At a sleepy NFL fall meeting, there was a topic most of the owners had on their minds—and, interestingly enough, it didn’t come up inside the meeting room during the two-day summit in Midtown Manhattan.
It’s now been about five months since Raiders owner Mark Davis and legendary quarterback Tom Brady came to an agreement for Brady to join the team as a minority owner. Brady had already gone in as a limited partner with Davis’s WNBA team, the now two-time champion Las Vegas Aces. And he’s since been around the Raiders a little, most prominently for a preseason game at Dallas.
Yet there’s been little movement on formalizing Brady’s deal with Davis.
The reason?
“It’s got a lot of problems,” one owner told me of the agreement.
My understanding is Brady’s share of the Raiders would be around 6% of the franchise. This year, valued the franchise at $6.2 billion. So if you assume that to be a fair number, that stake of the team would be $372 million.
That’s relevant because the main source of pushback the Raiders are getting is that owners aren’t comfortable with the sale price. And as one of them explained to me, there’s no chance the league will rubber-stamp the way Brady was sold a quasi-ceremonial piece of both the Aces and Birmingham City, a second-division British soccer club that wanted the former quarterback as an investor to increase its visibility in the states.
Money is the driving force for most of the owners. More specifically, their only interest is in making sure every share of every team goes for as much as possible to boost their own teams’ valuations. And not only would a discount for Brady be counterproductive, it also wouldn’t bring much value to anyone but the Raiders.
The second piece of this is Brady’s job with Fox. On the surface, it’s easy to see why owners’ concerns would be valid. No team would want a minority owner from a rival team in its building meeting with its coaches and getting privileged information—the way most broadcasters do—simply to do their job at the level the NFL would expect of the people calling its games.
I’m not sure where this will go next, to be honest. But it tells me there’ll need to be a lot of tweaking before the larger group will entertain a more thorough discussion on the topic.
In case you’re wondering, the next league meeting is in Dallas in December.
