A lot of people have actually questioned the business of sports and the amount of money that goes into it. These questions may not be out of place, especially when you consider the fact that sports is an entertainment and could be termed a business that works on people's mood and emotions. The question has also been targeted at whether the revenue that will come from these sports activities in the future will be able to justify the amount pumped into them and sustain the running of the teams.

Football and basketball are perhaps the biggest culprits of this. Many analysts have termed ridiculous the amount of money that football clubs in Europe dole out in the bid to sign players they deem germane and the overly huge amounts they are paid as weekly wages. But this does not end with the two aforementioned sports. Baseball is another sport that has witnessed a huge level of funding in the past. This has created more awareness and publicity for the game and made multiple betting tips for different sports on OddsDigger arise. But recent events at the University of Winnipeg men's baseball team in Canada have brought this question to the fore again.

Unexpected Budget Cuts

In what the players, coaches, and administrators termed surprising, the school authorities have decided to cut off the men's baseball team, the reason being that they want to save some costs through the cuts. Many of the people involved in this team have described the move as not only surprising but hurting.

When asked about the decision, the Wesmen basketball coach named Morgan de Pena said that the decision caught him off-guard. For him, this shouldn't have been the case as there are only two college level baseball teams in the country that offer the same level of baseball as offered in the universities in the US, and Winnipeg is one of them. The coach, who has trained the team for more than 2 years, said that he never had a faint idea that such a thing was in the offing.

Of course, it should be recalled that the reason for this cut is because the board of regents of the school approved a $3.7 million cut in the operating budget of the school for the 2017/2018 academic year.

While explaining the reason for this, the university's senior executive officer named Chris Minaker said that the decision became imperative because of the cut in the funding that the school gets from the province. This led to some hard decisions.

But if this team was generating good revenue over the years, would this cut be made? This is a question to sports funding all over the globe. We may be looking at the huge clubs with huge following that have been recording lots of profits over the years. But the case of the smaller teams where the states sponsor them and gain practically nothing from them is not good.

The surprising thing is that the funding was not cut for the baseball team alone. It was also cut for the wrestling team and the men's soccer team.

What Now?

De Pena has come out to state that his team paid for their buses, hotels, and the players pay for their jerseys, equipment, balls, and bats. He went ahead to say that they are almost funding themselves and therefore he does not understand how they have become a burden to the school. But the question is, do they maintain the playing grounds? According to him, most of his players and coaches will now move to the United States and sign up with different school teams.

He complained that most of the players they got for the new session would be coming from areas like Australia, Prince Edward Island, Minnesota, Toronto, BC, Nova Costa and even the local Manitoba. But now, he has to call all of them and tell them to search for other clubs or teams to play for.

One of the players went on and on about how they have been made a family, learnt to be together and achieve together, and how he will miss all his teammates. That is actually the sensational part of the sport that we don't get to experience. The Vaughan Ontario native said that this was the only thing that brought him to Canada and it influenced his decision to attend the University of Winnipeg. For him, it will not be the same feeling if he gets back to the university next year without the baseball team.

But the main thing is that De Pena did not say that they funded themselves. He said that they practically did. The two are not the same. Being almost autonomous and being autonomous are not the same.