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.
