Sports teams are ridiculously expensive. They’ve always been expensive, but in the last 20 years things have gotten crazy. When Bob Castellini’s group purchased the Cincinnati Reds in 2006 the purchase price was $270M, for what turned out to be a 70% share of the team. Today the Cincinnati Reds are valued at $1.05B according to Forbes.
The Reds are one of the least valuable professional sports franchises among the big three professional sports. But if you wanted to buy them, assuming they were for sale, you’d need to spend over a billion dollars.