The NFL’s team owners have no immediate plans to increase the league’s limit that allows a franchise to sell no more than 10% of its ownership to private equity, multiple sources tell Front Office Sports.
The owners voted, 31–1, in August 2024 to allow teams for the first time to sell ownership stakes to private equity, while establishing a list of approved firms to which those sales could be made. Only the Bengals voted against the measure. The NFL had established an ownership policy committee in 2023 to study possible changes to the league’s ownership rules.
Major League Baseball raised its private equity ownership limit this summer from 15% to 20% per team with a single firm, FOS reported this week. That put MLB’s policy in line with that of the NBA. In both cases, that limit is lowered in cases in which a franchise’s controlling owner has less than a 20% ownership stake. If the controlling owner has a 19% ownership stake, for instance, a single private-equity firm cannot own more.
The NBA also made a recent policy change to allow a private equity firm and its executives to invest in a team at the same time, according to Bloomberg.
But NFL owners feel no urgency and have no appetite for now to raise their private equity limit above 10%, three sources told FOS in the aftermath of the report about the MLB change.
The limit eventually could be increased, those sources said. But for the foreseeable future, the owners feel no pressing need to make such an adjustment, they said.
The NFL declined to comment Thursday about the prospect of a future change to the private equity limit.
The owners are not expected to discuss raising the limit at their next quarterly meeting in October in New York.
The NFL’s 10% limit applies to the amount that a team can sell to private equity, whether to a single firm or to multiple approved firms.
The NFL has the highest average franchise value in professional sports and also has a reputation for having the most restrictive ownership rules.
Those rules require, among other things, for the controlling owner to have at least a 30% ownership stake and for an ownership group to include no more than 25 members. The group cannot borrow more than $1.5 billion to purchase the team (that figure combines the $700 million acquisition debt limit with the $800 million operating debt limit). No public corporations or sovereign wealth funds can own any shares.
The NFL’s rules do not prohibit a sovereign wealth fund from being an investor in a private equity fund that purchases an ownership stake in a team, however. No investor in a private equity fund that purchases ownership in an NFL team, including a sovereign wealth fund, can own more than 7.5% of the fund.
A private equity fund can hold ownership stakes in as many as six NFL teams. It must hold that ownership stake for at least six years. The fund’s minority ownership of a team gives it no voting rights.
The private equity firms originally approved by the NFL in 2024 included Arctos Partners, Ares Management, Sixth Street Partners, and a consortium of Blackstone Partners, Carlyle Group, CVC Capital Partners, Dynasty Equity, and Ludis, a platform founded and led by Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Curtis Martin. Blackstone and CVC are no longer part of the consortium.
Apollo Sports Capital, the sports arm of trillion-dollar PE titan Apollo Global Management, is not on that list. But its chief strategy officer, Sam Porter, told FOS last week that he’d like to be. Apollo recently invested more than $2 billion in the Yankees.
Carlyle, Dynasty Equity, and Sixth Street are among the minority investors in the new Seahawks ownership group led by the family of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Sixth Street has an ownership stake of about 3%, and Carlyle and Dynasty together own about 3%, a source previously confirmed to FOS. The owners voted unanimously Aug. 26 in Atlanta to ratify the Khosla group’s purchase of the team from the estate of late owner Paul G. Allen for a league-record $9.612 billion.
The Falcons’ pending sale of a 10% ownership stake to Arctos was not considered by the owners during the Aug. 26 meeting. That transaction perhaps could be considered and approved by the owners at the October meeting.
The Patriots, Chargers, Bills, Browns, and Dolphins also have sold ownership stakes to private equity.
The average NFL team is worth an estimated $9.5 billion, according to Forbes. That’s up from $7.1 billion last year.
—Ben Horney contributed reporting.
