worth of $13.6 billion, per Forbes, and is the favorite to own the club. He has close ties to Mets special assistant to the GM, Omar Minaya, and former manager Bobby Valentine, and can outbid other groups that have made it into the second round of bidding.
Cohen’s $2.6 billion deal to buy the Mets fell through in the 11th hour in February over control issues. The original terms of the Cohen agreement had Fred Wilpon as controlling partner for the next five years from the onset. The Wilpons hired the investment bank Allen & Co. to oversee the process shortly after the deal with Cohen collapsed.
“We’ll be moving forward to find a new transaction,” Jeff Wilpon said in a February statement, the last time the Mets publicly spoke about the sale. “We will not be giving details or updates on the timeline or process until we are prepared to make a public announcement.”
One of the next steps in the Mets sale process is getting three-quarters majority approval from Major League Baseball owners. Cohen, as part owner of the team, has already received a level of clearance from the league. In this way, he is steps ahead of other interested groups, in regards to league approval.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred supported the Cohen transaction in December, before the deal collapsed in February. Manfred then said it was “a pretty standardlooking transaction in terms of path-to-control and transition.” A couple of months later, Manfred confirmed the deal was dead. The commissioner supported the Wilpons and said, “The assertion that the transaction fell apart because of something that the Wilpons did is completely and utterly unfair.”
The group involving Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon bought the team in 1980. The Wilpons sold minority shares of the club in 2012 after the fallout of their losses in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. This marks the first time in 40 years that a New York based MLB franchise has been on the open market.