By Jose Navarro, MBA | San Diego | The Navarro Report
Anaheim just closed the book on a stadium dispute that cost a mayor his career and the city $2.75 million. That settlement, reached September 1, is a convenient moment to ask a bigger question: across the three Major League Baseball franchises anchoring Southern California — the Dodgers, Angels, and Padres — which market actually underwrites its team, which team has the strongest financial trajectory, and how do the fan bases each club is built to serve compare on the ground?
The settlement that started it
The city of Anaheim will pay the Angels $2.75 million, which officials expect to recoup through stadium revenue, in exchange for the right to build a fire station on Angel Stadium’s grounds. The deal closes a saga that began with the city’s since-voided $320 million stadium sale, halted after an FBI probe found then-Mayor Harry Sidhu had offered the team confidential negotiating information while soliciting a $1 million campaign contribution. Sidhu resigned and later pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges. It is worth being precise about the governmental layer involved: Angel Stadium is a City of Anaheim asset, not an Orange County one. The county government itself has no direct financial stake in the ballpark — a distinction that matters for anyone trying to track which public body actually carries the risk.
Who gets more public money: a city-by-city accounting
None of the three stadiums is county-financed. Each sits on municipal, not county, books.
San Diego carries the largest and most direct public subsidy of the three. The city financed $301 million of Petco Park’s $474 million construction cost in the early 2000s, sold to voters via a 1998 ballot measure that promised new hotel, sales, and redevelopment-agency tax revenue would cover the debt without touching the general fund. That promise did not fully hold. A decade after Petco Park opened, the city was still funneling roughly $14.5 million a year — about 8% of citywide tourism tax revenue — into ballpark bond payments and operations after accounting for Padres rent, because the redevelopment-agency funding stream it relied on was clawed back when California dissolved redevelopment agencies statewide in 2011.
Anaheim’s exposure is smaller in dollar terms but longer-running and reputationally costlier. The city owns Angel Stadium outright, has extended the team a below-market lease for decades, and just spent years and $2.75 million cleaning up a corruption scandal tied to an attempted sale of the property. It is public ownership without Petco Park’s scale, but with its own accountability history.
The Dodgers are the outlier. Dodger Stadium was privately financed in 1962 by owner Walter O’Malley for $23 million — the first privately built MLB stadium since the original Yankee Stadium in 1923 — and Los Angeles carries no equivalent annual subsidy today. That does not mean the Dodgers’ site was cost-free to the public. The land was assembled by the city in the early 1950s under eminent domain for a 3,600-unit public housing project, Elysian Park Heights, that displaced more than 1,000 mostly Mexican American families from Chavez Ravine. The housing project collapsed amid a political fight over “socialist” public spending, and a 1957 City Council ordinance transferred the vacant, publicly assembled land to O’Malley. The Dodgers pay no ongoing stadium subsidy; Los Angeles paid a different, one-time price decades ago that still shapes the franchise’s origin story.
The financial trajectory: not close
By any current measure, the Dodgers are in a different tier. Forbes and Sportico both put the franchise’s value between roughly $8 billion and $9 billion, trailing only the Yankees, on 2025 gross revenue of about $1.1 billion — a threshold previously reached only by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and Real Madrid. The team’s local television deal alone is reported to have paid more than $200 million last season, roughly triple the league average, and Shohei Ohtani’s arrival has pulled in sponsorship and Japanese broadcast audiences (9.7 million viewers per World Series game last fall) that no other West Coast club can match.
The Padres and Angels are both mid-tier franchises whose valuations moved sharply this year for the same underlying reason: both are changing hands. The Padres, valued around $3.1 billion by Forbes, sold this year for $3.9 billion to José Feliciano and Kwanza Jones — an eight-times-revenue multiple — after a legal dispute among the family of late owner Peter Seidler was resolved. The Angels, valued around $2.8 billion, are now being sold by Arte Moreno to Stan Kroenke for a reported $4 billion, a ten-times-revenue multiple that would be the highest price ever paid for an MLB club, pending completion. Both deals reflect buyer enthusiasm for Southern California markets more than either team’s on-field or balance-sheet performance; both franchises posted negative operating income in the most recent reporting period Forbes tracked. On attendance, the Padres are ahead — 3.4 million fans in 2025, second only to the Dodgers leaguewide and well clear of the Angels — giving San Diego’s front office a stronger near-term revenue floor than Anaheim’s, even before Kroenke’s ownership era begins.
The demographic case for each market
San Diego County is 35.7% Hispanic or Latino with a median household income of $106,268. Orange County is 34.3% Hispanic or Latino with the highest median household income of the three markets, $116,289. Los Angeles County is 49.3% Hispanic or Latino — nearly half the county — with a lower median household income, $90,112, reflecting its far larger and more economically varied population base of 9.7 million.
The practical read: the Dodgers sit inside the single largest and most Hispanic media market of the three by a wide margin, which helps explain both their revenue ceiling and the outsized Spanish-language broadcast audience that follows Mexican and Latin American stars like Yamamoto’s teammates. The Angels operate in a higher-income, lower-density market that has historically underperformed its income level in attendance and revenue relative to the Dodgers next door — a gap a new ownership group with fresh capital may be assembled specifically to close. The Padres, San Diego’s only major professional franchise since the Chargers left for Los Angeles in 2017, have a market to themselves in a way neither LA team can claim, which likely explains why a border region with fewer than a third of LA County’s population still produces MLB’s second-highest attendance figures.
The verdict
San Diego has paid the most in direct, traceable public dollars for its ballpark and continues paying today. Anaheim has paid the smallest dollar figure but the highest reputational cost, closing out a corruption scandal that reached the mayor’s office. Los Angeles paid nothing recurring for its stadium, but its origin story carries a public cost measured in displaced families rather than bond payments. And on pure financial trajectory, the Dodgers aren’t in the same conversation as their Southern California rivals — while the Angels’ and Padres’ sales this year suggest investors think both of the smaller markets still have room to grow into their price tags.
Jose Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and public affairs analyst based in San Diego with more than two decades of experience in public finance, government contract compliance, and nonprofit management. He publishes The Navarro Report, an independent outlet covering fiscal accountability and government spending.
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