Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
$44m salary floor. Divide that by 41 home games, and you need to gross $1.1m every night just to pay the minimum player salaries. According to Forbes, the Coyotes' total gate receipts for 2011-12 were $22m.
The total revenue for the team, as estimated by Forbes, was $83m (and I confess I don't see where they got $61m in non-gate revenues; that's more than the Flames had). Expenses were about $104m. Once again, they would have needed something over $40m in gate receipts to break even.
If you don't operate the team, you save 100% of the salaries of players, plus all the other hockey personnel, and all hockey-specific overhead. So those costs are not fixed overhead. You're paying them if you run the hockey team; you are not paying them if you don't.
If the hockey team is losing more money than it pays in rent to the arena, then owning it will make the arena's finances worse, not better. That's been the case with the Coyotes.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa, what do salaries have to do with running the arena? We must have been working under an entirely different set of assumptions here, as I was at no point talking about the city operating the team.