🔒Big plays in a small market: What it takes to run a pro sports team in Portland

Out of season and away from the ballpark, Slugger the Sea Dog skids across the ice for a double-mascot hug with orange-beaked Beacon the Puffin on Minor League Sports Night at Portland’s Cross Insurance Arena. ”Are you ready for hockey?” blares the baritone voice over the public-address system. The Maine Mariners most definitely were, pummeling Québec’s Trois-Rivières Lions in a 7-1 blowout marked by fisticuffs and flying pucks. The home team scored two goals in the first period garbed in Portland Sea Dogs jerseys, netted two more in the next period branded in Maine — and Boston — Celtics green and white, and three in the final period sporting hearts on their sleeves in homage to the Hearts of Pine soccer squad. A four-way lovefest under one roof? Unthinkable perhaps in places like Chicago and New York with bitter cross-town rivalries but par for the course in Portland. Home to pro men’s baseball, hockey, basketball and soccer teams — and a women’s pre-professional team in the works for next year — this 70,000-population city is still basking in the glow of being named 2024’s best minor-league sports market out of 194 locales ranked by Sports Business Journal. The accolade reinforced what locals have long known in a state many refer to as one big village. Fan support is infused in every chant of “Let’s go … Sea Dogs!” at Hadlock Field on a breezy summer night no matter what the score; every roar from the stands at a Maine Celtics game to win a boxed pizza sprint-delivered by green-clawed mascot Crusher; every “M-A-I-N-E!” heating up the Cross Insurance Arena and high-pitched “Woo … Woo!” after the Mariners score a goal and the lights flick off; and every thump of the drums in Fitzpatrick Stadium’s pink smoke-infused superfan zone during a Hearts soccer match. “In a state without major-league franchises, minor league teams carry outsized symbolic value, representing Maine on a regional and national stage,” says Aimee Vlachos, a University of New England business professor who teaches a class in sports governance. “That sense of ownership creates strong loyalty even when teams change leagues or levels.” But running a minor-league outfit in a small market like Portland is no slam dunk. All four teams are year-round businesses with seasonal demands and pressure to win games and championships. They are also chasing a limited number of sponsors in a sparsely populated state, juggling ticket pricing with rising costs, developing players and staff for bigger stages — and salaries — and selling branded merchandise. Way more entertainment-driven than the majors but with a fraction of the budgets, staff and revenue, all are making the most of cramped, dated leased facilities with big plays in a small market.

‘Entertainment first, baseball second’

Bundled up in hats, scarves and earmuffs, 5,026 baseball fans cheered on the Portland Sea Dogs at last April’s home opener against the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. Frank Sinatra’s “Jingle Bells” set the Christmas-in-spring mood for a 10-inning walk-off victory. Opening night’s snow gave way to a rainy spring that led to seven cancellations out of 69 scheduled home games. “We have 69 days to generate our revenue to pay our expenses for 365 days. If you start piling up rainouts, that can make the difference between whether you’re profitable or not,” President Geoff Iacuessa says in a late January front-office interview joined by General Manager Jesse Scaglion while ticket staff ring up sales in the ground-floor box office. The team, founded in 1994 by the late Dan Burke as an affiliate of the Florida Marlins, became the Boston Red Sox’s Double-A affiliate in 2003. In 2022, the team was sold to Diamond Baseball Holdings, a New York-based, private equity-backed group that owns 50 minor-league teams, including three of the Sea Dogs’ Eastern League rivals.

While player salaries, medical insurance and housing are all covered by the Red Sox, the Sea Dogs pay for travel and other expenses including 22 full-time employees and 300 staffers on game days. To keep a lid on costs, the Sea Dogs use local vendors as much as possible and have increased ticket prices only three times in the last decade — most recently in 2025. Despite efforts to keep admission affordable, the team has spent years fighting brokers who hawk tickets on the secondary market at inflated prices; a new Maine 10% cap on service fees charged by resale marketplaces is aimed at discouraging the practice. Less of a headache is the aftermarket for bobblehead freebies, like last year’s golden Slugger statuette to honor the Mascot Hall of Famer — the first minor-league mascot to be inducted — that one seller posted on eBay for $80. “It’s really cool that we created something that has that much demand,” Scaglion says. With rosters in constant flux as players are promoted and reassigned, the team has been intentional about keeping Slugger as the jowled, furry face of the franchise both in the ballpark and out in the community, while play-by-play announcer Emma Tiedemann (Scaglion’s wife) is a trailblazing female voice who’ll be honored with her own talking bobblehead this summer. Slugger’s stardom is in keeping with Minor League Baseball’s focus on “entertainment first, baseball second,” Scaglion notes. “If you go out the front gates and you ask someone who won the game, they don’t really know because they were having so much fun.”

Small-business hustle on the hardcourt

Taking in a Maine Celtics game is a high-decibel experience, fueled by non-stop tunes and PA blasts between plays in the packed Portland Expo — a 112-year-old venue the team leases from the city and shares with high schools and trade shows. The team has invested more than $1 million on upgrades, including a new court added in 2022. The Maine Red Claws were launched in 2009 as an expansion team in the NBA Development League with $2 million from 15 backers who formed Maine Basketball LLC; at the time, the team was an affiliate of the Boston Celtics and Charlotte (N.C.) Bobcats. Owned by the Boston Celtics since 2019, the team rebranded as the Maine Celtics in 2021 and restyled its crustacean mascot Crusher from red to Celtics green. Today as one of 31 teams in the Gatorade-sponsored G League, the Maine Celtics are the only Portland minor-league operation owned by its major-league affiliate. The Boston Celtics changed hands last year when a private equity-backed group acquired majority control for a record $6.1 billion. The Maine Celtics advertise that “the road to Boston begins in Maine,” where President Dajuan Eubanks oversees 14 year-round employees and up to 100 seasonal staff. “Minor-league sports is in essence a small business,” the former Harlem Globetrotter says hours before a Friday-night game versus the Salt Lake City Stars (the home team won 107-102).

While the $45,000 standard contract for G League players is a fraction of what NBA hoopsters earn, there’s a $5,000 incentive if the player stays on the roster the whole season. In addition, players on two-way contracts shuffling between the G League and NBA earn $636,435, or half of an NBA rookie’s minimum salary. Salaries go up exponentially for players called up to the NBA — there have been 24 so far, including three on Boston’s current roster. With an eye on April’s post-season, Eubanks says he would “desperately love” to replace the empty banner hanging in the Expo with a victory flag. “When you’re part of the Celtics organization, everyone knows what we’re in the business of — and that’s winning championships,” he says. During what is already a fast-paced sport, there’s also pressure to fill every break in play with music, cheerleader dances and other entertainment: “We don’t save lives, we don’t sell washing machines or insurance,” Eubanks says. “We sell smiles.” Liz Sohn was all smiles at an early December game she attended on a visit from Port Lucie, Fla., with seven-month-old daughter Tillie dressed in a green vest and pink pants for the youngster’s first-ever basketball game. “I love going to TD Garden in Boston, but at the Maine Celtics it’s a much more intimate arena,” says Sohn, a stay-at-home mom who grew up in Gorham playing and coaching basketball. Had she taken Tillie to Boston instead, “I don’t think it would have been as exciting for her senses.”

Carving a niche in a deep-rooted sport

During hockey-game intermissions at Cross Insurance Arena, the small ground-floor retail store fills up with shoppers like Dan and Amanda Smothers of Gray in January. Both are first-time Mariners season ticket holders who used to go to Portland Pirates games before that former franchise was sold and left town in 2016 to rebrand in Springfield, Mass. “I just got a new sweatshirt, a new hoodie,” Dan says holding his Maine Mariners merch purchase, a slightly different shade of green than the one he’s wearing. “I saw it last night. They didn’t have it in my size, so tonight they had it.” Today’s Maine Mariners — not to be confused with two defunct teams of the same name — were founded in 2017 and started playing in 2019. The ECHL minor-league team is affiliated with the NHL’s Boston Bruins and the AHL’s Providence (R.I.) Bruins. Dexter Paine, a New York-based private equity investor with New England roots, and his wife Susan bought the Mariners from Comcast Spectacor in 2024 with a desire to bring home the ECHL’s Kelly Cup. “I am a firm believer that no one goes to a game to watch their team lose,” Paine says over breakfast at a Portland hotel ahead of a weekend homestand. As a genuine fan with long-term commitment, Paine is a “real deviation from what I was used to working with Comcast where they looked at us as a line item,” Maine Mariners CEO Adam Goldberg says in his sports memorabilia-stacked office on the ground floor of Cross Insurance Arena. “They looked at us as a department, where Dexter really looks at us like a business.”

Despite hockey’s already high costs — staff salaries along with travel and housing for players are the team’s biggest expenses — both Paine and Goldberg view the latest collective bargaining agreement that increases pay and benefits as “fair.” The pact, reached in late December between the Professional Hockey Players’ Association and the Niagara Falls, Canada-based ECHL league, followed a brief strike that forced the Mariners to postpone three games. The Mariners increase game and group ticket prices incrementally each season, according to spokesman Michael Keeley. Despite some scheduling overlaps with the Maine Celtics when both sports are in season, Goldberg finds other forms of entertainment to be greater competition for consumers’ wallets. “In the first half of the year we compete against high school sports, we compete against the NFL,” he says. “And in the second half of the year, we compete with movies and outdoor events. Just because it’s the winter doesn’t mean that everybody stays indoors.” Even after two decades in minor-league sports, the former marketing executive says that juggling game operations, sales, marketing, ice maintenance and hockey operations can be “a little daunting at times.” “As much as I’d love to just come up with wacky promotions, you can get bogged down in the finances,” he says. With two months to go before hockey season winds down in April, the team is going through approvals for plans to build a practice rink in Scarborough that the team would lease and share with other groups. Could hockey ever become a summer sport? “Maybe it’s something we need to look into,” Goldberg says.

A scrappy soccer startup

Portland Hearts of Pine soccer matches at Fitzpatrick Stadium are an amped-up world apart from even the rowdiest high school football and lacrosse games at the city-owned venue. In a matter of hours, 50 to 100 game-day staffers turn the grounds into a mega-party zone with food trucks, an activity-laden kids zone and sponsored drinking dens for the 21-plus crowd. But at kickoff, it’s all about the soccer, absent any in-game entertainment save the sponsored “Call Joe” yellow cards fans brandish every time an opponent commits a foul. The club, owned by 30 investors including founder Gabe Hoffman-Johnson, sold out its first season, beating the previous attendance record set by the Richmond (Va.) Kickers in 2023. The Hearts are expecting another sellout for 20 games in 2026, with sales of single-match tickets to start in March. “Ultimately, we lose money each year given the high costs we face and given we have only 20 games, so every bit of revenue helps to try and build a sustainable business that excites fans and wins championships,” says Kevin Schohl, the team’s president and chief business officer. The former sports-betting industry executive, who helped launch a pro soccer team in Atlanta more than a decade ago, says the Hearts reinvest all their revenue back into the players. “We’re not a farm team of some bigger entity, we’re here to win a championship for Maine,” he says. That also adds up to steep travel costs, including cross-country flights to play teams on the West Coast, plus video broadcast production costs. “On an annual basis, the hope is that by Year Three or so, we can get pretty close to break even,” says Schohl, who describes sports franchises as an asset that appreciates over time: “You’ve got to have deep pockets and strong conviction because it’s tough to make money.”

Though some Hearts fans resell tickets for games they can’t attend, Schohl says that most give them to friends or colleagues, turning them into sought-after “social currency.” Merchandise is another hot ticket, with close to 27,000 team jerseys sold in 50 states and 20-plus countries. But in their second year, “how much more merchandise can they sell?” asks Brian Corcoran, an investor in the team with his wife, WEX CEO Melissa Smith. As a long-time sports marketing executive, Corcoran is well-versed in the sector’s financial struggles. “There’s an old joke in minor league sports: How do you make a little money? You start with a lot,” he says. “The reality is that only about a third of the teams are actually cash-flow positive.” Though bullish on plans by the Hearts of Pine to launch a women’s franchise in 2027, Corcoran wonders if the city is headed toward a “tipping point” for adding more pro teams beyond that.

‘Sense of belonging’

Amid the harsh business realities, the games are what matter most to fans like Glenn Thurlow, a medical-device company executive in Freeport who comes to Portland to see all four pro teams. He and his wife Patti are full-season ticket holders for the Mariners and Hearts, partial season ticket holders for the Maine Celtics and go to occasional Sea Dogs games. “When people gather to cheer for the same team, they share more than a score — they share pride, hope and a sense of belonging,” Thurlow says. “Local games become meeting places, rivalries turn into friendly banter and victories feel communal while losses are softened by solidarity. In those moments, sports create a common language.” If Slugger the Sea Dog could talk, he might very well say the same thing.