First consider this, Jerry Jones purchased the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL in 1989 for $140 million, to which Forbes magazine estimates its current worth at $3.2 billion. Donald Sterling purchased the NBA LA Clippers (formerly the San Diego Clippers) for $12.5 million in 1981, and sold the franchise to Steve Ballmer in 2014 for $2 billion. Businessinsider.com states: "In 1973, George Steinbrenner led a group that purchased the New York Yankees from CBS for $8.7 million. Forty-two years later, the franchise is now worth $3.2 billion." While it is understood that the value of a dollar today is considerably less than when these particular businessmen purchased these sports franchises, clearly, based on today's valuations, these already superrich owners have made an incredible amount of money for being in the sports entertainment business, indicating that the owning of big-time franchises isn't really something that owners do as a matter of mindless entertainment for the privileged, but in fact, is a way to demonstrably increase their net worth considerably, on the backs of the taxpayers, the unsuspecting public, and the skills of the ballplayers themselves.
The business of sports franchises in America is really about the business of maximizing their product for the express benefit of the elite ownership. For instance, the NFL, the NBA, and MLB either specifically have salary caps on player salary expenses or a luxury cap which serves essentially the same purpose in capping salary payroll. There are very few businesses that can control their labor expenses, labor contracts, and so forth at the degree that these major sport franchises do without being possibly subject to expensive lawsuits for what would typically be seen as both an antitrust violation as well as collusion. Additionally, these owners have to a considerable extent received "sweetheart" deals for stadium or arenas being built to franchise their teams to which they have often received at least one of the following: tax reductions or privileges, land cost reductions or privileges, rent reductions or privileges, concession reductions or privileges, and often are not even responsible for the cost of the actual edifice itself.
Throughout recent years, just about everything that franchise owners have wanted to get, they have received, but the easy money is approaching its end and franchise values will never appreciate from their current high levels at anything approaching what these shrewd aforementioned businessmen paid for their respective franchises in the previous century. While sports franchises generate important revenue from licensing, merchandizing, and ticket sales, the bulk of its most essential revenue comes from television, and television is able to pay billions of dollars for these sports because they get their revenue from national advertisers, and the advertisers advertise because of the viewership of these sports. However, therein lies the rub, as you might suspect, the viewership of sports is not necessarily the demographic that is most desirable, because sports appeal more to males, and typically more to adults ages 35 and up. Additionally, this is the age of the internet as well as the variety and versatility of multi-media outlets that people can interrelate to, which signifies that the norm in watching television sporting events on TV is in the process of mutating into something else.
While the major sport franchises have grown accustomed to ever better deals and thereby ever higher amounts of money negotiated from the major TV networks; should that formula change, and it will, sports franchise values will change with it, and because the value of these franchises are based on future projections, those that read the tea leaves better will be the sellers of such and not the buyers.