San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Team owners? Who needs ’ em?
While the Giants are busy firing and laying off employees, I have a suggestion for one more position they can easily eliminate.
No, not the team mascot. Lou Seal is not my cup of blubber, but he is a perennial MVP candidate — Most Valuable Pinniped.
The position the Giants should eliminate is owner. Charles Johnson is the principal owner, with a stake of about 26%. The other 74% of team ownership can also be pinkslipped. Think of the parking spaces that would be freed up.
Nothing personal against Johnson and his team, but the Giants are as good a place as any to launch my proposed program to eliminate the traditional team owner.
The only function of a team owner is to siphon off some of the profits for his/ her personal use and amusement. Whatever cut they take is money that cannot be spent on improving or maintaining the team.
Imagine if 100% of the Giwho ants’ profits were used on the Giants? Same goes for any team in any sport. Why not cut out the middleman?
Here’s my plan.
Buy out every owner. Give them a fair market price. Where do we get the money to do that? Good question. We get it from the fans. Ask every Warriors fan, say, to kick in $ 100 per ownership share ( limit: 10 shares per fan) until we have enough for a down payment, then we’ll pay off the rest of our purchase by borrowing against the worth of the team.
For your $ 100, you get a certificate and a “Giants owner” Tshirt. You’ll get no dividends or perks, just pride.
Is this fair to the present owners? Well, let’s take the Giants. The ownership group bought the team in 1993 for $ 100 million and it’s worth $ 3.1 billion, according to Forbes, so the owners have already made $ 3 billion on appreciation alone, plus a cut of annual profits.
Once the fans own the team,
will run it?
The several thousand new owners will vote on a list of candidates, and the top three votegetters will form a threeperson committee that runs the team. These three will be paid a salary, and one or all can be replaced at any time by a majority vote of the stockholder fans. If you like your present owner, you can vote him or her in. Joe Lacob could stay with the Warriors, if he’s voted in, and is willing to work fairly cheap, with no cut of profits. Now we’ve got an ownership group with two advantages over the old system.
One, the bosses are now accountable. Under the present system, a bad owner is forever. See: Chris Cohan, John Fisher.
Two, under my system, all profit goes right back into the team. Once the tab is paid for buying out the old owner, your team might have too much money. Solution: Raise the pay of the ballpark workers, lower ticket prices, donate to charity — mix and match.