Today in leaked sports organization financial statements news, Deadspin’s latest scoop is the audited financial statements of NFL Ventures, L.P. and Subsidiaries. NFL Ventures consists of the following subsidiaries: NFL Enterprises, NFL Properties, NFL Productions and NFL International. These companies perform operations from broadcasting to advertising to the NFL Network to Super Bowl hospitality.
As you can imagine, professional football in the United States is a pretty lucrative business. Forget the mess that is the
Ugh. That’s an ugly one, huh? I managed to get pretty close on the math, however. If you multiply the total expenses by 1.09 and then subtract that total from the gross revenues of $1.7 billion, you get the $1.2 billion (within $15-20 million or so). Craggs writes that this “accounts for the drop in net income” although that doesn’t seem correct (I emailed him to see if he can clarify) but is correct in saying that this remittance is simply “money moving from one pocket to another.”
Other than that, the report, also audited by Deloitte, is fairly lengthy and seems fairly innocuous since the companies as a whole appear to be extremely healthy (e.g. robust working capital, growing operating profit, impressive cash flow). There was a cash distribution FYE ’10 of $136 million to the limited partners, however nothing else really stands out.
Of course if you’re a rabid football fan, this is all quite infuriating because it stands as evidence that the team owners simply want more money for themselves. And Craggs smartly points out that since the G-3 program ran dry in ’07, that left some owners in the lurch:
[T]he case could be made that the real dispute at the heart of the lockout lay between the owners who’d exploited the G-3 program to build bright new revenue-generating stadiums and those who hadn’t and now couldn’t because their peers had burned through the fund. In this light, the lockout looks like something else entirely — less a battle between management and labor and more a proxy war in which the owners, unwilling to fight each other for money, decided to extract it from the players instead.
The full report is on the next page. Enjoy.