Sports Economics Quotes

I got an offer in 1992 to buy a major-league team. I turned down the offer because I don't want my love of the game to involve business.

Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure.

World Cups aren't moments to invest in players.

The way the Premier League is now we have a lot of foreign players. A lot of very good foreign players.

That's the biggest shame there is, that L.A. doesn't have a team. I was a big fan of the L.A. Rams, and when they left, I lost interest. Then there was the Raiders, and they left. How they can't have a football team in the biggest market in the world is beyond me.

Professional sports play a very important part in American life and a very important part in the American imagination. Anybody who goes to the movies these days sees just what an important part of the American mind sports comprise. If they are so important and have such a hold on the minds and imaginations of children, then this ought to be a focal point of our efforts.

[Olympics] obviously, is not the easiest thing to do, and nobody makes any money out of. Yet, for the small amount of money they could [invest] in a Formula One race, they don't want to do it.

It's not just the players, it's the culture. Sometimes it's the people around them; the people who are looking after them - the money they're given. Some of the families give up their jobs and live off their sons. That would never have happened 10 years ago.

Economics is about creating win-win situations. But in sports, someone loses.

Anna Kournikova will always be better paid than Lindsay Davenport. The first left the circuit without having won a single title while the second was world number one.

Today, free agency takes away a lot of your heroes, they go somewhere else. Some of them don't but a lot of them do-take the higher offer to go somewhere else. And, it turns the fans off because they get attached to the players.

Traditionally, sport has looked down at number crunchers, but the reality is that they give sport the financial sustenance it needs.

The difference in economic potential between clubs in Italy, those in England, or the big two in Spain is very high.

The time has come to disregard the exemption. Baseball is no longer a sport.

Nowadays, it's hard to know if a player really deserves the money spent on him, because transfer values are high.

The two major things that changed the makeup of all professional sports are money generated by television and courts that players went to in order to win their freedom as free agents.

There were a lot of places, including Los Angeles, that didn't have major league baseball. There were other really large cities that had no major league teams, but at least they had college football.

I look at it this way: the WNBA is 13 years young. I think eventually women will get to that point, maybe in my daughter's generation, where their salaries will be similar to men's. But we're still starting off, like, where the NBA was back in the 1950s.

I won twenty-eight games in thirty-five and I couldn't believe my eyes when the Cards sent me a contract with a cut in salary. Mr Rickey said I deserved a cut because I didn't win thirty games.

Basketball is a business. Pure and simple. If you want to have fun, go to the YMCA.

(Bill) Terry, you can ask for more money in the winter and do less in the summer than any ballplayer I know.

I don't mind women's football. I am of the business understanding though, when people say 'it should be equal pay.' If the business makes sense, it does.

For me, and I've been on record saying it, let's create two leagues: one for players who want the college football experience, and another for those that want to get paid, have the NFL help fund it, whatever. Guys who don't want to go to school to get an education, let them go to work.

Billy Beane was a guy who had been devalued by the sport as a player and now is working as a GM for a small-market team.There is such a gulf in what these teams have to spend on talent [that] they can never play equally - they can never have a true competition.

You don't want to make a living or habit out of trying to solve your problems with high-price pitching free agents because over the long run, there's so much risk involved that you really can hamstring your organization.