Financial Reference for OOTP6 Preview

[Ben E Lou]

[Ben E Lou]

And now, for comparison sake, here we are 16 years later. I am not that familiar with the financials, so I'll leave the analysis to others. Re-opening thread.

[Ben E Lou]

[Eaglesfan27]

Is it possible something happened in formatting, otherwise it seems like MANY teams are having a huge change for the worse in marketing revenue in this season as compared to the last season column.

Edit: Nevermind, you must be mid year, because the attendance revenue is showing the same trend.

[Alan T]

Is it possible something happened in formatting, otherwise it seems like MANY teams are having a huge change for the worse in marketing revenue in this season as compared to the last season column.

Edit: Nevermind, you must be mid year, because the attendance revenue is showing the same trend.


Yep, it appears he is exactly 5 games into the season for most teams :)

[Ben E Lou]

Yeah...uh...this is meant to compare to 16 years earlier. Look at the date on the second one. It is *very* early in the season.

[Maple Leafs]

At first glance, it seems like the merchandising issue has improved.

[Alan T]

At first glance, it seems like the merchandising issue has improved.


Sean, that was my first instinct as well until I went back and looked at my old notes. At second glance, it appears to be the same.

The current problem with merchandising revenue is that it changes but not by much over a period of a few years. The above example is a 16 year time frame where most teams did not change much at all (a few million here or there).

The reason why it bites alot of people in online leagues is by default unless you change it, OOTP initially bases merchandising revenue on what it starts at (and that usually is defined in the initial draft based on team salary, or in leagues with no initial draft it seems to be more random.) The issue as it is today, a team that goes from a small payroll (Tampa Bay as an example) with a low merchandising revenue who then turns their team into a 5 time WS winner, will likely have increased fan interest, increased ticket sells, increased broadcasting revenue, but merchandising revenue likely will not increase that much from year to year.

I don't think the above examples gives a whole lot of change from what we see now. We currently now see 2 million dollar swings in merchandising revenue over a 10 year period, which is what we see there.

What might be hard to tell is what happened year to year in Skydog's league. If it changed faster year to year then that would probably be improved somewhat.

[Maple Leafs]

Sean, that was my first instinct as well until I went back and looked at my old notes. At second glance, it appears to be the same.I think you may be right.

Keep in mind that SkyDog's league started with fairly equal finances. Most online leagues start with unbalanced situations (Yankees with $35M merchandising, Devil Rays with $10M). That's a permanent $25M advantage, which makes it next to impossible for small market teams to ever compete on equal footing, even if they turn themselves into big markets.

This is a huge issue for online leagues, and it looks like it wasn't addressed... again.

[kcchief19]

That was my thought too, Alan. It does appear to be improved, but I think part of that may come from SkyDog using the adjust market button when he created his fictional universe. Everyone started in a rather narrow band.

The good news is that the band expanded in 16 years, so perhaps that's a good sign.

The other possibility is that Markus has simply adjusted the value of merchandising revenue. This league started with everyone in a narrow band rather than with Tampa Bay at $8 million and New York at $40 million. If the solution to tieing fan support/market size/team success to merchandise revenues was to simply downplay the value of merchandising revenue, I'd be in favor of that.

Of course, it wouldn't fix existing leagues, but if it did that could actually lead to more problems.

[Alan T]

That was my thought too, Alan. It does appear to be improved, but I think part of that may come from SkyDog using the adjust market button when he created his fictional universe. Everyone started in a rather narrow band.

The good news is that the band expanded in 16 years, so perhaps that's a good sign.

The other possibility is that Markus has simply adjusted the value of merchandising revenue. This league started with everyone in a narrow band rather than with Tampa Bay at $8 million and New York at $40 million. If the solution to tieing fan support/market size/team success to merchandise revenues was to simply downplay the value of merchandising revenue, I'd be in favor of that.

Of course, it wouldn't fix existing leagues, but if it did that could actually lead to more problems.


Stabalizing the financial environment at the start was actually always the recommendation, and if done in our league we would not be having the same issues. :) I just was always amused by a financial value increasing or decreasing from year to year not based on your success but instead based on how much you spent :) Sounds like my Tax accountant from my 1999 Tax return somehow...

[Maple Leafs]

Stabalizing the financial environment at the start was actually always the recommendation, and if done in our league we would not be having the same issues.Of course, now that we know OOTP6 isn't addressing it like we hoped, we could actually get off our butts and work on fixing it now.

(Uncomfortable silence.)

(Crickets chirping.)

(Tumbleweed blows by.)