The Seahawks are moving closer to having a new owner.
Ben Horney of Front Office Sports reports that two groups have emerged from the pack in the effort to buy the team.
One group is led by Celtics minority owner Aditya Mittal and former Celtics governor Wyc Grousbeck. The other is led by 49ers minority investor Vinod Khosla.
Horney adds that one of the two groups includes at least one former Seahawks player. The player and the group aren’t known.
It’s apparently down to those two groups. Horney notes that someone else could emerge. It all comes down to money. As in who offers the most of it.
Per Horney, Canadian billionaire Steve Apostolopoulos removed himself from consideration. Todd Boehly also was reportedly interested but is no longer in the mix.
The Paul G. Allen Estate, which is selling the team, told Horney this: “There is no news to share about the sale process.”
Details have been limited, and vague, throughout the process. It was believed at the outset that the sale would result in a winning bid in the range of $9 billion to $11 billion. There was an ESPN report at one point that the market was soft. ESPN later reported that the market had intensified.
Regardless, it has yet to feel like the land rush some had expected, despite the fact that the Seahawks are the defending Super Bowl champions and the team seems to be set up to be competitive indefinitely.
In the end, success on the field is immaterial to value. Win or lose, all NFL franchises have significant value because all teams share massive annual revenues. With a record set four years ago by the sale of the Broncos for $4.65 billion and broken a year later by the $6.05 billion price tag for the Commanders, the sale of the Seahawks will set another record — the only question is how high the bar will be raised for the next inevitable offering.
There undoubtedly will be more, in time. For all anyone knows, there’s an owner currently waiting for the dust to settle on the Seattle sale before putting that team on the market. The league surely doesn’t want more than one team for sale at a time; the scarcity of the asset helps drive up the price. If two or more were available at once, the potential buyers would have the kind of leverage that keeps the final price tag from being maximized.
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