Thanks to the Brooklyn Cyclones for hosting an excellent 40th birthday for my girlfriend, Meredith, on Saturday. We booked the On Deck Club and had a wonderful time. If you’re in the New York City area during the summer and haven’t been, do yourself a favor and check out Maimonides Park in Coney Island. It’s one of the great minor league baseball venues.
Vinod Khosla, whose family struck a deal to buy the Seahawks for $9.6 billion, is an example of the expanded class of uber-wealthy billionaires who can afford NFL teams even as the league's valuations rapidly grow. Getty Images
For more than a decade, NFL leaders and sports finance experts have questioned whether the league’s famously risk-averse policies around ownership are costing owners money by artificially limiting the supply of wealthy bidders for teams, thereby depressing valuations.
That theme isn’t going anywhere in the long term, but the recent Seahawks sale process provides scant evidence of that problem coming to bear right now, insiders say. Of course, the Paul G. Allen Estate and bankers at Allen & Co. would have liked more bidders and a $10 billion price instead of $9.6 billion from the group led by venture capital kingpin Vinod Khosla, which is still a record price for an NFL club by a wide margin. But the auction involved multiple bona fide bidders, if not a robust set. And the outcome is shaping up as a solid number from an ownership group with no need for policy waivers or an unwieldy number of limited partners, insiders say. (That could not be said for the 2023 sale of the Commanders to Josh Harris). The consortium is still coming together, but one source called it “tidy.”
The Seahawks sale process would have likely surprised a lot of experts if you could have shown it to them 10 years ago. At the time, there seemed to be an intractable conflict between the ever-rising value of NFL teams and the supply of people wealthy enough to buy them — at least under NFL rules that require a single person to hold 30% of a team, limits groups to 25 investors and caps debt financing at levels far short of what would naturally be available. It seemed virtually certain that, one day soon, a team would become so valuable that nobody could actually buy it under those terms.
‘So many ... billionaires’
What did those predictions not foresee? The explosion of extreme wealth at the highest end of the economic ladder in the 2020s, by virtue of the K-shaped post-pandemic recovery, the 2017 tax code rewrite and the A.I. boom. “There are so many f****** billionaires,” one source said. And this isn’t just for people rich enough to buy controlling stakes; there seems to be a huge supply of people who can join a group for a few hundred million dollars or more. Also, sports have become the asset class du jour, with interest developing in corners where there had been little before.
“We underestimate how much wealth has been created,” said Dynasty Equity co-founder and CEO Don Cornwell at a Wall Street Journal event Thursday, noting that several recent sports deals have used institutional capital but did not appear to require it.
The NFL has not been entirely passive in the wake of the potential threat posed by growing valuations. The league has changed some policies, including allowing private equity to invest up to 10%, increasing the debt limits and dropping the prohibition on owners of other sports teams in NFL cities buying into the NFL. But so far, more dramatic changes have not come.
Some skeptics say the Seahawks’ sale should not be seen as proof those dramatic changes aren’t still necessary. One good outcome doesn’t mean there will be more, they caution, and that if the Seahawks are worth $9.6 billion in the NFL’s 14th-largest market, then teams in the top-five markets are worth at least several billion more. At those prices, trouble is coming if the league doesn’t change its policies to allow for a more corporate and less family-focused approach to ownership, these policy hawks say.
The NFL Finance Committee and the Special Committee on Ownership Policy will continue to evaluate these questions and to tinker. But anyone hoping the Seahawks deal by itself would spur big action must be a little disappointed.
The NFL held its first regular-season game in Ireland last September, a Steelers-Vikings matchup at Croke Park. Sportsfile via Getty Images
The NFL has sent all 32 teams a questionnaire about their experiences in the league’s four-year-old global markets program, which grants teams commercial rights in certain foreign countries like what they have in their home cities. The survey will lead into a comprehensive review of the program’s rules, which have attracted critics for the limited commercial upside offered to teams working overseas.
Every team participates in at least one country, but enthusiasm and activity vary widely across the league. Even the biggest believers acknowledge that economic and policy barriers make it difficult for teams to drive meaningful revenue, which in turn makes it difficult to justify the big investments required to develop fans from scratch.
League executives are quick to note that international growth has always been intended as long-term investment. American football is a “challenger brand” in most places outside the U.S., they note, and teams should not expect big increases in revenue or profits overseas as they invest in growth for many years. But they acknowledge there could be improvements made.
“GMP was never designed to be a short-term revenue play, and we don’t want to lose sight of that,” said Bobby Gallo, the NFL’s senior VP/club business development. “But we also don’t want the long-term view to be an excuse for not helping clubs find tangible wins along the way. Striking that balance right is a big part of what we’re focused on.”
Speaking privately, club executives note that even the most modest of fan-development executions in far-off countries, such as watch parties or flag football clinics, are extremely expensive. On the revenue side, they say, the vast majority of the actual value of the NFL abroad is connected to the games played, which are league-controlled properties. Also, team-gathered fan data overseas is controlled by the league for legal reasons, and any attempt to sell a team sponsorship can be stymied by league activity in that category. The threshold for when teams must share revenue is low, too.
In theory, the idea is that, after years of all this hard work, every team would profit handsomely when the league one day signs a big-dollar international media rights deal, à la the English Premier League. But that doesn’t do much for executives who must justify expenses and payroll on a day-to-day or annual basis, and they argue that big payoff could come sooner if they had more incentives now.
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Ultra-endurance cyclist Bond Almand kicked off his nationwide ride to all 30 NFL stadiums on July 7 in Miami. Courtesy Extreme Networks
As a small player in an industry dominated by giants such as Cisco, NFL Wi-Fi network solutions and analytics sponsor Extreme Networks is always looking for ways to leverage the league to build its brand and its enterprise sales funnel. This summer, it’s taking an especially big swing with an audacious activation: a nearly 11,000-mile bike ride connecting all 30 NFL stadiums.
On July 7, professional ultra-endurance cyclist Bond Almand took off from Miami on a custom-made Trek bike that’s designed to carry a game ball from the 2025 NFC Championship all over the country, with Extreme Networks supporting community appearances and activations in every NFL market. So far, he’s worked his way to Tampa, Jacksonville and New Orleans, and on Thursday, he’s in Houston for his fifth stadium (see his route and track his progress here) and an appearance combining flag football with a bike ride-a-long.
If all goes well, Almand will hit another 24 stadiums over the next 55 days and make his final stop at Seattle’s Lumen Field on Sept. 9, when the Seahawks and Patriots kick off the NFL’s season.
“As a challenger brand in a big industry, that’s who we are,” saidExtreme NetworksChief Commercial Officer Norman Rice, who met Almand through the Dartmouth alumni network (Almand, 21, graduated in June). “We’re always challenging ourselves — how do we get out there and make a bigger message or make a bigger splash.”
As a B2B company with a product and service that’s difficult to illustrate in the usual marketing channels, Morrisville, N.C.-based Extreme is using Almand’s taxing ride to emphasize the importance of connectivity, the cultural role of football in bringing people together and its track record of high performance in major stadiums. “The immediate business benefit is our customers and partners at these events,” Rice said.
NFL sponsor Oakley got involved with the ride too, and the NFL and Extreme’s local relationships (with the Steelers and MetLife Stadium, for instance) will be activated as well. Almand’s bike, the ball and two tickets to the kickoff game are being auctioned to benefit Genyouth, a fitness and nutrition nonprofit, and the NFL’s Play 60 campaign.
Nothing is set yet for the final day in Seattle, but Rice says he’s aiming high, hoping to arrange for Commissioner Roger Goodell to receive the ball from Almand in front of NBC cameras.
The NFL issued $196 million of new debt to fund stadium construction projects in late 2025, which garnered an A+ debt rating from Fitch for the league’s continued strong financial situation and contractually guaranteed revenue, according to a note published Monday.
A triumvirate of some of most powerful players in sports licensing — Fanatics, Disney and the NFL — debuted an apparel line Thursday that combines NFL indicia with Disney-owned IP, including characters from Star Wars, Marvel, Toy Story and other Pixar characters, reports SBJ’s Terry Lefton.
Renderings and a flythrough animation are providing the first look at a concept for an NFL flag football league venue, which a source tells SBJ’s Bret McCormick is modular in nature.
Scott Fitterer left the Commanders’ front office to join Athletes First as an agent and executive in the firm’s coaches and executives division, reports SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario. Fitterer spent the last two seasons as a personnel executive in Washington after a long run in NFL front offices.
Paul Hastings LLP, one of the fastest-growing big law firms, added former Ravens executive and NFL in-house counsel Brandon Etheridge as a partner in its Washington, D.C., office as it formally launches a dedicated sports practice.
Former NFL player and coach Jason Garrett will sit down with some of sports’ most accomplished coaches and executives for insights on leadership as part of a new podcast series, “Coach 2 Coach,” that debuted Wednesday, writes SBJ’s Na’Andre Emerson.
