While it looks like this was a great investment, there's not enough information to determine ROI. A statement of cashflows is needed.

If there is a 900% increase in capital, I'm pretty sure it will work out to be a good investment.

Professional team owners have an uncanny ability to cry poverty when it comes to needing new sports arenas so the public often pays to help them. When it comes to selling their actual franchise, the truth comes out and they walk away with billions.

Said I thought it was a good invest. I also agree with your stance toward owners. I don't really blame the owners for asking for a cushy deal. What surprises me is how many localities continue to fall for it.

What I said was that we don't have enough information to calculate ROI. Without that info, we can't tell how good an investment it really is. Given that, I think Rosenthal wrote a fluff piece designed to stir the pot.

$1.6B for a baseball team is pretty awesome. Considering when AMD's shares hit rock bottom around $3, it's market cap was down at $3.2B or so. At least AMD's market cap is 10x the value of the Marlins now (not that I care about AMD that much, just picking an example from a sector in the economy that affects EVERYONE since they are the only real alternative CPU offering to Intel which almost all of us use either on our desktop, or the 95% of servers in the cloud data centers globally powered by Intel). Interestingly enough AMD was a sponsor of the USPS team when Lance was racing LOL....I guess they should have sponsored a Baseball team, not a cycling team.

In comparison Intel's market cap is $167B or ~ 100x the market cap of the Marlins, but if you roll up all of Major League baseball, Intel is probably only ~3x MLB. So basically the CPU market is barely 4x the size of MLB. Talk about messed up value to society and I grew up living and breathing the stats of every MLB player.

Well, that's really one of the big problems though isn't it? A pro cycling team doesn't have a sustainable value.