When I was a kid Michael Jordan was god. This especially since the only time I saw him was in the few highlight reels on TV, where he twisted himself this way and that way on his way to the basket. He played for the Chicago Bulls and won six NBA titles with them.
I watched the Bulls a few years ago, live at their home court, the United Center, and it was a yawner. Probably because I had to watch the whole match and not the highlights only, but obviously because the-long-retired Jordan was not playing.
A few weeks ago, it was reported that Jordan had off loaded the Charlotte Bobcats, a team he took control of thirteen years ago, for $3b (sh11.1trillion). That is just a number until you place it the context of what he reportedly paid for it, $275m in 2010. What made the deal even more spectacular is that he is said to have only put up $25m of his own cash with the rest being him taking over the team’s existing debt.
And this for a team that never won a championship.
Observers say a lot of the value came from the increasing revenues from broadcast rights that have inflated team valuations around the major sports leagues of the world, allowing them to pay they stars millions of dollars a year.
Last week there was a report that Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford was set to put pen to paper on a new £375,000 (sh1.7b) a week contract.
But before these team owners could benefit from the largesse of the broadcast media they had to be organized.
Many of these teams started off as pet projects of one rich man or the other. It was their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to the communities in which they operated. These teams were then passed on to businessmen, when the original owners passed on or they became too expensive to sustain. Businessmen seeing the opportunity that came with earnings from the gate took them over, invested in their infrastructure and built national and international communities around them.
With more eyeballs on their teams, they could attract sponsors. This took time. In the case of the English Premier league this was the progression from the end of the second world war to the beginning of the premiership as we know it in 1992.
"With the entrance of TV the real inflation in valuations begun. And now with the internet and non-traditional players like Amazon jumping into the fray, where, we wonder, are the limits to this cash bonanza....
In Uganda of course our sports are largely amateur. The owners or patrons have failed miserably to make them money spinners, content to eat the crumbs government throws their way.
Some owners are making a real go at it – Vipers FC, KCCA and maybe Arua Hill. Rugby has some serious sponsors but the infrastructure is still wanting. Golf have managed to have corporate Uganda falling over themselves to sponsor weekend events (is it because the check signers are also golfers?). Beyond that nothing.
The individual owners trying to do the right thing are being weighed down by the mediocrity of the rest.
We have said many times in this column that money follows organization, though people think when the money comes then they will get organized. The problem with money is that it magnifies what you are, so if you are disorganised you only become more disorganized and the opposite is true.
Going by the way the trends in sports have gone in more developed economies we still have a long way to go.
We are still in the age when the sports team is just a vanity project of some rich man with some shillings to spare. We still need to get to the point when a business is formed around a sports team, with the purpose of onfield success but more importantly business success.
As the Jordan story above has shown, even if a team’s trophy case is bare but it is commercially viable there is always a chance that they will turn things around someday, because they will survive to see that day.
"The Denver Nuggets have seen little joy since they were formed in 1967, but this year won the NBA Championships for the first time. The way they were able to wait through those years is because they are commercially viable...
What is stopping us from doing that here, organizing businesses around sports? The obvious answer of course is that our business culture is still very rudimentary. We all want to own 100 percent of a small thing rather than a small piece of a big thing.
Imagine a group of people came together to build a sports team that would be successful in ten to 20 years. They would pool resources to set up and finance the team, eventually build it infrastructure. If they start from zero it could take longer.
Imagine pouring resources into an endeavour for years without the guarantee of a return. What kind of promoters would they have to be? They would be long term thinkers and it would help if they had some extra cash lying around.
The model of the big man running the team should be dumped by the way side. It has serious limitations that will mean it will not go further than being a big fish in our small pond.
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