First, owners of sports teams get their return on their investment in non-monetary ways. They get in the news a lot. They have people fawning over them, jumping to accomodate their every desire. They get the best seats in the house on game day, and guaranteed attendance at invitiation-only championship events such as the Superbowl and the weeks of parties leading up to it. They can send politicians and thousands of fans quaking in their shoes just by hinting that they might want to relocate the team if at any point they don’t feel “unloved”.

Secondly, an operating profit can be pretty easily manipulated into a loss if the owners have a reason to do so (and vice-versa). It’s just a question of whether they move their expenses forward in time or defer them to later. And the team expenses usually include a rather large amount of “owner’s expense”, from salaries to travel to some very expensive perks.

Third, the owners make their profit (usually a huge one) when they sell or relocate their teams - not from year-to-year operations.

Finally, if the financial situation was so bad for the owners, you would think that NOBODY in their right mind would want to be one. But there seems to be a lot of people who are quite ready to step into the job if it becomes available.

So the whole idea of getting the owners to open up their books is a red herring. It’s being proposed because they want to deflect the owners from using the “poor me” approach publically. But it’s also an incredible nuisance factor for the owners - they don’t want their personal expenses which are included in the team books to be made public, so they will never submit the books to open scrutiny.