Quote:
Originally Posted by Snakeeye
Population = larger potential market = greater potential revenues. When that guy did the audit of the Kings books before the lockout, he found that the Kings had a massively overvalued radio deal because the competition for listeners was so fierce. The size of the market dictated the value of the contract. That cannot happen here in Calgary, no matter how much you want to trot out the "there are more hockey fans in Calgary than x" strawman.
Or, to simplify, if Calgary and area has more hockey fans than Dallas, as you suppose, why have the Stars historically had much higher revenues than the Flames? Even in 03-04 when we went to the finals, Forbes listed Dallas' revenue as being nearly 50% higher.
http://www.andrewsstarspage.com/CBA/11-14-04cba.htm
Seems kinda odd, dont you think?
Not that I necessaraly disagree with the thought that Calgary has more hockey fans than Dallas does, merely that there is no direct relation to ability to generate revenue. |
Your numbers are based on a time when Canada's dollar was way lower than it is now. If you based those numbers on today's Flames ticket prices in today's Canadian dollars, I am guessing that they'd be a whole lot closer. Gate revenue is pretty close to 60% total revenue for all the teams.
Canadian owners made a very fatal business mistake with the Canadian TV deal. They should have never agreed to split the HNIC/Playoff rights 30 ways. Also CBC has been underpaying for these rights for years. TSN's bid proves that they are worth about $20 million per CDN team per year. Instead Canadian teams get just a fraction of that based on the flawed hope that a huge US contract would come one day. Even in their wildest dreams, they should have realized they'd never get a contract in the US that was greater per 30 teams than the Canadian contract was per 6 teams.
Better Canadian tv deals is how Canadian owners should have taken advantage of the fact that there are way more hockey fans in Canada. For some reason though they never figured out how to do this. There is no reason a Cdn TV contract should not be in the ballpark (per capita) of the American NFL contracts.
An extra 20 million per year of revenue would have sure helped the Flames in the dark years. It would also have a snowball effect of allowing for better teams and bring in more money from attendence and higher ticket prices.