Steve Cohen's $765 million gamble: Can a 15-year deal with Juan Soto redefine baseball's future?

Is it possible to pay $765 million to a sportsman in a 15-year contract? Yes, if the person in charge of doing so is Steve Cohen, owner of the New York Mets, the baseball team that will pay them to Juan Soto, the Dominican megastar of the sport.

The operation has changed the pace in all sports and economic sectors in the United States. It was not just another move for Steve Cohen (New York, 1956). Juan Soto, at 26 years old, was the most coveted diamond for the baseball greats as he has shown in his only season as a hitter in the New York Yankees, the team of cinema, glamour and glitter in New York.

Snatching a star from the Yankees scores double. Snatching it as the 'poor' neighbor for money scores triple. That gigantic offer bettered the one put forward by the Yankees, who were left with 760 million dollars for 16 seasons. Cohen has already gone down in history by laying the philosophical stone of the Mets' path to the title, an honor they have only tasted in 1969 and 1986.

The day he bought the equipment

Steve Cohen acquired the Mets in 2020 after paying close to $2.4 billion. Another investment for an unstoppable entrepreneur. Cohen graduated in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. On his first day on Wall Street, he made $8,000 for the group that hired him.

Cohen has a lot to do with the current manager, but not in the savings because he now has a fortune estimated at $20 billion, by far the richest of all the bosses in North American baseball. As a business genius, Cohen is the chairman of Point 72 Asset Management, a global asset management firm founded in 2014, which has nearly 3,000 employees.

Cohen refines his ideology on the company's own website: "I believe that if you're not innovating and not adapting, you're dying. I won't let that happen here. Great ideas can come from anywhere in this company, and they can be applied anywhere in this company. We need people who think entrepreneurially to help us move forward."

A five-year term

That's what he does at the Mets, innovating with risks, like the ones he took when he owned his previous fund, S.A.C., for which he had to pay a $1.8 billion fine in 2013 to avoid a lawsuit with dire consequences. After that fiasco, he founded the current Point 72 a year later.

When he bought the Mets franchise, he set himself a limit: to win the World Series within five years, a period that ends next season. With this approach and that checkbook, he cares little that the Mets took in $393 million last season and posted a loss of $292 million.Cohen spends more than $1 billion a year on charity. He has seven children from various relationships and adds baseball player Juan Soto to his roster.