Every once and a while we like to check out our web queries to see what questions you guys googled to wind up at this site. Well, it appears that this month one of you found this site by googling “How much does it cost to buy the Mets?” We’re not exactly sure why you’d want to buy the Mets, but to the lazy billionaire that hit up Google instead of hiring an analyst, we’ll try to answer the question.
In March Forbes valued the Mets at $747 million, which is a crapton of money, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. You see, Forbes’ value is just an estimate. Only the owners of the Mets, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, know the true value. However, you can guestimate how much the team costs because they tried to sell part of the team to David Einhorn in May. The sale, eventually fell through, was for a minority stake and was worth $200 million.
The key to figuring out how much the Mets are worth is figuring out how much of a stake that $200 million would have bought. Business Insider reports that it was for 1/3 of the the team, which would mean that the team was worth about $600 million. (In which case the Forbes estimate is WAY off and the Wilpons are in deep, deep doo-doo.) Of course, a minority stake is up to 49 percent, so the team could be worth as little as $400 million and change (In which case, everyone in here in TFA will start scraping together our pennies and we’ll buy the team.) But Forbes thinks that the deal with Einhorn would have priced the team at $783 million, meaning that Einhorn was trying to buy about 25 percent of the team. (The smaller the amount that Einhorn would have bought, the more the team is worth.)
Our guess? The team’s probably worth around $720-730 million. Their value has probably gone down some since the end of their poor season. Of course, all they have to do is find a sucker to overpay for part of the team and BOOM! the team’s a cash cow again.
Sources: Forbes, Business Insider, Photo via David Berkowitz on Flickr
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