As billionaire flexes go, owning a major sports franchise is hard to beat. You get to prance around in the owner’s suite and host dignitaries and celebrities who gush over your prized possession, all the while watching your investment sprout revenue like a magical beanstalk. Team owners cash in on television rights (ka-ching!), ticket sales (ka-ching!), licensing fees (ka-ching!) and sponsorship deals (ka-ching!).
But the most profitable moment for any sports franchise owner is when their team is up for sale. That’s when other billionaires swarm in, hoping to join one of the most exclusive clubs in the world (ka-ching-a-ding-ding!).
Despite Black athletes dominating the team rosters in the NFL and NBA, there is only one Black majority owner of a major sports franchise: Michael Jordan, who has controlling interest of the Charlotte Hornets.
More often, potential Black owners are outbid by people like Jeff Bezos. The second richest man on the planet, Bezos is rumored to be putting together a bid to buy the Washington Commanders – a football team reportedly valued between $5bn and $7bn. (Bezos is worth an estimated $171bn.)
Portfolio valuations aren’t all that matters in the murky world of sports ownership. Bezos must get in line with others wishing to woo the Commanders owner, Dan Snyder, who selects the suitor that gets to enter a profitable and prestigious relationship with 31 other owners, a group that includes the Dallas Cowboys owner and oil tycoon, Jerry Jones, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Oakland Athletics owner, John J Fisher, whose parents co-founded the Gap.
In 2018, after Bezos announced plans to build a second headquarters for Amazon, cities such as Austin, Texas, Miami, Toronto and Los Angeles put together Olympics-style bids. If Bezos, a man who rockets into outer space for kicks, must jump through hoops to fulfill his sports owner fantasies, imagine the obstacles facing aspirants who don’t own Amazon, and who happen to be Black.
Seven years after star quarterback Colin Kaepernick first decided to kneel during the national anthem as a gesture of protest against social injustice and police brutality, and nearly three years since the murder of George Floyd, professional sports leagues have ramped up their diversity and inclusion initiatives. In 2020, NBA owners committed $300m to a charitable foundation aimed at supporting economic growth in the Black community and fighting for civil rights. The NFL launched its Inspire Change campaign, a host of programs and promotions designed to foster goodwill in Black and brown communities. This included adding the words “End Racism” to football fields’ end zones.
Despite such efforts, Black people still struggle to break the most fortified glass ceiling in sports: into the owner’s suite.
Institutional obstacles
Black athletes comprise the bulk of the rosters in the NFL, the NBA and the WNBA. However, Black people have been nearly shut out of majority ownership of sports franchises. The numbers are especially alarming in the NFL, a sports league that generates more revenue than any other worldwide, and that relies on the talent of Black athletes.
It may seem odd to bring up a wealth gap between billionaires, but the economic disparities created by institutional racism are all the more pronounced at the top. According to Forbes, there are 2,668 billionaires in the world. Only 15 of them are Black. The wealthiest Black billionaire is Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian who owns Africa’s biggest cement producer and is worth $14.5bn. (Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is worth $219bn.) Black billionaires such as Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Rihanna, Jay-Z and LeBron James have net worths ranging from $1bn to $2.7bn.
Jodi Balsam, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who teaches sports law at New York University, was an attorney for the NFL for 12 years. She thinks that NFL owners would welcome Black majority ownership, but the current requirements make such a notion nearly impossible. “Whoever is proposing to be the majority owner of the team must personally, individually as a human being, own 30% of the equity,” says Balsam. “So if you have a team worth $6bn, 30% of the equity is roughly $2bn. You need to have an individual owner who could come up with $2bn liquid who can be part of that owner’s group.”
The US racial wealth gap, which stems from a legacy of slavery, centuries’ worth of discrimination in the housing market, and a lack of educational, employment and business opportunities for people of color, has led to “very few, if any, Blacks wealthy enough to be able to meet the NFL’s 30% requirement”, says Michael Isimbabi, author of the book Pooling Our Resources to Foster Black Progress: An Entrepreneurship and Impact Investment Framework.
With economic inequalities hindering access to billions in capital, the responsibility to embrace Black ownership at the principal level rests with mostly white owners. While players are officially employees, the top-heavy way in which sports team owners lord over players – trading them to other cities without the players’ consent, showcasing athletes’ physical attributes at pre-signing events – is eerily reminiscent of the slave trade.
“Ownership has been pretty much exclusively white for the entire existence of sports, and white owners have had countless chances to show they deserve the benefit of the doubt,” says David Steele, a veteran sports journalist and author of It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism. “If they were ever going to do right by all those players they’ve made billions off of they would have done it by now. Black ownership is the last chance for these sports to prove they’re not just fundamentally racist.”
Capital gains
In 1932, an Irish-American businessman and former Duquesne University football star named Arthur Rooney ran a semi-professional football team in Pittsburgh called the JP Rooneys. The following year, Rooney paid a $2,500 franchise fee for his JP Rooneys to join the NFL as the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today, that team is the Pittsburgh Steelers, valued at an estimated $4bn. Given the current requirements to buy an NFL franchise, even Art Rooney II, majority owner of the Steelers and grandson of Arthur Rooney, would be unable to buy a new team.
Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, became the first Black principal owner of an NBA franchise in 2002 when he paid a $300m expansion fee for the Charlotte Bobcats (now the Hornets). This was double what the Vancouver Grizzlies and Toronto Raptors expansion fees cost when the league added those teams in 1994.
Eight years after coming on board, Johnson sold his stake in the Charlotte franchise to Jordan. Johnson’s ex-wife and cofounder of BET, Sheila Johnson, is the only Black woman with a principal (not to be confused with majority) stake in three professional sports teams: the Washington Wizards (NBA), the Washington Capitals (NHL) and the Washington Mystics (WNBA).
In December 2022, Mat Ishbia, the CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage, bought the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury for $4bn, more than 10 times what Johnson paid for the Bobcats. The meteoric rise in franchise fees is why most billionaires and multimillionaires crave acceptance to these exclusive clubs. There are few investments more bankable than owning a team in a major sports league. Today, the Charlotte franchise that cost Johnson $300m is valued at $1.7bn.
The NBA is considering expansion, adding two new franchises, one in Las Vegas and the other in Seattle. The league would be asking north of $2.5bn per team. Despite being the first Black billionaire in the US, and the first African American to have his company traded on the New York Stock Exchange, it’s unlikely that even Johnson could afford to play ball.
From players to owners
Black athletes who dream of buying a sports franchise often take incremental steps to ownership. For example, Jordan first bought a small stake in the Wizards in 2000. In 2006, he bought a minority interest in the Charlotte franchise, becoming the largest individual owner of the Bobcats after Johnson. Today, Jordan is the team’s majority owner.
Former NBA stars Dwyane Wade and Grant Hill own minority stakes in the Utah Jazz and the Atlanta Hawks, respectively. This may be their stepping stone toward building portfolios in sports ownership. In 2022, Wade partnered with the Jazz owner, Ryan Smith, and venture capitalist Ryan Sweeney in a deal to buy the Real Salt Lake City Major League Soccer team.
Some athletes look to ownership outside the major sports leagues. The former WNBA player Renee Montgomery recently became part owner of the Atlanta Dream franchise. The value of WNBA franchises ranges from an estimated $15m to $67m, about the same as the annual salary range of star NBA players.
Tennis great Serena Williams joined the Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton in 2022 as a minority investor in a bid to acquire the Premier League soccer team Chelsea. Their effort was unsuccessful, but Williams and her husband, the Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, and their daughter, Olympia Ohanian, are investors in the Los Angeles-based Angel City Football Club in the National Women’s Soccer League. Ohanian is co-founder and lead investor, while Serena and Olympia are listed among an investment group that includes the actor Eva Longoria and soccer star Mia Hamm.
The good old boys
The barrier to access doesn’t stop at capital. Winning a bid also requires getting by the gatekeepers. In the NFL, the process begins with the owner who is selling, who may want the buyer to be someone with local ties to the city where the team is located. When Clint Murchison Jr, the founding owner of the Cowboys, decided to sell his team, he specified that the new owner be a Texan who lived in Dallas.
The seller submits his choice to the NFL finance committee, made up of a few owners, who, after running background checks and other due diligence, submit their approval to the other owners for their approval. Three-quarters of the league’s 32 owners must sign off on the sale.
Last year, the Black media mogul Byron Allen was part of a group that put in a bid for the Denver Broncos for a reported $4bn. Allen lost out to a bid led by Walmart heir Rob Walton, who bought the team for $4.65bn. Walton’s group included three Black people: Mellody Hobson, chairwoman of Starbucks Corporation and wife of film-maker George Lucas; former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; and Lewis Hamilton.
Allen vowed he’d bid on the next NFL team up for sale, and he is reportedly putting together a group offer for the Commanders.
“When you lose to the richest family in the world, it’s not a bad day in the office,” Allen told TMZ Sports, referencing the Walmart-owning Walton family that outbid him.
The NFL requirements make it difficult for Black owners because the league limits the number of investors, investment groups or hedge funds in an ownership group, with the interest of keeping owner numbers to a minimum.
Lisa Delpy Neirotti, director of sport management programs at George Washington University, says the NFL’s stringent requirements have more to do with solidifying the brand than keeping Black owners out.
“They want to make sure that anybody coming in is going to be able to pay the payroll, and are going to be able to build a stadium,” Neirotti says. “I mean, because you look at these European leagues, soccer teams, they’re all leveraged out.”
That said, Neirotti says she expects the NFL to loosen some of its financial requirements for ownership. “I would say that within the next five years, there’s going to be some adjustments.”
Yet, the NFL recently revised bylaws that help legacy owners like the Rooneys retain their franchises.
When George Halas, who owned the Chicago Bears, died in 1983, he left his team to Virginia McCaskey, his only living child. He also gave McCaskey voting power over the shares he left to his 13 grandchildren. Although McCaskey did not own 30% of the team, NFL owners voted to allow this voting trust arrangement to accommodate one of the league’s founding families.
However, McCaskey is now 100 years old, and when she dies, ownership will be spread among Halas’s heirs. NFL rules require that a single lineal family must control 30% of each franchise. The new bylaws lower the ownership requirement from 5% to 1%, though, but only for teams with the same owner for 10 years.
Making it happen
Snyder, the Commanders’ owner, never officially announced that the team was for sale. Instead, the Commanders released a statement in which Snyder and his wife, Tanya, announced that they have enlisted Bank of America to help explore the idea of a potential sale. It was the mere idea of an available NFL franchise that sent billionaires scrambling for partners.
If Snyder decides to sell the team, and if he approves a Bezos bid, a Black owner – albeit one with a minority stake – will probably be in the mix. And in the meantime, potential Black owners continue courting investors who can help them move from minority partners to majority owners.
“We’re going to get it done,” Allen told TMZ Sports. “It’s just a matter of time.”
