The Bengals Are Stuck In Cheap Ownership Purgatory
Credit: Sam Greene - via Imagn Images
Fans have had gripes with the Cincinnati Bengals ownership for as long as time itself has existed. It’s a tradition as beloved as Christmas morning. A tradition as beloved as losing in the first round of the playoff with Marvin Lewis as the head coach. The Bengals’ ownership has long had a reputation for being cheap. The national media knows it. You know it. I know it. Even people who live under a rock know it!
The fans’ gripes with the Bengals’ ownership has repeatedly made them utter those dreaded three words: Sell the team.
City of Cincinnati needs to force Mike Brown to sell the team to some Saudis. You can’t rob a fanbase of 10+ years of Burrow/Chase/Higgins
— Ethan🫐 (@SoftlyAugust) October 6, 2024
Now, selling the team can have great benefits. It can, of course, hand the team off to a fresh regime who can recommit the team to winning ways. It can also prevent a weekly dosage of “What the hell did Dan Snyder do THIS time?” news pieces. In sports, the best competitive advantage a team can have is a good owner. If they continually invest in their product, the team can remain competitive for long periods of time, and not just because Joe Burrow fell into their laps at the exact right time.
Unfortunately, the Bengals are stuck in Cheap Ownership Purgatory. The Brown family has owned the team since its inception in 1968, and Mike Brown has given no inclination that his family will sell the team. By letting good players consistently walk in free agency and struggling to negotiate with its star players, they’ve given no inclination that their cheap ways will end any time soon. Other than perhaps selling the naming rights of the stadium behind the city’s back so they can afford Joe Burrow’s contract, they aren’t full of Dan Snyder-esque scandals that would necessitate the league coming in and forcing a sale of the franchise.
However, just for funsies, let’s say a sale were to take place.
Business owners are frequently moving teams to bigger markets so they can acquire a bigger profit. This is a day in age where owners are moving teams to Las Vegas at the first chance they have, even though the NFL quickly discovered that having young, newfound millionaires in a city whose economy is based on its nightlife isn’t always the best idea.
Cincinnati’s professional sports teams have remained small market teams and stayed loyal to frugal practices in a world where inflation won’t seem to slow down any time soon. In 2024, the Reds are the third least valuable team in all of baseball ($1.18 billion), and one of the two teams below them is moving to Las Vegas in just a few years time. On the other side of downtown Cincy, per CNBC, the Bengals are the lowest valued team in the entire NFL ($5.25 billion) and had the second lowest revenue of any team in the NFL ($546 million) last season. Per SportsMediaWatch.com, Cincinnati is the 37th largest sports market in America. Of the cities above them in the rankings list, 12 of them do not have an NFL team, and two of those cities (St. Louis and San Diego) have had a team move from those cities in the past ten years.
If the Brown family sold the team to Insert Rich Guy Here, they would almost assuredly not hesitate to move the team to a bigger market. If Jeff Bezos bought the team, he would likely move it out of Cincy and charge the team for shipping unless they have an Amazon Prime membership. If Elon Musk purchased the team, he would stuff the franchise into one of his box cars, move them to Orlando, and require his players to compliment their teammates by saying “He’s got that DOGE in him.” There is no doubt that even with Cincinnati’s loyal, diehard fan base, a businessman who values profits over loyalty would give zero f***s and jump ship from the Queen City at the first chance they got.
As infuriatingly cheap as the Brown family’s ownership ways are, they are at least loyal and committed to (and as far as tax dollars are concerned, tied to) the city of Cincinnati. Even though the stadium’s lease expires in 2026, and negotiations are tense up to this point, there are no immediate plans for ownership to sell or for the team to move.
For now, the ownership will remain the Brown/Blackburn family business. It’s been that way for the past few decades, and it’s a purgatory that the franchise won’t escape any time soon. A sale of the franchise will only result in a worst-case scenario of the Bengals no longer calling Cincinnati home. No matter how many times people tweet “SELL THE TEAM” at Bengals’ social media interns, Cincinnati is stuck with the frugal ownership they’ve come to tolerate over the last several decades.
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