More Than the Talents: The Hefty Cost of Owning, Managing a Basketball Team

Building and managing your own basketball team isn't just about recruiting the best players, hire the best coach, and let them play on the court. It involves more than the talents of the players and the genius of a coach. After all, most fans tend to forget that basketball is and will always be a business and in business, investments are required.

And before you can even recruit players on your team, you will already need to spend a big amount to even get things rolling. In the National Basketball Association (NBA), buying teams has been a practice that has been done in the past and that, the numbers involved aren't a joke. For one to become a team owner in the NBA for example, one has to choose between buying a successful team or an unsuccessful team. And yes, there's a big difference in buying a successful team and an unsuccessful team. For a successful team, the estimated amount, according to Forbes.com dating back to the end of the 2009-2010 season, for one buy a team that is successful is 655 million US Dollars or more than 32 billion Pesos. The breakdown of the said amount includes the brand management of the team and the expenses for the team's stadium. Buying a team that hasn't been successful can cost someone 258 million US Dollars or almost 13 billion Pesos. And those amounts are just for the purchase of a team.

Expenses in operating and managing an NBA team, or any basketball team in general, is a headache even among richer teams, especially in the big league. By the end of the 2010-2011 season, the New York Knicks spent 4.7 million Dollars on the players' uniform, 2.4 million Dollars for transporting the team from one city to the other, and 4.4 million Dollars on the food of the team. They also spent 2.4 million Dollars on the team's medical expenses as well as 4.4 million Dollars for the training expenses. 

Perhaps, the most important aspect of building and managing a successful basketball team is the team's ability to pay for the coaches, team personnel, and most importantly, the players themselves. Now, since the NBA long has a salary cap to limit how money teams can pay on their players, teams have different approaches to how they pay their players. For example, the Knicks, as reported in the past, used to pay 100 million Dollars on salaries alone with 30 million to the tax fund. It also depends on the kind of players one team has. For example, an "All-Star" player, who is selected to play in the All-Star Game, can obtain 12 million Dollars involuntarily but his mother team could also pay him up to 25% above the cap amount. Meanwhile, a "franchise player"  can be paid 17 million Dollars. In layman's terms, a player can only be considered as a franchise player if he gets to play for four consecutive seasons with one team and has already completed three All-Star teams or, two selections in the First to Second All-NBA Team. The salary situation of a player gets trickier if an All-Star player gets traded. 

At the end of the day, it's still a big decision whether you choose to own a team in the NBA or in any basketball league in the world. While the amounts stated above are all amounts for an NBA team, we can expect almost similar amounts for buying and managing a basketball team elsewhere. At the end of the day, it's a business decision and if your team is unsuccessful to achieve your goals, you might need to change things up. After all, as some movie villains say it when things aren't going their way, "It's just bad business"

Photo is from Extreme Sports Buzz