The curtain call of the Bass era, the Lakers "sell themselves" capital for 10 billion

The power structure of professional sports is never static. In the past few years, European football and North American sports have been continuously embedded in a larger capital structure.

The team belongs to capital before it belongs to the fans. The importance of brand value, content derivatives and copyright is far greater than the performance of the field. So when a team changes hands, it is not just about changing the boss, but also a reset of the underlying genes and operational logic of a super company.

This time, it was the Lakers' turn.

According to multiple sources, the Bass family is about to reach an agreement with American businessman Mark Walter to sell most of the Lakers' equity, with a transaction valuation of about $10 billion.

Yes, 11 digits - the highest price of a professional sports team in history. The final transaction volume may continue to rise.

What I have to mention behind this deal is the $76 billion contract signed by the NBA with ESPN, NBC and Amazon. It can be said that since the moment this contract was negotiated, the valuation of NBA teams has been rewritten. The Celtics, which were $6.1 billion last year, are far from being raised for the Lakers today. The valuation of

10 billion US dollars is not only exclusive to the Lakers, but a signal that teams such as Celtics, Knicks, Warriors, and Heat with strong historical heritage and great city appeal may all usher in a "valuation freshman".

Teams are more valuable, and the league is more valuable. NBA President Xiao Hua's idea of ​​the league is becoming reality step by step, and he can finally make up for the anger he was born with due to the bleak ratings in the finals.

Source: Basketball Forever

Back to the Lakers themselves. According to ESPN's description, the old club, the Bass family will still hold the remaining 15% for "a period of time", and the head of the ball, Jenny Bass, will also remain in office for the time being and continue to play the role of the team's manager.

In fact, this is a conventional method in recent years - the Celtics and the Mavericks are all similar operations.

But in fact, the old club had already died in name only the moment they signed the contract, and lost all power at the team's development level. The only substantial reason for staying in the team was to let her employees complete the contract.

The official curtain call of an era. In 1979, Jerry Bass spent $67.5 million to buy ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers. In 46 years, the Bass family not only built the Lakers into one of the most influential sports teams in the world, but also made important contributions to the NBA's business model.

As we all know, David Stern has made an epoch-making contribution to the creation of the NBA brand, but in fact, some of the concepts and specific operation details come from Old Bass who were considered to have "new era thinking" at that time.

In a sense, Old Bass, who has never even played campus basketball, has changed basketball and sports.

Jerry Bass Source: GQ

The United States in the 1980s was an era of blockbusters, concerts and big waves. Although Old Bass, who lived in Southern California, never entered the entertainment industry, his lifestyle was deeply infected by Hollywood. And when he just became the Lakers boss, Bass, watching the NBA game with a single entertainment format, smelled business opportunities.

First, Bass hired a Hollywood front-line promotional film production team, invited a band from his alma mater, Southern Canada, and personally formed the famous "Laker Girls", which brought cheerleading into the NBA for the first time to run the Lakers' games according to the specifications of the award ceremony.

At the same time, Bass also moved the media seats set up on the sidelines at that time and invited Hollywood's biggest stars and celebrities to watch the game, making the sidelines seats a business card that demonstrates social status, so that the concept of "looking at NBA=fashionable" has been deeply embedded in the hearts of Americans.

Combined with the selection of Magicians and the famous "Showtime" sign, Bass brought unprecedented media attention and brand effect to the Lakers in a very short period of time. To this day, this concept is still being used by professional sports leagues and teams around the world.

is worthy of this family making 150 times more profitable.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

But the development of time has always moved forward.

The news of the Lakers' sale came out for a few hours. The Magician, who once brought five championships to the team and is currently a consultant of the Lakers' team, publicly vocalized on social media:

"About Mark (Walter), I can tell you! He pursues victory and excellence, does everything in the right way, and he will invest any resources needed to win!"

After all, the wheels are rolling forward, and the times will not wait for anyone. Although Jenny Bass has worked hard to maintain the family system left by her father over the years, under the impact of capital, the "vanguard" Bass family, which was then, has begun to appear somewhat conservative, restrained, and even out of date today.

Source: NBA

, and Mark Walter, who took over, is one of the most advanced and modern super players in today's professional sports.

can buy the Lakers at a record-breaking price of 1.5 times faster than the original valuation. Everyone knows that the new boss is definitely not an ordinary buyer. But when we really look back at Walter's resume, we can truly face up to the weight of this power transfer..

Walter's main identity is the co-founder and CEO of Guggenheim Partners, which has long focused on asset management, investment banking and insurance businesses, with clients covering dozens of Fortune 500 companies and managed assets of more than $325 billion.

Unlike Silicon Valley upstarts who are more and more happy, they are born in the financial and legal system, endorsing top companies, and what Walter represents is a more stable, older-school but also more underlying architecture Wall Street power.

Capital in

.

Mark Walter Source: Fox Business

At the same time, Walter also has one of the richest sports investment resumes in the world.

Since this century, he has won all of them in Los Angeles Dodgers, Los Angeles Sparks, Cadillac F1 team, Spire team fighting in NASCAR, and Andretti team fighting in IndyCar. In 2022, Walter also participated in the acquisition of Premier League team Chelsea, accounting for more than 10%.

If you don't limit your attention to successful cases, he also snatched the Clippers with Ballmer in 2014, and even tried to buy the parent company of the Crypto.com Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Staples Landlord.

The Lakers are just the latest one in his sports empire to "delist".

In fact, as early as four years ago, Walter joined hands with Chelsea boss Todd Burley to acquire 27% of the Lakers' equity, becoming the team's second largest shareholder, and also gaining priority to become the largest shareholder.

But the real question is, what changes will happen to the Lakers after taking over now? We can find clues from his management of the Dodgers over the past 13 years.

Although the MLB League is still trying to climb out of the vortex of audience aging, the Dodgers can be said to be the most representative modern professional sports specimen in the United States at present. Not only are they willing to sign phenomenal players like Shohei Otani for a sky-high price, but they also have the healthiest, most transparent and most modern management structure in the league.

Last week, The Athletic just released an anonymous questionnaire for MLB players, and Dodge was selected as the best-known management team in the players' minds. When it comes to their operational methods, some players even used the word "ideal".

Sometimes, the best management is not to manage.

Source: Fortune

Even from the fan level, it can be found that in the past few years, Aunt Jenny and Pelinka's actions and ideas have not always been objective. But when everyone puts team operations into modern industrial thinking and continuous value-added becomes the only goal, things will become simpler.

What's more, from the perspective of Dodge, Walter's style has always been: spending a lot of money and doing big things.

Lakers fans are blessed.

Old Bass taught the world how to turn basketball games into casinos with the Lakers, and Walter, may point to a bigger goal.

But just like the Mavericks who left Cuban can sell Doncic, some people have always called the Lakers "Steps" at home. When this team is thrown into a brand new, huge, and sophisticated capital machine, it may change its genes, but at the same time, there will always be new fans wearing purple gold jerseys and starting to shout for it.

History has repeatedly proved that major changes in professional sports - whether it is a leap in business models, a subversion of the valuation system or a reshuffle of the power structure, often start from big football markets such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston.

When legendary creators like the Bass family cashed out at a high level and chose to leave the game, the Lakers' purple gold weight movement not only changed the league's values, but perhaps the value of powerful men such as the Knicks and Warriors also became interested in selling the team.

※Article cover image source: Sportic