The Morning Chop: Corporate Wheelings and Dealings for Liberty Media?

But wait, there’s more…

The FOX Sports RSN empire holds broadcast rights with more than just the Braves.

In fact, here’s all of the teams that currently appear on those networks:  Arizona, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, LA Angels, Miami, Milwaukee, Minnesota, NY Yankees, St. Louis, San Diego, Tampa Bay, Texas.

Of some note: many of the smaller market clubs – the revenue sharing teams – are in this list. More on that in a bit.

Interesting Bedfellows

Here’s where the bidding by MLB in competition with Liberty Media gets even more intriguing. Here’s exactly half of the MLB teams that could be broadcast under the control of either MLB or LM… while LM is also a partner with MLB as an owner of one of those clubs.

Several things come to mind:

• Would this relationship represent an inherent conflict of interest… or is just the perception of a conflict of interest sufficient to make people nervous?
• As a winning bidder, could LM use their new power to drive down prices for future broadcast rights to not only better themselves, but to give the Braves a monetary advantage? Certainly MLB might have an interest in whether this happens.
• Could the TV blackout rules finally be changed as a result of a sale – assuming that either MLB or LM emerge as the winning bidder?  Even if so, would the fans benefit?
• If MLB were to win, what could that mean for the smaller market clubs under their umbrella?  Would this allow MLB to move more revenue to them… or vice versa?
• What about the impact on the Yankees and Braves, who are not small market teams?  [Yes, there’s more than one possible conflict of interest angle here!]
• Let’s suppose that LM is the winner: would MLB then force LM to sell the Braves because of this association… or just because of fear, or retaliation for out-bidding them?

As you can tell, there’s a lot more questions than answers, though the biggest ‘answer’ still needed at this point is pretty obvious: who is going to buy these networks from Disney?

Once that is determined – and there’s no clear favorite at all right now – then other pieces on this very large and expensive chess board can begin to move.