Bloomberg Businessweek starts annual sports issue

Bloomberg Businessweek released Thursday its first sports issue with 37 pages of the Oct. 24-30 issue devoted to an in-depth look at the business of sports.

Stories on the Green Bay Packers’ operation, the anatomy of a baseball trade and the first index detailing how much 122 professional teams spend on average for a win, continue the magazine’s mission of covering the world of business while expanding readers’ notion of what “business” can mean.

“Most people see sports through the lens of a game, but we wanted to show how the decisions and  transactions made off the field shape what happens on it – and how they can be just as compelling as the game itself,” said editor Josh Tyrangiel in a statement.

The cover of the Bloomberg Businessweek sports issue features the NFL’s Green Bay Packers President and CEO Mark Murphy with 100 Packers fans at Lambeau Stadium.

The cover story ‘Meet the Best Owners in Football’ examines how, with Murphy’s guidance and the fervent passion of its fans, the Packers, ‘a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit,’ have become ‘the NFL’s dominant team and a paragon of the modern sports organization…despite the fact that it plays in by far the smallest of the league’s 32 cities.’

The issue’s centerfold is ‘The Efficiency Index’ which rates how well the four major U.S. professional sports leagues — the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB — have turned payroll dollars into wins over the last five seasons.

Pairing all 122 teams’ regular season wins and losses with their player payroll data, Bloomberg Businessweek determined an average cost per win in each league.  Then they measured — by standard deviation — how far each team varied from the league norm.  The Index reveals how every U.S. franchise compares to its cross-sport peers in squeezing wins from money.