The Washington Commanders will go down in the history books as the sports franchise to be sold for the highest price. According to reports from specialized sources such as Sportico, Front Office Sports, CNN and CBS Sports, the NFL team will be acquired for a value of 6,000 million dollars by a group led by businessman Josh Harris.
Josh Harris has reached an agreement in principle to acquire the Washington Commanders for $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Still-owner of the Commanders, Dan Snyder, and Harris expect to execute a contract in the coming days, said the people, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the transaction publicly,” Sportico revealed on the morning of April 13. April, although the news was not made official for the rest of the day.
According to CBS Sports, for this transaction to be a fact, the endorsement of at least three-quarters of the owners of the NFL, made up of 32 teams, is needed, so it would be the league itself that would have to give the validity for it. Harris and his group take over as the new leaders of the Washington franchise.
If the sale goes through for the aforementioned $6 billion, it would rank as the highest in sports club history, surpassing the $5.4 billion Todd Boehly paid to acquire Premier League side Chelsea FC in May 2022 and the 4,650 million that the Walton-Penner family paid in June also last year.
That amount is no problem for Josh Harris, whose net worth is estimated at just $6 billion according to Forbes. The graduate of the Master of Business Administration from Harvard University has built his fortune thanks to being one of the co-founders of the investment firm Apollo Global Management, in which to date he maintains a 6% stake.
With that financial strength, he decided to meddle in the sports industry starting in 2011, when he acquired the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers for $290 million and since then has raised the value of said franchise by almost 600%. He later acquired the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and added stakes in the Pittsburgh Steelers (NFL) and Crystal Palace FC of the English Premier League.
Regarding the transaction with the Washington Commanders, Harris included in his group of investors the billionaire Mitchel Ralles and also the former star of the Lakers, Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson. His interest in acquiring the team had come to light since the end of last year, but it would be about to materialize this spring.
“Yes, our offer is in. We hope we win. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’ll see what happens with Mr. Snyder making that decision; meanwhile, we are excited”, declared ‘Magic’ Johnson at the beginning of April of this year, when the offer with the group with Harris and Ralles was already official.
With this high transaction, the era of Daniel Snyder as owner of the Commanders will end, a franchise that he bought in 1999 for 750 million dollars under his old name (Redskins), although he never managed to get along with sports successes, since the The team’s greatest achievement in that span was two divisional playoff losses (in 1999 and 2005).
Snyder put the Commanders up for sale in 2022 on the edge of dozens of complaints that were made public in 2020 regarding incidents of sexual harassment, which led to an investigation by the NFL into his person and, finally, a penalty of 10 million of dollars that ended up breaking the reputation of the owner in front of the fans and the rest of the leaders of the league.
Formal negotiations for the Commanders have been taking place over the past six months, Sportico reports, and have come amid the constant specter of whether Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, might make an offer. Bezos is worth an estimated $124 billion, but he never made an offer.
