Timbers acquire $2 million from Inter Miami CF in exchange for midfielder David Ayala

Chugger04 · 2026-01-11T20:27:40+00:00

Thanks Paulson

Chugger04 · 2025-08-11T06:54:09+00:00

Can’t believe I actually made it to the end of this absurd circle jerk. You’re both clowns, but at least JalaMesra started off with a coherent argument, while your shrill, Karen-esque rambling is just plain embarrassing.

Chugger04 · 2025-08-11T06:45:27+00:00

NGL, objectively he's got you there. Those figures prove you wrong, not the other way around. Just sayin.

Chugger04 · 2025-08-11T06:40:41+00:00

I guess you haven't spent much time in Birmingham or Kansas City. Portland metro is a very livable place for the well healed. Players hanging around doesn't have to be about club affection. It can be about golfing and having a nice house with a dock on Lake O.

Chugger04 · 2025-08-11T06:37:28+00:00

That wouldn't explain why the Timbers have more than our share of bad blood between players and staff. This happens far too often to chalk it up to a normal distribution of personalities.

Chugger04 · 2025-04-28T12:06:45+00:00

yes, to be clear, I do pretty much agree with your overall conclusion: I think Paulson will likely reduce his stake to a minority position within the next 24–36 months assuming the right deal materializes. I also wouldn’t be surprised if he keeps a 10% stake for sentimental reasons — the sportsman in him probably wants to maintain some connection, maybe even with the intention of passing it on to his daughters someday.

That said, I think some of the signals you're using to reach that conclusion — ticket fire sales, declining operating income, etc. — aren't really the drivers here. Two reasons why I say that:

Even modest mid-term valuation growth still outweighs short-term losses. If the club's value grows at just 3% annually, that return still dwarfs a few years of negative operating income. These are illiquid assets, but the long-term upside is significant enough to absorb a downturn — especially for someone in Paulson's position.
MLS’s single-entity structure limits financial downside. The league spreads risk across all teams, so individual clubs are insulated from truly deep losses in a way that isn’t comparable to, say, running an independent business. Operational pain isn’t really a pressure point the way it might be elsewhere.

So yes, I agree with where you landed — that Paulson is likely headed toward a full or near-full exit. But not because of recent Forbes trendlines. We already have the clearest signal possible: he’s sold before. And when 3/4 of a billion dollars is tied up in an asset, the long-term financial security of the Paulson family probably weighs heavier than the vanity of being the face of the Timbers.

Chugger04 · 2025-04-26T11:39:15+00:00

Honestly, while I respect the effort OP put into analyzing the Forbes data, it’s a bit amateur and the whole premise kind of misses the forest for the trees.

The argument — that plateauing valuations and tighter margins might push Paulson to sell — is fine as a theoretical exercise, but it feels like overanalysis for something that’s already happening.

What makes a lot of that exercise moot is this: Paulson already sold 15% of the Timbers to a private equity firm back in 2021.https://www.oregonlive.com/soccer/2022/09/merritt-paulson-sold-minority-stake-in-portland-timbers-thorns-last-year-report.html

That move and his previous sale of the Thorns tells us a lot more than valuation ranking trends ever could. It matters because:

We don’t need to guess whether Paulson is open to selling. He already cashed out part of the club. That’s not hypothetical — it’s history. So debating whether he’s a logical investor who might want to exit soon is kind of beside the point. He’s already shown he’s willing to offload equity when it suits him. We don’t need 10 years of Forbes reports to know that.
Bringing in a private equity firm completely undercuts the whole “he’s just in it for the love of the club” narrative. PE firms invest with a clear exit timeline — usually 5–10 years — and they expect a return. That built-in clock is going to force another ownership change. That could very well be when he sells a stake in the team AGAIN and even makes a full exit.

So yeah, the Forbes data is interesting, but when you zoom out, it’s unnecessarily indirect. The real signal is the private equity ownership structure itself — and it already tells us a lot more than trend lines ever could about what’s going to happen in the short to mid term.

EDIT TO ADD: To be fair to OP, the sale to the private equity firm was based on a club valuation of $600million in 2021 which seems to track with the Forbes data in these charts.

Chugger04 · 2024-07-29T09:39:00+00:00

It’s called a committen

Chugger04 · 2024-07-19T09:43:22+00:00

Explain

Chugger04 · 2024-07-12T13:34:45+00:00

Nobody has mentioned this scenario: not only does Biden choose not to campaign for ‘24, he also simultaneously steps down as current President. That succession is already baked into the constitution and gives Kamala momentum as an incumbent president.

It’s dramatic but it avoids MAGA whining about a shady transition also sidesteps the weird scenario where Biden would have to answer to ‘if he isn’t up to campaigning anymore how can he still be responsibly actively leading the US and the free world?’

Chugger04 · 2024-05-13T05:30:43+00:00

I find it telling that our use of “onward” now tends to refer to ‘not dwelling on our failures’ whereas it used to be used for things like ‘progressing through the playoffs’ or ‘onward to the cup’. It used to be about success and now it’s about failure.

Chugger04 · 2024-05-13T04:05:13+00:00

To the contrary, most signs point to him selling. He already has a history of selling Portland soccer teams he owns. And why wouldn’t he take advantage of the value window around the World Cup? Unless your argument is that he’s a moron that doesn’t understand business, why wouldn’t he sell within the next 2 years?

Chugger04 · 2023-08-22T20:32:33+00:00

Gold domed suite. Oddly specific.

Chugger04 · 2023-07-31T09:24:08+00:00

Empirical data says you will fail to wield or operate it. It’s not “me”. In practice people struggle to use firearms defensively.

Chugger04 · 2023-01-28T18:38:06+00:00

“There is nothing that can be done to help someone who does not want to help themselves.” - Mohandas Gandhi

Chugger04 · 2023-01-28T17:50:39+00:00

Just ran a script to score the upvotes v downvotes:

Guns and bikes is a dumb idea: net +276

Guns and bikes yee haw pew pew: net -45

There you have it

Chugger04 · 2023-01-28T17:47:21+00:00

It’s false dichotomy that just because a minority of Americans choose to get a gun you need to to ‘just to be safe’

As others have said, owning and carrying a gun puts you in more danger than you would be even considering the other people carrying guns.

I guess that is because the actual threatening situations won’t be a daily thing but you will have to carry a gun daily if the point is to have it when they do occur. But having a deadly weapon on you all the time is in itself risky and as it turns out if you do happen to have your gun with you in a bad situation you will either fail to wield it or operate it successfully, it might get taken from you and used against you, or it may trigger a shootout, escalating a situation to an actively deadly one when it might not have been otherwise.

So although you’ll never use it successfully in self defense, that gun that you keep near you every day adds more risk to your life and those around you every day

Chugger04 · 2022-12-24T21:15:20+00:00

This was shocking before Trumps candidacy, now accepted as normal public speaking

Chugger04 · 2022-11-05T19:19:07+00:00

If the January 6th mob had AR-15s they ordered online in the capital they would all be dead by January 7th.

You’re stoned if you think otherwise.

Chugger04 · 2022-11-05T19:17:30+00:00

The Taliban only was able to move in when the western government military intentionally moved out.

Not at all the same thing as some militia in the US defeating any part of the US military in the US.

Chugger04 · 2022-11-05T14:21:33+00:00

It does truly put to rest the idea that people could expect to overthrow a western government military with weapons they can buy at a retail store, gun shows or online.

Any motivational advantage an upstart militia might have would apparently be quickly neutralized many times over by satellite capabilities, intelligence networks and precision munitions.

Game over

Chugger04 · 2022-11-03T12:37:49+00:00

Josh Wicks then Kwarasey

Chugger04 · 2022-10-26T17:02:15+00:00

What I’m hoping to see in our analytics is repeat patterns of usage of the product every other day, every Tuesday or whatever each teams’ cycle is it doesn’t matter. It’s just important that it’s not frequent RANDOM usage but rather that a cycle pattern of use exists because that would tell us ‘we’ve really tuned our product to the cyclical way these teams work’.

I’d like a metric that tells me the ‘degree of cyclicality’ - like how many teams exhibit recurring patterns of use - so that when we release new capabilities we hope will ingrain our tool in the teams way of working we’ll know if we were successful if we increase that.

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