NFL owners are coalescing around a vision to allow private equity to invest in teams, but final approval of a policy is still at least two months away and may take until the fall, Commissioner Roger Goodell said.
The special committee on ownership policy presented a proposal to the other 27 owners during the NFL annual meeting in Orlando this week, and their tentative outline received less pushback than expected, sources said. As expected, there was no formal action taken.
“They seem very close to sort of outlining an approach, and that approach is something we want to make sure the membership was aligned with,” Goodell said. “I think that’s true, and now we have a lot of work to do to take that approach into reality.”
When Goodell first appointed the committee in August 2023, he said he hoped the group would complete its work by this week’s meetings. Today, he said he feels no urgency to approve a final policy. There are no controlling stakes in NFL teams currently on the market, but experts say several teams would likely seek to sell minority stakes to institutional funds once the policy goes into effect.
“We’re making progress,” Goodell said. “I think there will be some changes maybe as early as May, probably closer to October.”
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There is still a meaningful range of potential outcomes on details of the plan, sources said, such as which private equity funds are approved to invest, how much equity they can buy, and how many different teams they invest in. But Chiefs owner and finance committee Chair Clark Hunt, who is also ex officio chairman of the special committee, said “we’re starting to hone our focus.”
Hunt also said the NFL’s structure for private equity will differ from other pro leagues, but maybe not by as much as some preliminary ideas suggested it would. As one example, the NBA allows teams to sell up to 30% of their equity to funds, and each individual fund is capped at owning 20% of a team, with a maximum of investments in five teams per fund.
“I would say that what we’ll end up with will definitely have a focused NFL aspect to it, but certainly we’ve learned a lot from what the other leagues have done and it’s quite possible we’d include much of their thinking in where we end up from a policy standpoint,” Hunt said.
Along with Hunt, the committee consists of Falcons owner Arthur Blank, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, Broncos owner Greg Penner and Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
