David Rosenthal

This is an extremely valuable asset.

So, yes, on the one hand, that's great news.

It's validation of the NFL's whole strategy for the past hundred years.

On the other hand, they've kind of become hostages of their own success because of all those strict ownership rules that they have.

They now need to come up with a new principal owner candidate who has enough liquid cash to cover an emergency purchase of 30%, at least, of the Washington football team.

When the Walton family bought the Broncos, I think for $4.65 billion.

So just to put some numbers on this, the commanders ultimately sell for just north of $6 billion.

So the minimum required cash equity check here is at least $1.8 billion that you need somebody who just has that liquidity lying around that they could, in a fast process, invest in an NFL team.

And, oh yeah, they also have to fit the Venn diagram of...

want to own an NFL team based in Washington, D.C.

This is not a large pool of buyers here.

So ultimately, they do find a buyer, Josh Harris, who is the co-founder of the huge private equity firm Apollo, and already owned the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA and the New Jersey Devils in the NHL.

He comes in as the principal owner of the new ownership group of the Washington football franchise, along with 20 other limited partners.

Because, oh yeah, that's the other problem here.

You also need this person to have enough friends who are willing to throw in that can cough up another three to four...

billion in cash here because like yes there's the 1.5 billion in debt but that still means you need four and a half billion in cash so it's kind of a miracle that this all happens it started impacting the game too it's like because this is all during the off season that this is going down what's going to happen to the commanders are they going to continue operations it's crazy uncertainty is not good for the league no definitely not they forecast revenue 15 years in advance yes

So once all the dust settles, the owners are like, all right, we can never have this happen again.

We know we need to change something here.

So the next offseason in summer of 2024, they vote to allow private equity into the NFL.

Basically, all the other major sports leagues around the world had already done this, and the NFL was the last holdout.