TO ITS OWNER, a sports team is more than just a plaything. If you happen to have the billions it takes to acquire one, you presumably have a near-infinite number of ways to spend your money. By buying a team, an owner can reveal their inner winner—or make people forget how they made all that money in the first place. Thus, a shipbuilder and Watergate bit player named George Steinbrenner could take over the Yankees and turn himself into The Boss. If his dad had never bought the Knicks and the Rangers, Jim Dolan would just be an angry guy who used to own a cable company. An owner gets to play fantasy in real life, going to work at a park. And what other trophy asset can end up yielding an actual trophy?
If everything had gone according to plan, Steven A. Cohen might have been parading down the Canyon of Heroes this month. When he purchased the New York Mets in 2020 for a record-setting price of $2.4 billion, Cohen promised to restore his favorite team from childhood to glory, saying he would be disappointed if he did not bring it another World Series within “three to five years.” He then assembled the highest-paid roster in baseball history. The ecstatic Mets nation treated the richest man in baseball like he was a free-spending folk hero. At 67, Cohen, a Stamford-based hedge-fund manager, has $14 billion according to Bloomberg, or maybe $19 billion if you believe Forbes, but at any rate, a whole lot of money—seemingly more than enough to procure a championship. Some fans took to calling him “Uncle Steve,” a nickname that seems to please the proprietor.
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