If you are a sports fan, it is often times to see easier to see business themes in sports  and one of those books where it is evident is Ron Jaworski’s book The Games that Changed the Game, The Evolution of the NFL in Seven Sundays, Random House, NY, 2010. Mr. Jaworski was a quarterback and maybe familiar to people as one of the broadcasters on Monday Night Football with the nickname of Jaws.

The NFL is a very profitable league, the TV contract is worth billions, each team is worth a billion or close to it, the owners are up in that category, which leads to parity in the league – any team has all the resources it needs to win. The variable is the coaching and intergrating the players into their coaching system. Winning management styles differ over the years – some coaches yell, some are soft spoken, but all expect results, and if they do not deliver their time as head coach is a generally a short one. Mr. Jaworski says there is no simple way to win a football game. There are many paths and that is why people watch and continue to care about the game. There are many levels to watch a game from on one level it is physical activity; another level it is a chess match; another level it is about quality of players; another level it is coaching style; another level it is putting everything together in to make a whole; another level it is entertainment.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, if you focus on the teams, all of the teams make money, lots of it. Even though they compete against each other, they share TV revenues and that is a large portion of the budget. From a financial point of view as long as the league does not expand, winning is not necessarily the most important element. Having said that, the owners of the teams over their careers have been successful and do not like to lose or they do not stand pat for long. In the case of your dividend paying stocks, the company has proven to be successful, the question for you is how much monopoly like conditions apply to your companies? Is this percentage likely to continue? if it is then you have little to worry about; if not there are industries that operate on monopoly or semi-monopoly like conditions – check them out.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions