Sports

Billionaire Steve Cohen’s bid to buy Mets is on life support

Steve Cohen’s $2.6 billion bid to buy the Mets is on life support — if alive at all.

Multiple sources close to the situation are confirming that the billionaire hedge fund manager is ending negotiations with the Wilpons on his purchase of an 80 percent stake in the franchise. According to those sources, Cohen is deeply unhappy with the Wilpons changing the terms of the deal at a very late stage and has decided to walk away.

When rumors broke on Tuesday that the Cohen deal was dead, the Mets offered a strangely worded non-denial: “The parties are subject to confidentiality obligations, including a mutual non-disclosure agreement, and therefore cannot comment.”

Sources close to Cohen tell The Post that the 63-year-old, $13 billion man is holding his tongue for the time being.





Up until midday Tuesday, it appeared the deal was progressing quite well. At MLB’s winter meetings in December, commissioner Rob Manfred indicated he was satisfied with how Fred Wilpon and fellow owner Saul Katz were proceeding on the sale. But even at the time, the massive sale was reportedly structured in a way that could be politely described as unique.

Wilpon would remain as control person and CEO for five years. Team COO Jeff Wilpon, Fred’s son, would continue in that role for five years. After that period — or during — it was expected that both Wilpons would be removed from the daily operations of the team. The deal also reportedly did not include ownership of the Mets’ regional sports network, SNY.





But sources familiar with the talks said the Wilpons pushed late to maintain some control of the franchise beyond the five-year window. There also appears to have been some disagreement over the long-term status of SNY. Details are murky on the SNY front, but initial reports might have overstated the simplicity of the Wilpons retaining ownership of the network as a separate entity.

Cohen also appeared set to move into life as a baseball owner. In an email to investors in his Point72 hedge fund in December, Cohen wrote, “If the deal goes through I expect that my roles at Point72 will not change. Period.” Sources familiar with Point72 have made it clear to The Post over the past weeks that the firm was preparing for Cohen to take on another role running the Mets.





According to a source, Cohen had even been planning an Opening Day gala that would announce his majority ownership in the Mets. Those invitations to guests haven’t been sent, and now it appears they likely won’t be.

If Cohen’s deal does collapse, this would be the second time in less than a decade that a Wilpon deal to sell a large stake in the Mets to a local billionaire hedge fund manager has fallen through. In 2011, the Wilpons tried to tweak a deal with David Einhorn, who similarly balked at the machinations and publicly walked away, accusing the Wilpons of bad faith in the final stages of his deal.

Einhorn went as far as to call out the Wilpons for not honoring the exclusivity agreement in their deal and then lobbying MLB behind his back to reject a clause in the deal that would allow Einhorn to pull his money out if they did not honor their pledge to cede some control of the team to him.





While the deal with Cohen seems perilously close to being dead, one source familiar with Cohen from the hedge fund world cautioned, “This is Steve Cohen, so this might be a negotiation. The Wilpons need this more than he does and no one is going to pay more.”

— Mike Puma contributed to this report





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