Evan Weiner, Sports Columnist and Journalist
The Business & Politics of Sports

When MCNSPORTS’ CEO Marc Brunet announced in March 2007 Mr. Weiner’s coming on board as a sports journalist, he said, "Evan's knowledge in the business of sports is second to none. Not only will he be working and writing on several projects with MCNSPORTS, he will also be adding very exciting insight to the world of sports. This will allow every sport fan in the world to make sense of why and how certain business decisions are made. These decisions have and will eventually impact how their favorite sport is played. Having more options and diversified sports content in our ever growing portfolio for all of our viewers to enjoy is very important to us.”

Evan Weiner was a contributing columnist for New York Newsday (2001-05); AM-New York, the New York Press, the Bergen (New Jersey) Record, the Philadelphia Metro, Washington Examiner, Orlando Sentinel, Rhode Island's Sports Journal, and for The Chicago Tribune's Spanish Hoy! newspapers in NY, Chicago and LA between 2002.

Mr. Weiner has also appeared on programs on the former WBIS, Channel 31 (New York, NY), RNN (New York), the History Channel with Al Michaels and Frank Deford, as well as ABCNews Now's Politics Live TV show with Sam Donaldson, and the BBC Radio Documentary Sports and Sponsorship.

Evan also lectures at colleges and universities about the business and politics of sports, including the globalization of North American sports and how technology is changing sports. His book, The Business and Politics of Sports, has been critically acclaimed by academic journals and is used as part of a number of sports business management courses at schools throughout the United States.

• Westwood One piece on the Flagstaff United School District actions on Pay to Play
• Westwood One piece on Big Time College Sports
• Westwood One piece on Rupert Murdoch and Advertsing on E-bay
• Evan talking about politicians deciding to spend money for the public good, necessary infrastructure, or for sports stadiums
• Congressional hearings on the NCAA

Is the NHL a trendsetter?

Washington Examiner, Thursday, February 3, 2005 1:28 AM EST

Sports commentary by Evan Weiner

Just in case you haven't noticed, there is a seismic shift taking place in the sports world and its aftershocks may be extraordinary. People better get used to long work stoppages in sports because of a fight over money.

The five-month old National Hockey League lockout has ushered in a new age of sports reality and sports economics. Owners have decided to flex their collective muscle and drive down salaries and the NHL is the first on line. The National Basketball Association could lockout its players next July 1 and Major League Baseball may do the same in 2007.

The National Football League has an owner-friendly salary cap system and is also at the crossroads. The players want changes in the system and it already has become a sticking point in preliminary collective bargaining negotiations.

The NHL lockout was caused by owners who could not say 'No' to players' financial demands. Now the owners want the players to protect them from making bad financial decisions. If NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman doesn't get a salary cap, Edmonton's owners are ready to suspend operations and other owners may declare bankruptcy.

In the 1990s, as the salaries increased, the owners were able to cover the costs with national TV deals, expansion fees (the NHL went from 21 to 30 teams), a rise in ticket prices, new buildings opening with more luxury boxes and club seats and monies from new technologies like cable and satellite TV.

In 2004, all of that enhanced revenue was gone. Ticket prices are too high for the average person. NHL owners want cost certainty because their revenues aren't going up as quickly as the players' salaries are.

But does cost certainty work?

Apparently it doesn't in the NBA. In 1999, after an owners lockout, the players and owners came up with a new revenue sharing system, which is not working as well as Commissioner David Stern and his owners want. Part of the problem was caused by a loss of a significant chunk of cash from TV rights as the present deal is worth far less than the previous deal. Stern will push to limit guaranteed contracts down and raise the luxury tax as a way to control costs. That push will lead to a July 1 lockout.

If Major League Baseball is played in 2007, it may depend on the kind of deal that the hockey players accept. Major League Baseball owners have been handing out huge contracts this off-season and it has caught the eye of Pittsburgh Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy. McClatchy is blaming his fellow owners, not the players, for overspending. That is why McClatchy is rooting for the NHL. An NHL owners victory may go a long way in determining just how far baseball owners are willing to going an effort to achieve their own cost certainty. The NHL maybe the least watched of the four major sports, but its lockout will have major ramifications on the other three.

Evan Weiner is a radio commentator on the business of sports.

Cable helps Mets reach for the stars
by Evan Weiner

New York Newsday, February 3, 2005

'Meet the Mets, Meet the Mets!" should be the name of a new television series, because the New York Metropolitans are hotter than a reality TV show - especially when you consider what's going on behind the scenes.

As everybody knows, when you produce a TV show, you gotta have stars, which is why the Mets have shelled out almost $200 million to bring in Pedro Martinez, Carlos Beltran and re-up Kris Benson, or rather his wife Anna, a popular Howard Stern guest. (Last December she was voted FHM magazine's sexiest baseball wife.) How convenient that Anna Benson also wants to be the star of her own reality-TV series.

The Mets ceased being just an overpriced baseball team last spring when owner Fred Wilpon terminated his cable-TV contract with Charles Dolan and Cablevision's Madison Square Garden Network and decided to put together his own deal. In 2006, Wilpon, along with Time Warner and Comcast, will debut a Mets regional sports network.

Ironically, this year Dolan will be the beneficiary of the Mets' hiring Martinez and Beltran, because his network figures to pick up a significant number of viewers - at least early in the season - and he can raise his advertising rates accordingly.

Dolan won't get any additional fees from cable subscribers. He gets that money whether one person or 500,000 people watch Mets games on MSG or Fox Sports New York. It doesn't matter because the Federal Communications Commission and Congress won't let cable subscribers choose what channels they do or don't want - and that won't change in George W. Bush's second term.

Cable TV makes strange bedfellows because Wilpon's new television partners are involved with rival baseball teams. Time Warner owns the Atlanta Braves, the Mets' National League East nemesis, while Comcast Cable is TV partners with the Philadelphia Phillies, another perennial competitor. Does that mean that Time Warner, which now has a significant interest in the Mets, wouldn't mind seeing the Braves' domination finally end? After all, the better the Mets are, the more advertising money flows into Time Warner's wallets.

Comcast doesn't own the Phillies - it just cablecasts some of their games - but it is a full partner with the Tribune Company's Chicago Cubs, the White Sox, the Bulls and the Blackhawks in a Chicago regional sports network. What would be better for Comcast's coffers? A stronger Mets team, a winning Cubs team or a tougher Phillies team?

At least George Steinbrenner doesn't have that problem with the YES Network. He has sole star power all right, but he only has distribution partnerships with Comcast and Time Warner. Still, that brings up an interesting question. What if Steinbrenner's costs become out of line for Comcast and Time Warner and the two companies, as owners of the new Mets network, decide to pull Steinbrenner off their systems? That would kill his golden goose and probably threaten the Yankees' dominance.

Oh, what a tangled web.

These days Major League Baseball is less about sports and more like a series of complex business transactions. Take New York's second or third most compelling team (depending on who you root for), the Boston Red Sox. The Sox, partly owned by The New York Times, are also in the cable-TV business, thanks to the Red Sox New England Sports Network, one of Comcast's offerings in New England.

As the Mets are about ready to enter the stratosphere, Fred Wilpon will join George Steinbrenner in acting like a New York baseball owner with money to spend. The Mets organization needs big names, big stars, to move its product in this media market - something Steinbrenner learned a long time ago.

So, life won't get any easier for small-market baseball franchises like Kris Benson's old team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. They will still have to find talented young (cheap) players, develop them and hope they can hang onto them for five years before trading them to teams like the Yankees and Mets for future prospects. And, if you are Steinbrenner and Wilpon, who needs scouting? They have cable TV and can buy just about any player they want. Especially if they need to give their "reality baseball show" a boost.

Evan Weiner is a commentator on "The Business of Sports."

The West Side stadium proposal doesn't seem to be the type of issue that would resonate either upstate or out on Long Island as there is no statewide referendum planned for the Manhattan project - and nobody outside the five boroughs will be voting in the next New York City mayoral race.

But there I was in a Cortland hotel recently, eating breakfast, when a commercial came on a Syracuse television station asking local residents to let Mayor Michael Bloomberg and their legislators know that they want no part of the West Side stadium plan. Later that day I ended up in Niagara Falls and there was the same commercial on a Buffalo TV station.

Opposition to the stadium is being partially funded by Cablevision CEO Charles Dolan and his son James and their subsidiary, Madison Square Garden. Obviously a new facility suitable for National Football League games and other big events - especially if the roof is retractable - would compete with their 36-year-old arena. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson is ready to invest $800 million into the $1.4-billion stadium. The state will pick up $300 million and the city will pay the other $300 million. But even that $1.4 billion figure is not set in stone. So New York's taxpayers could be looking at a higher bill down the line.

The West Side stadium, which plays a big part in the city's bid to host the 2012 Olympics, is on a wish list that includes getting George Steinbrenner a new Yankee Stadium, Fred Wilpon a new Shea Stadium, Bruce Ratner a new Brooklyn Arena for the New Jersey Nets and a renovated Madison Square Garden for the Dolans (although they claim they'd pay for that themselves, no doubt from cable fees).

As the 2005 mayoral race heats up, the West Side stadium has become a bone of contention between those who claim building the facility is really corporate welfare and those who say it will spur the kind of economic development that, according to Bloomberg, will bring about $12 billion into the city and create 135,000 jobs. Those kinds of figures, if true, would be great, but in actuality stadiums and arenas have never proven to be the economic engines that their proponents claim.

Bloomberg does have a major playing card that can put a halt to James Dolan's designs. Madison Square Garden doesn't pay city property taxes. In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch and Gov. Hugh Carey signed legislation that gave then-Garden owners Gulf & Western a tax break in exchange for a promise not to move the Knicks to the Nassau Coliseum and the Rangers to the Meadowlands. The city loses about $11 million in annual revenue. What happens to the Dolan's Garden renovation if Bloomberg and the City Council decide to take away the exemption?

Dolan does bring some ammunition of his own to the table. He has former Sen. Alphonse D'Amato working as one of his lobbyists, and D'Amato could cause Bloomberg more problems than his potential Democratic rivals, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn-Queens), City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and other players to be named later.

Weiner is against the West Side plan but not necessarily spending tax money for stadiums, as he favors a Queens Jets/Olympic Stadium. Miller isn't against building the West Side facility, but the City Council speaker has problems with the mayor's spending plan - and he has one other major point worth considering.

Miller is concerned that if the city manages to get the 2012 Summer Olympics, both city and state taxpayers will be on the hook for billions of dollars in cost overruns. The International Olympic Committee requires host cities to pay off debts that accrue from hosting the Games. At last look, Greek officials have estimated that they are facing $3 billion worth of cost overruns following last summer's Athens Olympics and that figure could grow.

But like it or not, sports spending has become a political football from Niagara Falls to Montauk Point, and many egos are on the line. We haven't seen the last of it. The stadium issue may be great for selling ad time to both sides, but watching these commercials is a lousy way to start the morning.

I recently pulled into the Holiday Inn off of Route 28 in Pittsburgh and asked the question that has become commonplace for me. "How much of the 14 percent room tax is going to the stadiums?" The clerk behind the counter pleasantly responded, "I really don't know but the Pennsylvania sales tax is six percent and the local hotel tax is five percent. When I started it was nine percent. They said they needed for the stadiums and the Pirates started out well but then they got rid of their players and I lost interest."

Both Pennsylvanians and non-Pennsylvanians are paying a variety of taxes for a private industry, or two private industries in Pittsburgh, the baseball Pirates and the NFL's Steelers. Pennsylvanian’s maybe paying for another Pittsburgh team shortly, the NHL's Penguins, who according to team owner Mario Lemieux need a new arena to survive. Some of the seed money for the Penguins new place will come from the old reliable source, state legislators who have passed on stadium and arena costs from sports facilities in Philadelphia, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Harrisburg, Hershey, Pittsburgh and other areas around the state onto taxpayers in a variety of ways from hotel/motel, car rental, sales, restaurant and water taxes to name a few.

The struggling, Midwest-based, Frontier League is interested in putting a team in Westmoreland County near Pittsburgh and contacted state Sen. Allen Kukovich's office to see if Harrisburg had any available money to build a stadium. A Frontier League franchise needs about a 4,000 seat facility and those cost at least $6 million to build. But that's the way sports franchises operate. If a franchise owner cannot get the government to provide a facility and get lion share of the revenues generated by the facility flowing into the team, there will be no team. Lemieux's new arena may come to pass if the Harrisburg legislators and Gov. Rendell come up with a gaming law that allows horse racetracks to install slot machines which could lower property taxes statewide. Rendell thinks he will have the legislation on his desk and signed by Christmas.

The slot machine legislation is an essential part of Lemieux's and the Penguins plan. If slots are placed in the tracks, then a West Virginia racetrack owner Ted Arneault plans to go ahead and try to win support to build a racetrack near Route 28 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike Exit 48, 15 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh. If Arneault gets the track, he plans to give Lemieux some $60 million from slots revenue as part of the $275 million project. Rendell would release some $90 million in state money, the Penguins would kick in another $47 million, there would be $11.6 million coming in from federal sources, another $3 million from the Pennsylvania Water and Sewer Authority and $53 million from the Regional Asset District.

By the way, the voters have no say in stadium and/or arena decisions. In Philadelphia deals were worked out between team owners and city and state lawmakers. In Pittsburgh, voters said no to the Pirates and Steelers new stadium proposals only to see Pittsburgh, Allegheny and Harrisburg lawmakers overturn their decision. Lawmakers never say no to sports team owners because pro sports is more important than funding education or snow removal.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of Metro.

Evan Weiner is a commentator on "The Business of Sports" for Westwood One's Metro Networks.

It's too bad that the Yankees didn't face the Cleveland Indians in the American League playoffs. Then George Steinbrenner could have challenged Cleveland owner Larry Dolan and Cablevision to a winner-takes-all competition: If the Indians lose, then the Dolan family would agree to leave the YES Network alone and place the rookie channel on Cablevision's basic roster.

And if the Yankees had played the Atlanta Braves in the World Series, then Steinbrenner could have challenged its owner, Time Warner, to leave the YES Network alone and place it on its basic lineup.

Of course, had Steinbrenner lost either series, he would have had to allow those cable television operators to do whatever they wanted with YES, which would have meant letting cable subscribers choose whether they even wanted YES.

But blame it on the Marlins, if you will. Now lawyers from Steinbrenner's YES Network will be slugging it out with Time Warner's attorneys. YES is contending Time Warner violated terms of the YES-Time Warner agreement by giving Time Warner cable subscribers a choice.

Time Warner had decided to make YES an option for its customers after Cablevision reached a truce with Steinbrenner. During the summer, a year and a half after Time Warner rolled out YES (and conveniently forget to tell its subscribers that YES was being added - or that it was raising its rates by $3.04 a month for a service that was costing them $1.82 per subscriber), the giant media company informed its customers that they finally could say no to YES and get a dollar a month off their bill.

The Time Warner decision came after various New York City and state elected officials, along with those in New Jersey, pressured Steinbrenner and the Dolan family into a temporary solution that let Cablevision subscribers choose whether they wanted to watch the Yankees' 2003 season. But neither the YES Network nor the Dolans have budged from their positions, so the battle will continue before an arbitrator.

Meanwhile, another new front in the sports war has opened down south that bears watching up here. The chief executive officer of the country's fourth biggest cable operator, Cox Communications out of Atlanta, has apparently grown tired of paying 32 percent of his programming costs to the Walt Disney Company's ESPN and Rupert Murdoch's Fox Sports Net, which are only watched by just 8 percent of Cox's subscribers. Jim Robins wants to hold down costs for his customers and put the sports networks on a high-end premium channel.

Right now, 100 percent of Cox's basic cable subscribers are subsidizing what a fraction watches - at $2.61 a pop, roughly what New York area subscribers pay for the same ESPN privilege. In fact, some 76.7 million cable subscribers nationwide fund ESPN whether they want it or not.

Welcome to the multi-billion-dollar world of Cable-TV Socialism. We, the cable subscribers, are all paying for what few of us watch - ESPN, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC and others - so that cable operators can hold down the costs of programming for those interested in watching those particular channels. In America, we do not collectively pay to keep down the cost of prescription drugs or health care for those who need it, but we do for those who want ESPN or Fox News.

At this point, Cox has no intention of accepting the latest demands from Disney, which include annual 20-percent rate hikes, nor from Fox, which wants a 35-percent increase. Cox wants to shift both channels to a pay tier and give all their customers a choice. Those wanting ESPN and Fox would have to reach into their pockets and pay a hefty price for them. No more subsidies.

Needless to say, the Cox plan is not being welcomed by ESPN and Fox because those networks stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars if cable companies change the way they offer sports channels. Believe it or not, there is not much of a market for cable-TV sports. In fact, most cable networks get poor ratings but are financially successful because of cable-TV socialism. (As a point of reference, the combined ratings for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are less than PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," meaning Bill O'Reilly is far less a factor than Lehrer when it comes to presenting news.)

It's time the Federal Communications Commission and Congress re-regulate the cable-TV industry. Give us fair and balanced choices and let us - the subscribers not the cable operators or the networks - decide what sports, if any, we want to pay extra to watch.

The race for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games started on July 15 and the nations who want the event range from the United States with New York City as the nominee to England, France, Germany, South Africa, Spain, Russia, Brazil and Cuba. Hungary dropped out because it couldn't swing the $21 billion cost for staging the Games, but money seems to be no object for the other countries.

The list of countries is both interesting and intriguing. The United States and the United Kingdom were, of course, the only coalition partners who fought in the Iraq War. President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair are close allies and partners but on this one, the two countries will go their separate ways.

France, Germany and Russia opposed the Iraq military action which didn't exactly please the Bush administration. Paris was an International Olympic Committee favorite before the Iraq action and remains that way. The most curious bid comes from Havana.

How can one of the world's poorest countries bid for an Olympics that will cost billions upon billions of dollars? Cuba's bid may signal that Fidel Castro wants to get involved with the world's business community even though the Cuban dictator drew the world's ire by cracking down on dissidents in April.

There is no way that Cuba can win the bid, but Cuba could be using the Olympics as a negotiating ploy to get the United States to drop economic sanctions against the country. Castro continues to draw President Bush's wrath. In October, Bush announced that he was seeking regime change in Cuba and wanted to tighten sanctions on the Castro government with the hopes of toppling the Cuban dictator.

The Olympics are more than an athletic competition. The Olympics are a corporate bazaar where multi-national corporations show off their products in a 17-day advertising campaign that is televised worldwide. The Olympics also provide a political platform for many groups who are looking to move up in the world order or air grievances.

So there are a few ways of looking at the Cuban decision. Cuba wants the Games for whatever prestige it would bring. But more importantly, politically and economically, Cuba wants to join the rest of the world. The Havana Government may be using China as an example. China is hosting the 2008 Games and has to open its borders and its government to the world. China is also investing billions to put its best foot forward.

The International Olympic Committee will take two years to sift through the various bids and this could be a highly charged and emotional decision because of the Bush Administration's dealings with Iraq. There was a huge split in the United Nations' 15-member Security Council about disarming Iraq with force. A good many of those countries along with the other governments who were opposed to military action in Iraq are International Olympic Committee members and will vote in this process.

The New York Olympic Committee may feel its has the best chance of landing the Games, but it may find out that politics and diplomacy, not a strong bid is more important when these Games are awarded.