💰 This City Turned Down $1M

The greatest investment of the last 100 years isn’t Apple, Nike, or Amazon.

It’s checks notes… the Washington Redskins, Football Team, Commanders?

Who just sold for a record-breaking $6 billion.

That’s the highest price ever paid for a North American sports franchise and a 650% return for Dan Snyder, who bought the team for $800M in 1999.

No wonder billionaires want to buy sports teams.

Speaking of which:

🗞 The Big Story: Billionaire’s Baseball Dreams Rejected

📉 Biggest Loser: Tour de Jail?

🏆 Winner’s Circle: America’s Next Major Sport

🗞 The Big Story

I hate lukewarm coffee, most sequels, and when billionaires use taxpayer money to pay for stadiums they own.

But I’ve beat that last drum quite a bit recently, so how about we put a positive spin on it?

Instead of reading the headline: “Billionaire Sports Team Owner Uses $500M of Public Money to Fund New Stadium”

Our headline today reads:

“Aspiring Billionaire Sports Team Owner Offers to Pay $1M Over Asking Price to Buy and Rebuild Historic Local Stadium With 100% of His Own Money.”

Subtitle: “But the city turned him down.”

Now before you ask; no, this isn’t some populist fever dream I had last night.

It’s a real story that’s playing out right now in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and it’s almost too ridiculous to believe.

Let’s start from the top. McCoy Stadium (pictured above) was home to the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Boston Red Sox’s Triple-A affiliate, from 1970 to 2020.

But in 2020, the team was moved to Worcester, Massachusetts by a longtime MLB executive who had bought the team for $20 million in 2015.

This left McCoy Stadium abandoned, which upset a lot of local residents because it had been a fixture in the community since 1942.

Now, to be fair, the city did solicit ideas from the community in regard to repurposing McCoy Stadium back in 2019, but nothing stuck.

So they decided to put the demolition of the stadium up for a vote.

And, last November, Pawtucket voters approved the issuance of $330 million in bonds that would be used to tear down the stadium and build a new high school in its place, according to the Providence Journal.

Now, normally the story would just end here, but in early July a billionaire by the name of Stefan Soloviev was visiting Rhode Island to connect with a longtime friend and former NBA player, Chris Herren.

I won’t bore you with the details but just know that Stefan is rich. His father, Sheldon Solow, was a New York Real Estate developer who died with a net worth of $4.4 billion in November 2020.

And as of 2022, this made Stefan Soloviev the 26th largest landowner in America with 408,000 acres to his name (for reference, that’s about half the size of Rhode Island).

It was during this trip back to Rhode Island (where Soloviev attended URI before dropping out to focus on trading commodities) that he heard of the plans to demolish McCoy Stadium.

And even though Soloviev had no real connection to the place, given the fact that he had never actually been to the stadium, he still enlisted his son’s help to fly a drone over it so he could see it before it was demolished.

Unofficial Editorial Note: Stefan apparently has 22 kids, 11 of whom were with his first wife in which they had a set of quadruplets and a pair of twins. They could scrimmage in football with those numbers.

But apparently, when Soloviev saw the abandoned stadium, something struck him.

A notion that it needed to be kept alive.

Soloviev goes on to tell the Providence Journal that to him McCoy looked like a “mini-Fenway” and he was afraid Rhode Island would be losing a valuable part of its history if it were demolished.

But given the fact that the plans to tear down the stadium were progressing quickly, Soloviev knew he had to act fast.

And so he publically offered to buy the stadium from the city, fund a rebuild and bring a baseball team back to Pawtucket with money that would come 100% out of his own pocket.

He even offered to pay “a million dollars at most” over whatever deal the city had already made.

Now, the obvious question here is: why?

Why does a billionaire who had never visited the stadium or even live in Rhode Island care so much about the abandoned ballpark?

Well, it’s possible he just sees it as a distressed asset.

Soloviev even admits as much, saying that he sees profitability in bringing baseball back to Pawtucket.

And this isn’t the first time he’s done something like this, in 2014 he went to court to stop a company from tearing up a rail line in Colorado - which he later bought and made a part of his own company’s route.

So, it’s possible that a billionaire just sees an opportunity to buy a professional baseball stadium on the cheap, earn the goodwill of a passionate community in the process, and turn an abandoned ballpark into a revenue-driving asset.

Either that or his $2.3 billion net worth is burning a hole in his pocket.

📉 Biggest Loser

A fan might go to jail for taking a selfie.

The Tour de France, which finished last week, sees more than 15 million spectators crowd the streets of 40 French cities and towns to see these athletes compete for over $2.5M dollars.

Now, these cyclists are already racing in close quarters between the large pelotons and narrow European streets, but one fan, in particular, got a little too close as cyclists rode by him at an average of 25 MPH - sticking his arm out into the street, presumably to take a selfie.

However, not looking back, this fan's arm clipped the handlebars of American Rider Sepp Kuss setting off a huge crash that brought down 20 other riders including Kuss’s teammate.

Now, thankfully all of the riders who were involved in the crash successfully completed the 111-mile stretch of the race but that might not matter for the fan that caused the pile-up.

@nbcsports

Tour de France spectator causes a huge crash! #cycling #tourdefrance #tdf2023

You see, this crash was the race's largest since the infamous incident in 2021 in which a young woman holding a sign with a message in German for her grandparents caused a crash that resulted in a pile-up that affected nearly the whole field in just the first stage.

This crash resulted in two riders being pulled from the races including one Spanish cyclist who broke both of his arms as well as eight more cyclists who had to be treated for various injuries.

Two riders were even forced to retire due to the incident.

And as for the 31-year-old woman who caused the whole thing, well she turned herself in to the police four days later after a litany of backlash online and she was fined over $1300 in a French Court.

However, the prosecution in that case also requested a symbolic punishment that included a four-month prison sentence and a one-euro fine to be paid to the National Union of Professional Cyclists.

Fortunately for her, the lady avoided jail time but was still forced to pay her two fines - which bodes well for this year’s offender.

And given the fact that this most recent crash didn’t result in any serious injuries it’s likely he’ll get away with just a slap on the wrist.

Now we just need to find out who did it…

🏆 Winner’s Circle

Only one sport is watched by over 25% of the world’s total population, but no one in the US has ever tried to create a professional league around it…

Until now.

I’m of course talking about cricket, which captures the attention of 2.5 billion people every year, including 63 million Americans who already engage with cricket annually, making it the sport’s third most popular market.

And a new league, Major League Cricket, wants to capitalize on that sleeping giant with a 3 week season that started on July 13th and culminates with a final on Sunday.

In its opening match in a converted baseball stadium in Grand Prarie, Texas, MLC sold out the 7,200-person venue in over 100-degree heat.

And while the league’s co-founder admits that they’ll be relying heavily on Indian and Pakistani support early on, he’s also hoping Americans will come to fall in love with the game.

Now, the secret genius of MLC is that they have the rights to be the only professional cricket league in America - meaning they have a monopoly on top talent, streaming deals, investor’s money, and (most importantly) fans’ attention.

And with support from people like Microsoft’s and Adobe’s CEOs, they might be set up well enough to take over cricket’s final frontier - especially with $120 million worth of investments.

Which has already helped secure some of the sport’s biggest international stars.

And on top of that, MLC has partnered with two teams in Australia and four teams in the Indian Premier League - the most popular cricket brand in the world - to cross-brand teams in MLC.

Now all that’s left to see is if Americans actually like the sport.

⏱ In Other News

• Titletown Tech, a venture capital fund created by the Green Bay Packers and Microsoft, just raised $70 million more to invest in Midwest start-ups.

• MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, gets a four-year extension.

• Stephan A Smith wants Shannon Sharpe.

• Jaylen Brown signs the richest contract in NBA history.

👋 If you made it this far, you’d like my podcast Sportonomics!

This week we dive into the Packer’s Investment Fund, Twitter’s Rebrand and I interview a former Nike Executive turned NBA Champion.