From the start, the Oakland Ballers have aggressively set themselves up as a contrast to the Oakland A’s, who the founders see as everything wrong with modern sports. The Ballers were founded as a team in the independent Pioneer League after the A’s formally announced last year they were leaving Oakland.
This week, the team took its most radical step yet: The current owners want to sell shares of the team to fans and give those fans voting rights.
The founders told The Athletic that they believe they would be the first U.S. team to sell actual voting rights. Other franchises, like the Green Bay Packers, have collective ownership, but fan shares in the Packers are largely symbolic and do not come with any power over the NFL team’s decision-making.
“We think fundamentally the relationship between teams and communities is breaking — that social contract is breaking,” team cofounder Paul Freedman told The Athletic. “The right way to fix it is to actually give fans not just an economic stake … but actually voting rights, like the ability to decide things that they care about, like whether the team can move, or other things they have demonstrated that matter the most to them.”
The team has said it has to be vague about what exactly the rights would entail because of SEC regulations. It launched a website where fans can register interest in buying shares, which comes with a disclaimer that a “person’s indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind.” More than 1,000 people registered on the day of the site’s launch, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
In a press release, the Ballers said fans with ownership stakes would have an “unprecedented bundle of rights that includes checks and balances on key team decisions including where the team is based, changes to the logos and brandmarks, and even some front office hiring decisions.”
The founders told the Chronicle that they would be open to accepting investment of up to $1.35 million from fans.
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