Baseball’s Most Valuable Teams 2026 |
Every year since Forbes first began publishing its ranking of Major League Baseball team valuations in 1998, the New York Yankees have claimed the top spot. But while the Bronx Bombers once again lead the league—at an estimated $8.5 billion—they face serious competition as the sport’s most valuable club for the first time in decades.
Forbes now values the Los Angeles Dodgers, the reigning World Series champions, at $7.8 billion, halving last year’s $1.4 billion gap between the historic rivals. Of course, $700 million is not exactly a Texas League blooper, but the difference stood at $2.1 billion just two years ago.
Most around the sport still believe that, relative to their actual business performance, the Yankees would command a premium if they ever hit the open market, giving them a valuation that in some ways makes them look more like an NBA or top-tier NFL franchise. But the Dodgers, who have been No. 2 in Forbes’ ranking since 2012, have taken a significant lead in terms of annual revenue, posting an estimated $850 million last year, versus $710 million for the Yankees. No other MLB club surpassed even $600 million last season, and across all of the team valuation lists Forbes published in 2025, only five clubs exceeded Los Angeles’ revenue figure: three European soccer powerhouses, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
Amid the turbulence with regional sports networks across the country, the Dodgers are locked into a local TV deal believed to have paid them more than $200 million last season—triple the MLB average, and more than $60 million ahead of the second-place Yankees—and the addition of Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani two seasons ago has helped put Los Angeles’ sponsorship revenue in a similarly untouchable stratosphere. While bankers caution that the $1 billion in deferred player salary on the Dodgers’ books might depress their price tag a bit, several told Forbes they could see the team’s revenue trajectory pushing its valuation ahead of the Yankees’ in the next few years.
Still, the 13% year-over-year growth in the value of the Dodgers looks modest next to the 59% of the San Diego Padres—No. 10 this year at $3.1 billion—and relative to the increases across much of the bottom tier of baseball, with the exception of the Chicago White Sox, whose valuation declined for the second straight year, to $1.94 billion.
The Miami Marlins, climbing 43% from 2025, now set the league’s floor at $1.5 billion—after an eight-year stretch in which they appreciated a mere 12%, from $940 million to $1.05 billion—and MLB’s 30 franchises are up 12% on average, to $2.9 billion, from $2.6 billion a year ago. It is baseball’s largest single-year rise since 2017’s 19%—a span in which the NBA, the NFL and the NHL have each posted a year-over-year gain of at least 28%.
MLB’s jump up this year might come as a surprise given the state of local media deals across the country, with regional sports network operator Main Street Sports Group winding down and a number of clubs scrambling to preserve a business line that just a couple of years ago represented nearly a quarter of teams’ total revenue on average.
“You’re not getting back to $90 million a year for the Diamondbacks,” media consultant Patrick Crakes says, referring to the reported average annual value of Arizona’s former local cable deal, which was terminated in 2023. “That doesn’t mean that what you can get out of pay TV plus streaming isn’t vital. It just doesn’t power those kinds of economics anymore, so baseball has to figure out how to try to claw some of that back and also position itself for a digital universe that may make it easier to make money in the future and has some upside to it.”
Baseball is also staring down a difficult labor negotiation. Team owners are expected to demand some form of a salary-cap system when their collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union expires in December, and a lockout is considered “almost guaranteed,” in the words of the MLB Players Association’s interim executive director. (Under the current model—which doesn’t cap player payrolls but imposes a competitive balance tax on big spenders, alongside the league’s revenue-sharing requirements—12 teams operated at a loss in 2025, according to Forbes estimates, relative to two in the NBA and zero in the NFL and the NHL in the most recent season with available data.)
On the other hand, the sale of the Tampa Bay Rays to homebuilding billionaire Patrick Zalupski in September for a reported $1.7 billion—well above Forbes’ valuation of $1.25 billion that spring—provided a strong sign of investors’ interest in baseball, as have several recent minority transactions around the sport.
The Rays deal valued the team at roughly 5.7 times trailing-year revenue, according to Forbes estimates, and the league’s average multiple now stands at 7.0x—trailing the NBA (12.9x), the NFL (10.7x), the NHL (9x) and MLS (8.9x) but the highest mark Forbes has measured for baseball in the 29-year history of its valuation ranking (excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season). Forbes values the Yankees at 12 times estimated 2025 revenue, approaching the NBA’s average multiple and better than 27 NFL franchises last year. Meanwhile, at the low end of the baseball spectrum, the Marlins’ 4.7x multiple would have beaten MLB’s average a decade ago.
At a league level, despite reworking its ESPN contract last year, baseball continues to see its national media revenue grow, and there is some optimism it could see another step-up in its next cycle of rights deals, starting in 2029, as long as the more popular NFL and NBA haven’t sucked up all of the cash available from debt-strapped broadcasters. In baseball’s favor, networks are hungrier than ever for live sports, the only real appointment viewing left on television, and the deteriorating local media market might end up giving MLB more games it can sell nationally right as it posts strong increases in its viewership. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is also eyeing a more centralized streaming package that would ideally include even teams like the Dodgers that are happy with their current setup.
Overseas markets are another area where MLB hopes to make financial progress in its next round of media deals. To date, the league has generally thrown in international rights in domestic deals or sold them off at negligible rates, but in Japan, for instance, viewership during the 2025 World Series—which, along with Ohtani, featured Japanese stars Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki of the Dodgers—averaged 9.7 million per game, better than Canada’s 8.1 million and more than half of the United States’ 16.1 million. Foreign companies could also help keep sponsorship revenue rising now that most teams have signed jersey patch partners and may not have much new domestic inventory to sell.
In a more obvious signal of the health of baseball, MLB’s attendance inched up to 71.4 million in 2025 even though the Athletics and the Rays spent the season in lower-capacity minor league ballparks, giving the league three straight years of ticketing growth—its first such stretch since 2005-07.
With all of that momentum, the Padres are widely expected to fetch more than $3 billion as the Seidler family looks to sell the club this year, perhaps even reaching $3.5 billion with the inclusion of their events business, which generates tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue apart from the team itself. Regardless of where exactly the Padres’ price lands, it will almost certainly demolish the record for an MLB control sale, set by Steve Cohen’s $2.4 billion purchase of the New York Mets in 2020.
MLB’S MOST VALUABLE TEAMS 2026
MLB’S MOST VALUABLE TEAMS 2026
One-Year Change: 4% | Revenue: $710 million | Operating Income: -$53 million | Owner: Steinbrenner family
One-Year Change: 13% | Revenue: $850 million | Operating Income: -$21 million | Owner: Guggenheim Baseball Management
One-Year Change: 9% | Revenue: $567 million | Operating Income: $78 million | Owners: John Henry, Tom Werner
One-Year Change: 9% | Revenue: $599 million | Operating Income: $58 million | Owner: Ricketts family
One-Year Change: 1% | Revenue: $477 million | Operating Income: $54 million | Owner: Greg Johnson
One-Year Change: 9% | Revenue: $553 million | Operating Income: -$214 million | Owners: Steve and Alexandra Cohen
Philadelphia Phillies
One-Year Change: 10% | Revenue: $539 million | Operating Income: -$52 million | Owners: Middleton family, Buck family
One-Year Change: 12% | Revenue: $524 million | Operating Income: $27 million | Owner: Atlanta Braves Holdings
One-Year Change: 14% | Revenue: $464 million | Operating Income: -$45 million | Owner: Jim Crane
One-Year Change: 59% | Revenue: $452 million | Operating Income: -$1 million | Owner: Seidler family
One-Year Change: 2% | Revenue: $377 million | Operating Income: -$14 million | Owners: Arturo and Carole Moreno
One-Year Change: 8% | Revenue: $350 million | Operating Income: $33 million | Owner: William DeWitt Jr.
One-Year Change: 10% | Revenue: $398 million | Operating Income: -$44 million | Owner: Ray Davis
One-Year Change: 16% | Revenue: $445 million | Operating Income: -$71 million | Owner: Rogers Communications
One-Year Change: 7% | Revenue: $390 million | Operating Income: $24 million | Owners: John Stanton, Chris Larson
One-Year Change: 2% | Revenue: $300 million | Operating Income: -$15 million | Owner: Lerner family
One-Year Change: 11% | Revenue: $355 million | Operating Income: $23 million | Owner: David Rubenstein
One-Year Change: 11% | Revenue: $320 million | Operating Income: $45 million | Owner: John Fisher
One-Year Change: 23% | Revenue: $324 million | Operating Income: -$31 million | Owner: Ken Kendrick
One-Year Change: -3% | Revenue: $239 million | Operating Income: -$40 million | Owner: Jerry Reinsdorf
One-Year Change: 12% | Revenue: $354 million | Operating Income: $47 million | Owner: Mark Attanasio
One-Year Change: 16% | Revenue: $363 million | Operating Income: $27 million | Owner: Ilitch family
One-Year Change: 14% | Revenue: $315 million | Operating Income: $11 million | Owner: Pohlad family
One-Year Change: 36% | Revenue: $290 million | Operating Income: $31 million | Owner: Patrick Zalupski
One-Year Change: 14% | Revenue: $319 million | Operating Income: $20 million | Owners: Richard Monfort, Charles Monfort
One-Year Change: 19% | Revenue: $337 million | Operating Income: $53 million | Owners: Paul Dolan, David Blitzer
One-Year Change: 26% | Revenue: $330 million | Operating Income: $25 million | Owner: John Sherman
One-Year Change: 20% | Revenue: $330 million | Operating Income: $48 million | Owner: Nutting family
One-Year Change: 21% | Revenue: $336 million | Operating Income: $26 million | Owner: Phil Castellini
One-Year Change: 43% | Revenue: $320 million | Operating Income: $53 million | Owner: Bruce Sherman
Forbes’ team valuations are enterprise values (equity plus net debt) based on historical transactions and the future economics of the sport and each team. Revenue and operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) are estimated for the 2025 season and are net of revenue sharing, competitive balance taxes and stadium revenue used for debt service. Playoff revenue is excluded.
The team values include the economics of each team’s stadium (including revenue from non-MLB events that accrues to the team’s owner) but not the value of the stadium real estate itself. Similarly, the values include rights fees from regional sports networks owned by a team but not the value of the RSNs themselves; equity stakes in other sports-related assets and mixed-use real estate projects are also excluded.
Team values are rounded to the nearest $10 million, and estimated revenue and operating income are rounded to the nearest $1 million. All figures are in U.S. dollars based on the average U.S.-Canada exchange rate during the 2025 season (1 CAD = 0.87 USD).
The information used to compile Forbes’ valuations primarily came from team and league executives, sports bankers, media consultants and public documents, such as stadium lease agreements and filings related to public bonds.