It has been a while since Atlanta Braves fans have clamored for Liberty Media to sell the team. As it turns out, six straight division titles and a World Series win does a lot to create goodwill amongst those that call the Braves their team. While there have been some holdouts that will not be happy unless the Braves get a free spending owner like Ted Turner or Steve Cohen, the vast majority agrees that the Braves are in a great spot right now.
Still, there have been some rumblings for a while that Liberty Media may be considering selling the Braves in the wake of their decision to split the team off into a separate company with it's own publicly traded stock. There were no indications that Liberty Media chairman John Malone (who still controls almost half of the Braves' shares) was looking to sell the Braves after the re-structuring, but the split definitely got folks' attention.
There is even more smoke now around a potential sale of the Braves as there is at least one financial analyst that really seems to think that they could be sold soon.
Braves Rumors: Financial analyst is betting on the Braves being sold soon
To be clear, this isn't just some columnist or sportswriter blindly predicting something ridiculous for clicks. This stems from the decision by a top securities firm, Rosenblatt Securities, to go ahead and actively adjust their financial outlook for the Braves' stock upward to $53 a share and publicly predict that a "billionaire" is likely to purchase the team in the near future. It is one thing to just throw a prediction out there with little in the way of accountability. This is a legit financial firm that is putting their money and reputation where their mouth is.
The idea behind this is actually pretty straight-forward. By splitting the Braves off as a separately-held company, the tax ramifications of selling them become far less prohibitive after the new company exists for a year or two. Given that the split from Liberty Media happened last summer, that means selling the Braves becomes much more likely in the next 6-12 months. Clearly Rosenblatt Securities is reading those tea leaves as well as others the public may not be aware of to mean that a wealthy individual or ownership group could swoop in soon and buy the Braves.
There is not much sense in trying to predicting who could buy the Braves because, well, anyone with that kind of money could be interested in the Braves just based on the value of the investment alone. The Braves are among the most valuable franchises in all of MLB and are still trending upward. Even Warren Buffet likes how the Braves are positioned as his company bought a significant stake back in November 2023.
What we do know is that based on the moves that Liberty Media and the Braves have made over the last year, a sale is a lot more possible than it previously was even if this all turns out to be nothing more than a corporate numbers game playing out.