Dan Snyder ‘Invisible’ in NFL Three Years After Commanders Sale 

The NFL has moved on entirely from Daniel Snyder. 

And Snyder increasingly appears to have distanced himself from the league and most of those associated with it, after once fending off any public suggestion that he should part with the team he’d adored since childhood.

Three years after his tumultuous tenure as Commanders owner ended unceremoniously with his sale of the franchise, some former associates and others within the league tell Front Office Sports they’ve had little to no recent contact with him. 

The change has been gradual since the 2023 sale of the team, but it has been striking to them, they say.

“Talk about a guy that’s gone invisible,” one former associate of Snyder told FOS.

ESPN reported in January 2025 that Snyder had shopped for an ownership stake in a soccer team, preferably in the Premier League. No such investment is known to have occurred to this point.

“I heard he was interested as a potential investor soon after he sold the Commanders,” the former Snyder associate said. “But I haven’t heard anything recently. … He’d still prefer to own the [Commanders].”

A second former Snyder associate told FOS: “The only thing he’d buy back into would be European soccer.”

NFL owners are scheduled to gather Wednesday in Atlanta to take a ratification vote on the league-record $9.612 billion sale of the Seahawks from the Paul G. Allen estate to a group led by the family of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. It is the first sale of an NFL franchise since the owners met in Bloomington, Minn., in July 2023 and voted unanimously to approve the $6.05 billion purchase of the Commanders from Snyder and his family by a group led by private equity investor Josh Harris. 

This time, there is none of the rancor that surrounded Snyder’s exit from the NFL. And even the controversy that engulfed Snyder and the Commanders is a fading memory. 

The Commanders are about to begin their fourth season of Harris’s ownership, with a team that reached the NFC championship game in Year 2 and a new stadium in D.C. on the way. Snyder, who moved to London with his wife, Tanya, before the sale was completed, has maintained a low public profile and has not made any known offers to return to professional sports ownership.

The former associates and others spoke to FOS in recent weeks on the condition of anonymity due to the intensity of the acrimony that once was attached to Snyder and his team.

Those people mentioned that their level of interaction with Snyder had tapered off during the time since Snyder left the NFL to being practically nonexistent now.

“I stopped trying,” one of the former associates said. 

A high-ranking official with one NFL team told FOS: “I don’t think anybody is in touch with him about anything. … I don’t know who he hangs out with. I don’t know who he talks to. Certainly nobody in the NFL is talking to him.” 

When Daniel and Tanya Snyder filed a certificate of incorporation of a private limited company for Snyder UK Investments Limited with the registrar of companies for England and Wales in November 2022, listing them as company directors, they had the country or state of which they were “usually” a resident listed as England.

Bloomberg reported last August that Snyder UK Investments had at least a half dozen employees at that point, was growing its team and had allocated to Apollo Global Management “offerings as part of its private markets bets.” It also reported that the Snyders had spent more than $67 million on a home in a luxury central London development and that the family’s approximately 305-foot yacht, the Lady S, had traveled around the U.K. and parts of mainland Europe. 

Snyder turns 62 in November; Forbes estimates his net worth at $4.7 billion. He could not be reached, either directly or through messages to past representatives, to comment for this story. Those representatives did not respond to requests to comment.

The NFL and the Commanders declined to comment.

There are few readily available comparisons for Snyder’s life as a former NFL owner. In this era of ever-burgeoning NFL franchise values, most team sales occur after the owner’s death. Before Snyder’s sale of the Commanders, the last living NFL owner to sell his team was Jerry Richardson, who sold the Panthers to David Tepper in 2018.

The NFL, following an investigation into allegations of workplace misconduct, fined Richardson $2.75 million the month after the $2.275 billion sale to Tepper was ratified. Richardson had put the team up for sale after Sports Illustrated reported in late 2017 that he made sexually suggestive comments to women and on at least one occasion directed a racial slur at a scout for the team. A statue of Richardson outside Bank of America Stadium was removed in 2020, and he died in 2023 at age 86.

Even so, the level of controversy that surrounded Richardson—an influential and widely respected owner for much of his tenure—and the Panthers did not come remotely close to the near-constant drama and legal issues with Snyder and the Commanders. 

Perhaps no other NFL owner, past or present, has been associated with as much turmoil as Snyder was.

Snyder and the Commanders were investigated by the NFL, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the attorneys general of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. On the day that the owners ratified the sale to Harris’s group, the NFL said an investigation conducted by attorney Mary Jo White concluded the Commanders withheld revenue that should have been shared with other franchises and that Snyder sexually harassed a former team employee. The NFL said Snyder would make a $60 million payment to the league as part of the closing of the sale. 

“From what I have gathered through just talking to people, the league has just totally moved on from him,” a former team staffer who worked for Snyder told FOS. “You bring up that name, people are like, ‘What?’ Like, ‘Nah, never mind.’ And I think he’s over there just basically living a life of anonymity. Nobody in London gives a shit who Dan Snyder is. And it’s probably mutually beneficial. The people in London don’t care. … It’s one of those things where thank God I don’t spend much time thinking about [it]. … It’s just weird. It’s like talking about a movie sometimes. … People would be like, ‘Really?’ Yeah, believe it or not, that actually happened.”

Snyder’s Loose Ends

Variety reported in May 2024 that a Snyder-backed company, Kinematics, put money into the film The Apprentice about President Donald Trump’s early years because Snyder was under the impression that it would provide a flattering portrayal of Trump. Snyder was “said to be furious” after viewing a cut of the film and Kinematics attorneys “were enlisted to fight” its release, according to the Variety report. The film was released but reportedly underperformed at the box office.

Harris’s deal to purchase the Commanders from Snyder included an “earnout,” a structure that would provide Snyder with a deferred payment or payments of as much as around $200 million, contingent on the franchise reaching specified financial benchmarks, five people with knowledge of the terms of the sale told The Washington Post in 2023. The Post reported in 2024 that the team was unlikely to reach the revenue markers required for Snyder to receive the $200 million. However, it appears that the Commanders’ financial performance under Harris’s ownership has, ironically, improved the chances of the earnout being paid to Snyder. The $200 million amount would come in addition to the initial payment of about $5.85 billion by the Harris group in the sale to push the total transaction above $6 billion, aside from the $60 million payment by Snyder.

The local revenues of most NFL teams, including the Commanders, are not publicly known. Each NFL team received $453.2 million as its share of the NFL’s national revenues, according to the financial details from the most recent fiscal year released last month by the Packers as the league’s only publicly owned franchise. That was $20.6 million more than the previous year. 

Snyder’s past representatives did not respond to questions related to the earnout.

Snyder could be back in the public spotlight to some extent as former Raiders coach Jon Gruden’s lawsuit against the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell over leaked emails related to an investigation of the Commanders continues to play out.

Gruden resigned from his Raiders job in October 2021 after The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal published reports about emails sent to the team account of Bruce Allen, Washington’s former team president, in which Gruden used racist, anti-gay, and misogynistic language over approximately seven years while he worked for ESPN as an NFL analyst. The emails were gathered as part of an investigation into Washington’s workplace conducted by attorney Beth Wilkinson. 

Gruden filed a lawsuit in Nevada in November 2021 accusing the NFL and Goodell of using leaked emails to “publicly sabotage Gruden’s career” and pressure him into resigning. The NFL has denied leaking the emails. Tanya Snyder, formerly the Commanders co-CEO, told fellow owners during a league meeting in New York in October 2021 that the email leaks did not originate with her or her husband or their franchise, the Post reported then.

According to the Post, Daniel Snyder and other NFL owners had to resolve differences over issues related to indemnification against future legal liability during the process leading up to the Commanders sale, including legal issues related to the Gruden case during the final week or so before the purchase by Harris’s group was ratified. 

It’s not known how those issues were resolved.

Under Harris, the Commanders had a 4–13 record in the 2023 season but drafted quarterback Jayden Daniels second overall in 2024 and reached the NFC title game in his rookie season before losing to the Eagles. The team slumped to a 5–12 record last season and missed the playoffs. Last year, the team and D.C. announced an approximately $3.7 billion deal for a stadium projected to open in 2030 at the RFK Stadium site. The new stadium is to have up to about 70,000 seats and a roof that would enable the city to vie to host future Super Bowls. Next year’s NFL Draft is scheduled to be held in Washington on the National Mall. 

All of that has occurred with Snyder observing from afar, if he continues to pay attention at all. The second former Snyder associate predicted the former Commanders owner will never reside in the U.S. again. 

“He’ll never be back,” that person said. “In London, they … don’t bother him.” 

That distance, geographically and emotionally, may be what’s best at this point for all involved, the former team staffer said.  

“Just let him be over there,” the ex-staffer said.