ESPN: Green Bay Packers ranked ‘Best Franchise in Sports’
STEVE CHIOTAKIS: ESPN the Magazine is out today with a list of America’s best sports franchises. The list is according to value fans get in exchange for the time, money and passion they sink into a particular team. The Super Bowl champs Green Bay Packers topped the list. But the L.A. Angels of Anaheim took number one of all baseball teams.
Peter Keating is a senior writer with ESPN Magazine. Good morning.
PETER KEATING: Hi. How are you?
CHIOTAKIS: Doing well. So the L.A. Angels, huh? Why are they the best baseball team on the list?
KEATING: They’ve been our model franchise for some time now. We asked fans — 70,000 fans vote online — and the Angels come out great in almost everything. They have cheap tickets, they win a lot of games, and they care a lot about fans and they give a lot of cool giveaways away. I mean, trolls, wrestling mats, rally monkeys, chia pets. You name it.
CHIOTAKIS: Well, you pretty much spilled the beans there, but how do you measure this kind of thing? I mean, what kind of metrics are you using here?
KEATING: We want to try to figure out in a total measure for rating teams according to how much they give back, not just for the money we spend as fans, but for the time and emotion we invest as well. So we do some financial analysts. We look at how well teams convert the fan dollars, like concessions and parking and that kind of stuff into wins. And once again, this year the Angels who were the number one over all time two years ago, came out as the top team in baseball, No. 4 overall.
CHIOTAKIS: And I noticed the Bengals, the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL were the worst on the list. Does that equate, Peter a team that’s not profitable?
KEATING: No, actually, the Bengals made $49 million in profits last year according to Forbes. The Brown family pays themselves a lot of money and they have a really poor record of acquiring players who are any good, and you combine that, you get a lot of on field losses even though you got a lot of off field money.
CHIOTAKIS: Well, it’s a very telling list and I look forward to checking all of it out. Peter Keating with ESNP the magazine. Peter thanks.
KEATING: Thank you so much.
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