Forbes: Most Valuable Sports Brands

Click-fest from Forbes. “Top 40 Brands” = Top 10 for each of Businesses, Teams, Athletes, and Events. It takes them 45 pages to list the 40. So to cut to the chase…

How do you place a value on a brand?

...For sports business brands, this means quantifying the amount the business would fetch in an arms length transaction in excess of what a comparable rival would be worth.

...For athlete brands… (those) whose endorsement income exceeded the amount their peers earned by the largest amount during the past year.

...Sporting events are valued on the amount of revenue they generate per-event-day from media, tickets, sponsorships and licensing.

...Team brand values are calculated by applying the same multiple we use to value the entire team to those revenues not associated with the size or demographics if its market, or its portion of league-share revenue.

So brand value isn’t franchise value. It’s the value the franchise gets from the brand name they’ve built - the name recognition, the amount people are willing to spend for their product instead of something similar from someone else.

Purely MLB-related:

#7 business - YES - $625 m
#8 business - NESN - $510 m
#9 business - MLBAM - $480 m
#2 team - Yankees - $443 m
#6 team - Red Sox - $237 m
#7 team - Dodgers - $225 m
#5 event - World Series - $135 m
#10 event - MLB All-Star Week - $86 m