Quote Originally Posted by JoesphNdo View Post
If we buy down oso and get a DP, Awesome, I hadn't heard that

But just to be clear - this is *not* how businesses look at finance. Our growth is completely divorced from our spend. It's almost completely coincidental.

Imagine an investor opens a restaurant in some crap hole town, and they buy the building because it's dirt cheap. Over many years they have had a series of managers, all utterly incompetent except one. They have flushed money down the toilet, outspending every nearby restaurant, while not even coming close to even matching their success

Coincidentally, at the same time, the town discovers oil and a huge influx of people come in. Suddenly, this building is prime real estate, and the owners have made magnitudes more than their investment

That does not mean they look at their manager flushing millions of dollars down the toilet and think 'but look how much money they made'. They absolutely, still, will demand this manager shows them a positive return on that spending. If they prove incapable of doing so, they either move on, or cut the spending. They don't just not sweat the money they're throwing away. The best, most successful, restaurants in town are spending a fraction of what we are.

In other words, operating the restaurant has lost them money. It's just by coincidence a part of their investment has ballooned in value. But that doesn't mean operating the restaurant won't be seen as something that has lost them money. We are that restaurant. Operations wise, we've lost money, even if the investment overall is in the plus, because they could have run us like Chicago and gotten 99.99% of the return

So all that is to say I just don't believe they'll have a YOLO attitude to our spending as they buy another yacht, because the spending didn't get them their return. And I truly do not believe we have anything close to the capital to say "Yeah, see those tens of millions we spent on the DPs I promised would change the world that flopped while we finished dead last? We want you to put that money in a shredder. Also, can we have another eight figure injection? I promise this time it'll totally work". I just can't see that pitch landing. If it does, man, I have to find a way to get a job at MLSE because there's no way I'd authorize another cent to goto Bill Manning at this point and I'd love to work in a place that cares that little about results

Anyway, we'll see. I just don't see what opening a DP slot without losing the financial obligation nets us, but maybe MLSE are in it for another money black hole and have two big DPs in the budget on top of what we're already spending. I'd love to be wrong. I didn't think they'd spend what they did on Insigne, so I may well be wrong. I just don't see it.
And yet a sports franchise is not a restaurant. They are not typically considered money making endeavour's. They are more like a house than any kind of actual service business. All of the operational costs are more like maintenance than anything else. Profit is likely only to be realized at the sale of the property. It is part of the pyramid scheme/real estate scam story of MLS franchise value. Most sports teams are not the Leafs. Most of the losses are expected as the cost of doing business. if sports teams were run with year over year operating profit as the goal, 90% of franchises would be bankrupt. Constant investment funds sports. See things like Wrexham, where the fans were paying both for tickets and donating money to pay wages for the team and staff, as the team was never profitable on it own.