Braves owner to spin team off into separate company in mid-July

Liberty Media, which owns the Atlanta Braves as well as several other sports outfits, announced that it will formally split the team into its own company on July 18.

The new company, called Atlanta Braves Holdings Inc., will consist of the team, Truist Park and its surrounding mixed-use development called The Battery Atlanta. 

Last November, Liberty announced that it would make the move without setting a formal date.

Liberty bought the franchise from TimeWarner (now part of Warner Bros. Discovery) in 2007. The Braves are one of two teams in MLB where the majority owner is a corporation - the Toronto Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Communications.

Liberty's purchase of the team formally ended a decades-long relationship with Ted Turner, the media magnate who built CNN, TNT, TBS and other channels that would eventually be sold to TimeWarner. It also put in motion a controversial move from Turner Field in downtown Atlanta to what's now Truist Park in suburban Cobb County. 

The new owners believed that beyond television revenues, it could generate more revenue with a stadium surrounded by a "ballpark village" of sorts that included restaurants, bars, retail, apartments, office space and a hotel. Cobb County offered one of the most infamous publicly financed packages in history, and taxpayers are reportedly losing $15M per year on the deal. A separate report claims that The Battery has finally turned a profit a decade after opening up.

The Braves' success has certainly done wonders for Liberty, which also owns Formula 1, a majority stake in SiriusXM and a third of entertainment company LiveNation. Atlanta won the 2021 World Series title and it's littered with All-Stars throughout its best-in-league lineup.

Front Office Sports said the Braves have done quite well for themselves financially:

Liberty in May said the Braves grew first-quarter revenue 35% to $31M, boosted by strong early-season Truist Park crowds and increases in Battery rental income, extending a 4% rise in full-year 2022 revenue to $588 million. The Braves’ 2023 attendance is still up by 3% to an average of 39,076 per game, sixth best in the league.

Separating the team's assets into a separate company isn't an entirely new phenomenon, but it's new for baseball. In 2010, New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan split the sports assets he owned from his then-cable operator Cablevision. Dolan later spun off the group again into its own sports company while a new group was focused on entertainment venues.