Team Financials Question

[RedsRule]

Started a New 2009 Major League with the default setup as Cincinnati (duh)and was reviewing my Team Financials and noticed to my utter shock that I had negative 1 billion dollars in Merchandising Revenue. Obviously this is impacting my overall financials.

Anybody got any idea what is going on here?

[Spritze]

Merchandising revenue is created by OOTP, no one knows where it comes from, no one knows where it goes. Kinda ghost like. There is a bug in the 2009 line of the financials.txt file. Start your league in 2010 if you can.

[tysok]

Merchandising si some complicated formula that takes several pieces of the financial page into account to come up with a semi-realistic number. Of course, if those other numbers aren't realistic neither will merchandising.

Having -1 billion in merchandising isn't good... tell your people to stop paying customers to take hats and jerseys - have some pride man!

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by tysok

Merchandising si some complicated formula that takes several pieces of the financial page into account to come up with a semi-realistic number.

Not really. Merchandising only accounts for a relatively small amount of a major league club's income. At least, that's the case based on the 1996-98 financial statements of the Cleveland Indians.

Here's the breakdown of the revenue sources by percentage of total revenue averaged over the 1996-98 seasons:

Ticket sales = 42.5%
Local radio and television = 13.6%
Concessions and catering = 12.3%
Private suite and club seat rental = 6.8%
Advertising and promotion = 6.9%
Merchandise = 3.1%
Major Leagues Central Fund* = 12.0%
Other (primarily MLB Properties**) = 2.7%

*Major Leagues Central Fund consists primarily of each team's share of the national television and radio contracts.
**MLB Properties is the merchandising arm of MLB; clubs share the revenue generated by MLB-level merchandise sales equally.

As can be seen, merchandising only accounts for 3.1% of the club's revenue. If you want to be more liberal in your definition of merchandising, then adding in the Other and Concessions and Catering categories brings the percentage up to 18.1%. That's still less that one-fifth of total revenue.


There are also detailed financial statements for the 1993-98 Seattle Mariners and the 1997-99 San Diego Padres, but don't have the percentages for each revenue type handy at the moment.

[tysok]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Not really. Merchandising only accounts for a relatively small amount of a major league club's income. At least, that's the case based on the 1996-98 financial statements of the Cleveland Indians.

Semi-realistic was the key there. It is far far far (I might even add another 2 or 3 fars) better than the original 2006 financials where merchandising often accounted for 50-60% of a teams revenue, and seemed to be based on nothing that exists in this plane of reality.

If you like, we can remove semi-realistic and just say it uses some complicated formula that takes several pieces of the financial page into account to come up with a number that isn't completely and totally (as well as utterly) ridiculous.


Also, after seeing the crap that has come out of the default financials this year (and this has nothing to do with the financials.txt file... it's something embedded in the game) I so hope the financial system gets its long overdue overhaul for next year.

[gord]

When playing around with the financials.txt file, I got that same thing when trying to apply historical financial settings. Somehow my financials.txt file was corrupted and was giving me wacky numbers like $-1B.

[tysok]

I'm off tomorrow so I'm going to spend a little time (hopefully) tomorrow seeing if I can track down what's destroying the finances of these teams.

I'm wondering if this could be an issue with the AI:
from another thread here:

After year 1 of my sim, a number of the players who were arbitration eligible received far more than they were projected on the salary report. It's obviously a small sample, but I was surprised just how high many of these contracts were for. Cleaned out my payroll so that I cannot sign other players.

That's good... but could also be very bad for AI controlled teams.

[RedsRule]

Is this going to be something that is going to whack my $$ moving forward in the league?

[tysok]

Originally Posted by RedsRule

Is this going to be something that is going to whack my $$ moving forward in the league?

Theoretically it should fix itself next year. Just give yourself a billion in media revenue to fix it in the short term.

[RedsRule]

Cool...I'll do that...THX

[Spritze]

Originally Posted by RedsRule

Cool...I'll do that...THX

You should also give Tysok $50,000 as the idea man!

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by tysok

Also, after seeing the crap that has come out of the default financials this year (and this has nothing to do with the financials.txt file... it's something embedded in the game) I so hope the financial system gets its long overdue overhaul for next year.

Me too. I've got some ideas as well as an amount of real-world data as a reference that should (hopefully) serve to make any overhauled financial system truly realistic as well as flexible...