John Malone: The Atlanta Braves Are ‘Not for Sale’
As much as speculation about a potential sale of the Atlanta Braves keeps turning up like a bad penny, John Malone has no intention of auctioning off the club.
In a phone interview with Sportico, the chairman of Liberty Media dismissed the notion that the company has considered putting the franchise on the market. “The Braves aren’t for sale, and the corporation that owns the Braves is not for sale,” Malone said Thursday. “I would only consider supporting a transaction that involves the Braves if it had the full enthusiastic support of the management team that runs the Braves.”
Neither Braves Holdings president and CEO Terry McGuirk nor anyone else in the upper echelons of management has suggested they were interested in selling the club. “They have not come to me with any kind of a proposal to do anything involving ownership of the Braves,” Malone said. “Terry and the guys have done a fabulous job with the Braves, we’re extremely proud of the team, the performance and particularly the real estate project.”
In addition to constructing a new 41,000-seat ballpark in 2017, the Braves have developed some 2 million square feet of mixed-use space, including a 4,000-seat concert venue, a pair of hotels and a cluster of multifamily residential communities.
Malone, who’s been involved with the Braves since 1987, when he led a consortium of cable companies that made a $568 million investment (a sum that translates to $1.57 billion today) in Turner Broadcasting, engineered a spinoff of the team from Liberty that was completed in July 2023. While talk about a sale remains unfounded, Malone reached out to Sportico after recent remarks made by Liberty Media president and CEO Greg Maffei were misinterpreted in the press.
A review of the comments made by Maffei Tuesday at the MoffettNathanson Media, Internet and Communications Conference support the notion that the significance of the executive’s statement—which amounted to a wholly noncommittal “we’ll see”—was overstated.
According to Malone, the legalese underpinning the Braves spinoff prevents him from putting the team on the block. “When we spun the Braves off, I personally had to sign a representation to the lawyers that I had no plan or intent to sell my interest in the Braves,” he said.
Malone added that the team will likely have to “invest more money relative to the television side of the business” should the RSN model collapse altogether.
The Braves are one of five MLB teams that have backed the league’s efforts to move on from the bankrupt Diamond Sports RSNs. After talks between Comcast and DSG broke off two weeks ago, Xfinity subscribers in Atlanta’s footprint of 2.74 million TV homes can no longer access Braves games via Bally Sports South.
Already the most plugged-in player in the media business, Malone is particularly well versed in the rapidly evolving RSN space. That’s at least partly a function of the fact that McGuirk, in addition to his duties with the Braves, is the chairman of the MLB Media Committee.
While it remains to be seen how things will shake out with Diamond—a confirmation hearing in their ongoing bankruptcy case is scheduled for June 18—Malone isn’t about to end his near 40-year affiliation with the club anytime soon.
“The reality is, the team is not for sale,” he said. “And it’s prudent on my part to basically not even engage in those kinds of discussions until the spinoff transaction is very old and very cold.”
The Braves generated $37.1 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2024, good for a 20% increase versus the year-ago period. Baseball revenue was up 25% to just shy of $22 million, while the mixed-use development segment grew 13% to $15.1 million. As of Thursday evening, the club was 26-14 and three games back of the Phillies in the NL East.
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