Do NFL owners really deserve an extra billion dollars? - Part 4
This is the fourth and final part of a series of articles discussing whether or not owners of NFL teams deserve the extra one billion dollars that they are asking for, saying that they are unable to cover the costs of owning and maintaining a professional
football team with the one billion dollars that they are already receiving from the league.
Moving on from Stan Kroenke, take a look at Jeffrey Lurie, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles. Before he bought the team in 1994 for $185 million, Lurie had been chief executive officer and president of Chestnut Hill Productions. The film company did not make
any big movies, but supervised production of films made by larger companies and they produced television commercials as well. On 27 February, 2007 the movie Inside Job won an Academy Award as best documentary. The film was produced by Lurie.
So this guy bought the Eagles in 1994 for $185 million, which is now worth about $1.1 billion. The Eagles stadium, Lincoln Financial Field, is a gold mine itself for Lurie. The stadium makes up for about $180 million of the total $1.1 billion that the team
is worth while earning Lurie $60 million per year. So over to Lurie’s extravagant expenditures, he has an 18-room mansion which also has an indoor tennis court, two-story recreating theater, two lane bowling alley and a three-hole golf course. So what does
he want to do with an extra billion dollars? Build a ski hill?
Are these owners really the ones we should be worrying about? Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner, says that the owners are asking for $2 billion per year instead of the initial $1 billion because they want to build new, or renovate, their teams’ stadiums. But
the only ones that benefit from better stadiums are the owners. The team does not get any better. There is nothing free for any of the fans attending. In fact, you may even have to pay more at a new stadium. Instead, the stadium, which is built by mostly tax
dollars, just adds millions of dollars per game to the owners’ bank accounts from advertisements, concessions and extravagantly priced seats.
This money isn’t shared with anyone. It belongs to the owners and the owners alone. Basically, Goodell is trying to say that they need an extra billion so team owners can buy new Ferraris, because theirs are dirty.
Creating a lockout for the 2011 season would be as wrong, unfair and defenseless as the Oakland Raiders’ owner Al Davis’ wardrobe. There is so much money to go around it is sickening that owners would even ask for more. A billion dollars back? They have
more than that in cash.
Jennifer Lopez, part owner of the Miami Dolphins team, is auctioning off her children’s clothes because they are not allowed to wear the same outfit twice. Bud Adams, owner of the Tennessee Titans, possesses 10,000 heads of cattle. That’s almost $1 million
in cows, bulls, calves and heifers. Yes, cows. Owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Malcolm Glazer, bought a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida for $14 million. Good for him, right? But the guy never even set foot inside of that mansion and later sold it for $24
million.
So with all of this said and done, you tell me: Do the owners of NFL teams really deserve more money than they are already getting?
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own and in no way represent Bettor.com's official editorial policy.
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