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Some key NFL team owners have long endorsed the notion of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos joining their ranks.
But even as Bezos made a minority investment Friday in Liverpool, a Premier League soccer club, sources in and around the NFL say they see little or no near-term prospect for him to become the principal owner of a franchise in the most popular U.S. sports league.
Bezos evaluated a potential bid for the Commanders but never actually made one before that team was sold by Daniel Snyder to a group led by private equity investor Josh Harris for $6.05 billion in 2023. Bezos was not linked to this year’s bidding for the Seahawks before the estate of late owner Paul G. Allen agreed last month to sell the team to a group led by the family of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla for a league-record $9.612 billion, pending the owners’ ratification.
“For now, he seems to have made that choice—because he could have bought a team if he’d wanted one,” a person familiar with the owners’ views of Bezos told Front Office Sports.
Bezos, 62, is part of an investment group that acquired an approximately 30% to one-third stake in Liverpool football club in a deal announced Friday by the club’s owner, the Boston-based Fenway Sports Group.
The consortium is led by Amit Bhatia, the founder of investment firm AyBe Capital and the son-in-law of Lakshmi Mittal, the executive chairman of steel and mining giant ArcelorMittal. Bhatia is expected to be Liverpool’s vice chairman and sit on the club’s board.
The club’s expanded board will include two other members of Bhatia’s investment group, Bryan Baum and Elaine Saverin, the wife of Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin. (The Saverin family office is part of the consortium.) Bezos will not have a seat on the Liverpool board. The group’s investment reportedly is based on a valuation of about $5.9 billion for the Liverpool club.
Bezos’s participation in the Liverpool deal could be a signal of receptiveness to additional sports investments. Amazon Prime Video holds the NFL’s broadcast package for Thursday night games.
A Lull in NFL Sales?
Industry analysts say it’s not clear which NFL team will be sold next after the owners approve the Seahawks deal. Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti has said he intends to eventually sell his team rather than passing it down to family members. But that’s not imminent. Bisciotti, who turned 66 in April, said during a news conference in January that he’d like to “win a couple” more Super Bowl titles with the Ravens and then get out of ownership, ideally “in the next 10 years,” around age 75. And sources say they don’t envision any other team being put up for sale in the next few years, barring unforeseen complications forcing an owner to sell.
“He ultimately wasn’t interested in the Commanders,” a high-ranking official with one NFL team told FOS about Bezos. “He wasn’t interested in Seattle. I just don’t know what other team is going to be for sale, other than Baltimore with Bisciotti. The private equity involvement has taken all the pressure off families for their estate planning.”
Bezos announced in 2023 that he was moving from Seattle, where he’d lived since 1994, to Miami. That prompted some speculation within the NFL that Bezos eventually could make an attempt to buy the Dolphins from owner Stephen Ross. But it hasn’t happened to this point.
Ross, 86, told Bloomberg in January that he’d been offered close to $15 billion to sell the team but declined, with plans to keep the franchise in his family. (Ross’s son-in-law Daniel Sillman is CEO of Ross Sports & Entertainment.) Ross has sold minority stakes in the Dolphins and related assets.
“If that team had come to sale, I think [Bezos] and Ken Griffin would go toe to toe for it,” the high-ranking NFL team official told FOS. “But I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I think that will stay in that family.”
Griffin, the founder and CEO of Miami-based hedge fund firm Citadel LLC, reportedly had previous discussions about a potential minority ownership stake in the Dolphins without completing a deal with Ross.
Bezos was not available to comment. Amazon did not respond to a request made before the Liverpool deal was announced to comment on Bezos’s sports investment activities.
“He Could Have Outbid Everyone. … Does He Want To?”
NFL owners have said they’d love to have Bezos in the league.
“I’d carry him piggyback to get him to the NFL,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told Sports Illustrated in 2018.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft told The Washington Post in 2019: “I’m sure that eventually it would be in everyone’s best interests if someone that’s as community-oriented as him gets involved in the Seattle situation.”
The Seahawks have been owned by Allen’s estate since the Microsoft cofounder’s death in 2018. Allen directed that the Seahawks and the NBA team that he owned, the Trail Blazers, be sold and the proceeds donated to charity. But there has been no indication Bezos was ever involved in the bidding process that led to the sale agreement with the Khosla group. The owners are scheduled to meet Aug. 26 in Atlanta to potentially take a ratification vote.
In 2023, Bezos hired Allen & Co., a New York–based firm that is prominent in transactions involving pro sports franchises, to evaluate a possible bid for the Commanders, two people familiar with the situation told the Post then. Members of other groups seemed resigned to the possibility of Bezos entering the process and acquiring the team by outbidding all competitors.
But Bezos never bid, clearing the way for Harris’s group to purchase the franchise from Snyder. Some NFL owners believed at the time that Bezos’s involvement may have pushed the sale price above $7 billion.
Allen & Co., which also was hired by the Paul Allen estate to oversee the Seahawks sale process, declined to comment this week about Bezos.
Bezos, who owns aerospace company Blue Origin and the Post, has an estimated net worth of $272.4 billion, according to Forbes. That makes him the world’s third-wealthiest person behind Elon Musk and Larry Page, by the current Forbes estimates.
The Liverpool deal indicates Bezos is open to making a minority investment in a major pro sports franchise, at least under certain circumstances.
“It absolutely invites those kinds of approaches” to Bezos in the future about minority investments in teams, the person with knowledge of the owners’ views said. “Usually things like this happen because of relationships.”
Mittal’s son, Aditya Mittal, was part of a bidding group for the Seahawks that was among the two finalists, FOS reported, before the Allen estate struck its deal with the Khosla group. He is the CEO of ArcelorMittal and a minority owner of the NBA’s Celtics. Even with that sports-based connection to the Mittal family through the Liverpool investment, there has been no indication of Bezos being involved with the Seahawks bidding or potential ownership.
Any NFL owner seeking an infusion of cash also has the alternative of selling as much as 10% of the franchise to private equity after the owners approved a measure in August 2024 allowing for that.
It marked a relatively conservative step toward loosening the NFL ownership rules, long considered the most stringent in pro sports. Those rules, among other things, require the principal owner of a team to own at least a 30% stake and prohibit ownership by public corporations and sovereign wealth funds—although a sovereign wealth fund could be an investor in a private equity fund that purchases a stake in an NFL team.
The consistent growth in franchise values—combined with the 30% requirement for a lead owner—promises to further narrow the field of people wealthy enough to be the principal owner of an NFL team. It hasn’t been a major impediment yet in franchise sales. The NFL has told teams that Vinod Khosla’s wife, Neeru Khosla, would serve as the Seahawks’ controlling owner if the purchase is ratified, as expected. Still, the Seahawks sale price represented a 59% increase over that of the Commanders, and analysts say some NFL franchises could be worth $15 billion to $20 billion in the not-too-distant future.
Yet for now and into the foreseeable future, the wait for Bezos as the primary owner of an NFL team continues.
“If he wanted to buy Seattle, he could have outbid everyone,” the person familiar with the owners’ views said. “If he wanted to buy the Commanders, he could have outbid everyone. … There are no teams for sale. There are no teams on the horizon to be for sale. The other thing is: Does he want to?”
