King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Forbes explains how keeping a team out of L.A. was one of the most inspired of Paul Tagliabue's policies.

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Sept. 5, 2006 | The current issue of Forbes has the magazine's annual team valuation report, which should be called the Read This and Then Read It Again Whenever One of Your Local Teams Starts Demanding Public Money to Build Its New Arena or Stadium Report.

Catchy, don't you think? Forbes does it for all of the major North American sports.

The 2006 report, written by Kurt Badenhausen, Michael K. Ozanian and Maya Roney, says the average NFL team is worth $898 million, an increase of 212 percent over 1998, when Forbes began calculating team values for the league.

"Look at it this way," the authors write. "Football team values have increased 11 times more than the S&P 500 since 1998. Profitability? In 2005, the average NFL team posted $30.8 million in operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), vs. $5.3 million in 1997."

Citing wealth creation as the chief accomplishment of just-retired commissioner Paul Tagliabue's 17-year tenure, the authors note that while booming TV contract values have filled the league's coffers, "the gravy has come from the 17 new stadiums that were built during Tagliabue's tenure."

And that doesn't count new stadiums for the Arizona Cardinals, the Indianapolis Colts and the New York Jets and Giants -- three stadiums total -- opening this year or in the next few. Or massively remodeled stadiums in Chicago and Green Bay.

One of the best things Tagliabue has done, Forbes says, is reduce the gap between the richest and poorest teams: "He has accomplished this by cleverly leaving the Los Angeles market devoid of a franchise since 1995, which has given small and mid-market teams with shoddy ownership, such as the Cincinnati Bengals and Arizona Cardinals, the leverage they needed to coax taxpayers into building them new stadiums."

Within 10 years or so, I bet every team in the NFL except the Packers and Bears will be playing in a stadium built since Tagliabue took the commissioner's post in 1989. By that time, the teams who got new parks in Tagliabue's first decade -- Atlanta, Baltimore, Carolina, Jacksonville, that crowd -- will be way past due for even newer ones if they don't have them already.

Think the NFL will put a team in Los Angeles someday? Or will it keep the nation's second-largest market as a monster under the bed? That's what it's been for cities with teams whose turn it is to get a new playhouse, because hey, the team might move to L.A.

Next page: The amount of value a team derives from its stadium is the main thing it can control