The world's most valuable sports teams: Meet Forbes' top 10

This year’s Forbes list of the world's most valuable teams is heavy with two kinds of football and features a new top squad. Can you guess which team, and which sport, nabbed the number one spot? 

2. Manchester United

Jon Super/AP/File
Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson gestures to supporters after the English Premier League soccer match away against West Bromwich Albion, his last as manager of Manchester United, at The Hawthorns Stadium, West Bromwich, England, Sunday May. 19, 2013

Sport: Soccer

City: Manchester, England

Owner: Glazer family

Value: $3.165 billion

Legendary Man-U manager Sir Alex Ferguson retired at the end of last season, after winning 20 league titles and helping turn his club into a valuable global brand. The team recently signed a record-breaking jersey sponsorship deal with Chevrolet worth $559 million over seven years. Last summer, the team made an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, and it became the first sports franchise valued at over $3 billion in 2013. But Manchester United was knocked out of Forbes’ top spot by another European soccer powerhouse. 

9 of 10

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.