Adding Up Costs of Behind Closed Doors

The value of playing games and undertaking sport behind closed doors is that it provides a sense of a return to reality.
It also delivers value for sponsors and broadcasters, protecting those vital streams of income.
There are costs though, especially in the risk to players and those involved in catching COVID-19 and passing it on, but also in the financial arena.
As part of the negotiation between team owners and players in Major League Baseball, we now have a sense of just how great they are in the professional sphere.
The New York Yankees and the LA Dodgers are two of the biggest teams in the sport and they have both published figures suggesting that by playing a shortened season of only half the scheduled 162 games per team, they will incur losses of €290 million and €215 million each.
Over an average of the entire professional League, the losses would average out at €591,000 per game.
The financial numbers in Baseball are vastly different from any sport we have in Ireland but are interesting to consider nonetheless in the light of the global pandemic and the impact on sport at the highest level.
The latest media rights deal for the broadcast of the season across four different stations was estimated at $5.1 Billion running from 2018 through to 2028.
Protecting that is an obvious priority hence the willingness to absorb the losses of staging games in front of empty stadia.
The main cost in the sport is wages to the players with each of the Yankees, the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs having an annual wage bill in excess of $200 million.
The biggest single challenge to any business looking to survive in the crisis is meeting the cost of paying staff when there is such a dramatic downturn in revenue.
When the sums are so big across such a small number of key employees that makes the negotiation ever more important.
In a number of professional leagues, this negotiation over a restart to seasons has been handled in public statements that are so tone-deaf to the crisis unfolding across the real world that it risks permanent damage to the relevance of the highest earners.
It will be interesting to see how these negotiations play out across ‘America’s game.’