There’s only one reason NFL fans should care about the new ownership rules

There are stories we care about for industry insiders, and stories that impact fans. This is the former.

Welcome to a beta edition of Club Sportico! Thanks for joining—please do reply with any critiques/comments/compliments! Eben leads off this week…

The NFL made a major change to its ownership rules this week. I spent the whole week writing about it, and you should probably just ignore it.

NFL owners on Tuesday voted to join pretty much every other major global league in allowing private equity firms to buy stakes in teams. The league’s new policy is significantly more conservative—and more lucrative—than any of its peers. Funds can only buy passive, minority stakes, and a team can only sell a maximum of 10% total to a handful of pre-approved funds.

I was surprised to see how many people on Twitter took this news as a tectonic shift toward the doom of the NFL. (I know, I know, people on Twitter will hate on anything). It’s an important development for billionaires, or those who work in sports deal-making, but the vast majority of NFL fans will likely never notice a difference.

Small 5% or 10% minority ownership stakes sell all the time without the news ever going public. I’d bet most NFL fans couldn’t name most of the minority owners invested in their favorite teams—even I’m uncertain if Shad Khan still owns 100% of my beloved Jaguars. Interspersed among all those anonymous rich folks will now be a few anonymous rich funds.

One thing that has set the NFL apart from its peers over the past few decades is its definition of the word “owner.” Unlike other leagues, which have publicly-traded franchises or teams with rotating control, the NFL has historically held firm to the idea that a single, consistent human should be the lone decision-maker for every franchise. Marc Ganis, one of Roger Goodell’s most trusted advisors, joined us on our Sporticast podcast this week to talk about all the ways this approach has helped the league reach its $20 billion size. He said preserving that unique advantage was “goal No. 1” for the NFL committee that drafted the private equity policy.

The result was a set-up that’s much more cautious than in any other major U.S. league’s private equity approach. Funds will be restricted to a smaller percentage of NFL teams, with more guardrails and less economic incentive. The league even has the ability to force funds to sell in some specific instances. Ganis estimated that roughly a quarter of the league’s teams would do a deal within the next three years.

Say what you will about private equity’s corporate raider history, and there’s lots to say, but these funds are not coming to plunder the NFL. And say what you will about the NFL’s insatiable appetite for money and its moral ambiguity, and there’s plenty to say there too, but this ownership tweak isn’t your best ammunition.    

As I see it, there’s really one reason an NFL fan should care about this policy change, and that’s if you really dislike the owner of your favorite team. This shift will make him/her richer, and also make it easier to keep the team in the family for successive generations. It’s good to be king.

tl;dr: 🏈 💰❓❓ ❓ 📈 💰💰

Last week, 60% of you said you’re less of a college sports fan as the endeavor looks more and more like pro sports. Wow!

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Now turning it over to Jacob for his Pick Six, including some talk of Deion Sanders, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Novak Djokovic—one of which Jacob suddenly finds himself rooting for…

Story of the Week 🦬: This week I want to highlight Daniel Libit’s business-focused preview of Thursday’s Colorado - North Dakota State football game. Libit has basically been on the Deion beat for a while now, though the most interesting parts of this story came from NDSU’s athletic director discussing how the program is fighting to remain “an FBS program wearing FCS clothes.”

Story of the Week (Non-Sportico Division) ⚾️: I got weirdly emotional over Alex Kirshner’s eulogy for the slugging first baseman in Slate.