MLB Team Values 2025: Yankees, Dodgers Worth Combined $16 Billion
Kurt Badenhausen
11 min read
Thirteen years ago, Mark Walter led a group that paid $2.15 billion for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The price raised eyebrows across the sports landscape, as it was twice as much as anyone had ever spent on a North American franchise, and the club had filed for bankruptcy the previous year.
Walter, CEO Stan Kasten and baseball operations president Andrew Friedman have built a juggernaut on and off the field. The on-field resume includes 11 division titles in 12 years, plus two World Series wins. Off the field, the Dodgers’ gross revenue before revenue-sharing is estimated at $1 billion, a threshold previously only hit by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and LaLiga giants Real Madrid and Barcelona.
The Dodgers are now worth $7.73 billion, including their real estate and related businesses. It marks a 23% jump over last year. The club closed the gap with the New York Yankees ($8.39 billion) and ranks seventh among franchises in all sports. The $1.43 billion year-over-year value increase is greater than the total value of four MLB teams, with the Miami Marlins ranked 30th at $1.3 billion.
The Yankees’ value only trails the Dallas Cowboys ($10.32 billion) and Golden State Warriors ($9.14 billion).
The average MLB team is worth $2.82 billion, up 7% based on conversations with team executives, as well as bankers, lawyers and investors familiar with team transactions. Rounding out the top five are the Boston Red Sox ($6.03 billion), Chicago Cubs ($5.69 billion) and San Francisco Giants ($4.2 billion). These estimates are based on a “control” transaction with a new owner taking over—limited partner transactions, such as Sixth Street’s recent investment in the Giants for less than $4 billion, typically carry an LP discount.
The Dodgers had high expectations when they signed Shohei Ohtani in free agency in December 2023 to a then-record 10-year, $700 million contract, but Year 1 of Ohtani in Dodger blue was a grand slam for both the team and the Japanese star, who is set to earn an estimated $100 million this year from endorsements, 10x the pre-Ohtani MLB record.
The Dodgers added a steady stream of new sponsor deals during the 2024 season, including Japanese brands All Nippon Airways, Daiso, Kosé, Kowa, Toyo Tires and Yakult. SponsorUnited estimated it meant $70 million in incremental sponsor revenue. The Dodgers would not comment on their financial results.
On the ticketing side, the Dodgers perennially lead baseball in attendance, but their pricing has kept them from the No. 1 slot in baseball’s gate revenue rankings, which typically have the Yankees on top. But last season, the Dodgers took the crown at $4.29 million per regular season home game, based on figures from MLB’s internal gate report shared with Sportico by a non-Dodgers team. The Yankees ($4.11 million), Cubs ($3.25 million), Red Sox ($2.93 million) and Houston Astros ($2.69 million) were next up. Meanwhile, teams at the bottom of the financial table are generating $500,000 per game, including premium seating.
The Dodgers’ biggest financial engine predates Ohtani. In 2013, the Dodgers signed a 25-year, $8.35 billion TV contract with what is now Spectrum. The deal highlights the sport’s revenue disparity even more starkly, with recent challenges in the regional sports network market causing many teams to take a haircut on their rights agreements or lose their deals completely.
Baseball’s new rules implemented in 2023 that shortened games and created more action have had their desired effect. Last year, MLB attendance rose again and hit 71.35 million, up 11% versus 2022. TV viewership had double-digit percentage growth among young adults and streaming viewership smashed its previous high. Teams are monetizing their stadiums more than ever with premium seating and non-MLB events. The Toronto Blue Jays hosted six Taylor Swift shows at the Rogers Centre last year, and their 2025 calendar includes Billy Joel, Metallica, Morgan Wallen, Post Malone and The Weeknd.
But the business momentum doesn’t paper over the major challenges facing the sport, which are intertwined with revenue disparity, media distribution and looming labor negotiations. The challenges have even big-market teams calling for change to the sport’s business model and pointing to the Dodgers’ economic might and bankroll of New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, who just landed baseball’s biggest free-agent prize—Juan Soto for $765 million—and is by far baseball’s richest owner with a net worth of $21.3 billion, according to Forbes.
The issues are causing a drag on MLB franchise value growth. The average club rose just 28% from Sportico’s first MLB valuations in 2021, while the least-valuable club rose 16% during that time. For comparison, the NBA “get-in” price is up 127% and the NFL’s is up 122%. The NHL had the greatest growth among its clubs at the bottom, up 159%.
Since 2022, three MLB clubs hired investment banks to conduct team sale auctions. The Los Angeles Angels and Washington Nationals pulled their clubs off the market, and the sale process for the Minnesota Twins that launched in October has been muted, according to most baseball insiders. The only completed control sale since Cohen’s 2020 Mets purchase was David Rubenstein’s deal for the Baltimore Orioles last year for $1.73 billion. Several big-market teams, including the Cubs, Giants and Philadelphia Phillies, have sold LP stakes at multibillion-dollar valuations.
Bankers and investors traditionally use revenue multiples to value sports teams, and MLB multiples continue to fall further behind the rest of the Big Five U.S. leagues with the NBA (11.9), MLS (9.4), NFL (9.3) and NHL (7.7) all ahead of MLB (6.6). MLB is the only one of those leagues without a salary cap.
The Boston Celtics’ $6.1 billion price tag is 13 times its 2023-24 total revenue and 16 times if you strip out playoff revenue.
What’s Next
Baseball’s 30 teams generated an estimated $12.75 billion in revenue last year, including revenue from non-MLB events at stadiums where teams own and/or operate the buildings. The $425 million average per team includes $106 million in gross revenue from MLB central revenue via leaguewide media, sponsorship and merchandise. Some teams show net revenue on their books after deductions for player benefits and leaguewide expenses, but gross league revenue is how most bankers present teams when up for sale and provides an apples-to-apples comparison to Sportico’s other sports team valuations.
Final calculations are still being made regarding revenue sharing, but roughly $550 million is expected to transfer from high-revenue to low-revenue clubs for 2024. The Dodgers’ final revenue-sharing bill will be around $150 million, shattering the previous record. The Red Sox kicked in roughly $70 million to the pot, and the Yankees’ bill was a tick higher.
The Dodgers also paid $103 million in luxury tax penalties for its high payroll. Nine teams paid a total tax of $311 million last year, and half of that goes toward the commissioner’s discretionary fund and is redistributed to teams that receive revenue sharing. The double whammy to these clubs meant significant operating losses for the Mets, Phillies and Giants, while most lower revenue clubs were cash-flow positive.
“The system they want to alter and change is because of the Dodgers,” leading baseball agent Scott Boras said in a phone interview. “No. They should want more teams to be like the Dodgers, and so don’t change the system, promote ownership to do what they do.”
Replicating the Dodgers’ model is not an option unless you have a bulletproof media deal, a 13-million-person metro area and the unquestioned biggest star in the sport. But baseball owners and the league office are mapping out the parameters of a new economic model for MLB that will be a delicate negotiation between the players union, big-market teams and small-market ones. The current CBA expires after the 2026 season, and the players union expects a lockout, as owners appear more unified than ever in pushing through a salary cap. MLBPA executive director Tony Clark reminded reporters last month, “No. We haven’t agreed to that in 50, 60 years.”
“There are ways of addressing the system that aren’t salary or cap related or require the restrictions of player salaries as the answer to every one of these questions,” Clark said.
Baseball leadership envisions a system where the league controls more game inventory to sell to media partners with wider distribution of games, versus the legacy model where RSNs restricted broadcasts outside of the local market. Most of the current national deals run through the 2028 season, and commissioner Rob Manfred hopes to package the streaming rights of as many teams as possible with domestic and international media rights for 2029.
Last year, MLB generated just over $4 billion in TV revenue, with local rights representing an estimated 53% of the total. Local TV revenue dipped slightly but was higher than the league expected when Diamond Sports Group, which held the rights to 14 MLB teams, filed for bankruptcy in March 2023.
For comparison, the NBA’s new national deals alone are worth $7 billion per year, and the NFL’s are more than $12 billion on average. The carrot for the big-market MLB teams to relinquish more local programming is a smaller revenue-sharing bill.
Diamond has been rebranded as Main Street Sports and retains rights to nine teams. Most of those teams had to take a haircut on their rights. An exception was the Atlanta Braves, which were Diamond’s most profitable MLB team on Bally Sports Sports Southeast, and received a rights fee bump on what is now FanDuel Sports Network Southeast. Seaport Research Partners analyst David Joyce expects local media rights for the Braves to rise 4.5% to $112 million in 2025.
“The business model is really not entirely in sync with the direction consumption is moving, but MLB has a great product and premium tonnage with six months of the calendar and 2,430 games,” Chris Bevilacqua, Rothschild & Co. media advisor, said in a phone interview. Bevilacqua sees this inventory and global streaming opportunity as real strategic advantages. “I do think they’ll figure it out,” he added, “but it will take a few years to pull this together.”
The international market is a key component for MLB to generate greater leaguewide revenue. The first game of the Tokyo Series between the Dodgers and Cubs averaged more than 25 million viewers in Japan—Game 2 topped 23 million. Merchandise sales were 320% higher than the previous record MLB international event. There were 23 sponsors for the series, with revenue 240% higher than the previous year’s Seoul Series.
The international revenue largely all flows through the league office and will help produce larger central revenue checks, which proportionally benefit the lower revenue teams.
While baseball sorts through its biggest leaguewide issues, it has likely found a solution for one of its problem franchises for the past decade. The Athletics, no longer known as the Oakland Athletics, kick off their first of three seasons in the Sacramento River Cats’ minor league stadium. The A’s made an estimated $276 million in revenue last year, including their league check and revenue-sharing. The team is expected to generate between $330 million and $340 million this year despite playing in a 14,000-person capacity stadium. Season tickets sold out with a waiting list established for 2026.
The A’s long-term health will be determined by their move to Las Vegas. Their $1.75 billion new stadium on the Las Vegas Strip is projected to open in 2028. Based on MLB’s current economic model, the club expects revenue to be around $550 million annually in its future Vegas home, which would have ranked fifth last year among MLB teams.
The A’s current value is $1.57 billion, up 15%, the second-biggest increase since 2024 behind the Dodgers, and it should continue to rise as the stadium opening nears.
