Rank Power Analysis for Comparative Strength of Professional Sports Franchises

Abstract

Major professional sports teams are nowadays complex businesses, intrinsically concerned with matters of economics and finance. Performances of each teams and each franchises vary greatly. This paper makes comparative performance analyses for four profession franchises in North America. Four financial measures are chosen to represent team performances: attendance, revenue, payroll, and profit. First, the box-plot was utilized to measure the spread of the power (wealth) of each league with respect to each measures. Second, the rank-power distribution was used to visualize the team’s relative standings in each measures and in each franchises. Most team performances were observed to follow the Pareto principle: few teams scored very high (significant few); large numbers of teams scored very low (trivial many). These qualitative findings can be a useful guide for franchise owners and commissioners for the future strategic planning.