I know I said I was done writing about Daniel Snyder, and God knows I’ve spent enough time on him over the last few months, but I felt like I couldn’t let his impending sale of the Washington Commanders go by without addressing it. There are, of course, socialist implications.
First, let’s just start with the most obvious takeaway: The fact that Snyder is able to sell the team for $6 billion* ought to be a major indictment of capitalism. Snyder bought the franchise in 1999 for ~1/8th of that sum, and then proceeded to do everything wrong. Most obviously, there’s all the stuff documented in the many investigations covered in the Snyder Files: the culture of employee abuse and sexual harassment, the surveillance and intimidation tactics used against ex-employees, and all the accompanying bullying and illegality.
*There are reports of a bid as high as $7 billion, but that does not seem to be the favorite, likely because of where the money is coming from.
But let’s bracket that for just a minute. After all, people think of those things as almost extracurricular for the capitalist class. Bullying your employees, breaking the law, abusing the legal system — that’s all just normal stuff for owners. Being a jerk or a liar or a criminal is seen as an acceptable, or even necessary, price to pay for generating profits.
So let’s just evaluate Snyder on capitalism’s own terms, and note that he was a really terrible owner even by those standards. For one, he put out a terrible product. He has taken one of the NFL’s marquee franchises and turned it into a punchline. Washington has three Super Bowl rings — only six teams have more — plus two NFL championships from the pre-Super Bowl era. Since Snyder bought the team, they’ve won only two playoff games. Prior to being purchased by Snyder, the franchise had a .529 winning percentage over half a century — now it has a losing record. Between the NFL’s merger with the AFL in 1970 and Snyder’s purchase of the team in 1999, Washington had a total of seven losing seasons. Since 1999, they’ve had 14.
This is to say nothing of the reputational damage Snyder has done to the team, by antagonizing his fans, fumbling the controversy around the team’s name, and picking fights with the league. All this has even made him enemies among the ownership class, who are notoriously protective of each other. But Snyder’s mismanagement of his team got him sued by his partners, then forced to take a bailout loan from the league, and now pressured to sell the team.
And yet – and yet! – for all that record of uninterrupted failure, he is now selling the team for 7.5x what he paid for it.
This is not how capitalism is supposed to work. The whole point of allowing private ownership, the whole reason that a thing like a city’s football team can be owned by a single individual, is that the owner is supposed to bear some risk or bring some value to the enterprise. This is what entitles him to the profits of that enterprise, and supposedly motivates the owner to run his business in an efficient, rational way that will please customers. All that good Adam Smith shit about the baker making the bread out of self-interest and all that…
But what if that’s not how any of this works in practice? What if a team or business is just a financial asset whose success or failure depends not on some keen insight or managerial efficiency of the owner, but on macroeconomic trends that the owner has no control over? What if you can sell your team for $6 billion even after running it into the ground for more than two decades? In that case, we might question the underlying premise of the whole system.
Which brings us to the second point I wanted to highlight from this sale, which is that the ownership class has already realized this. That is to say that owners already know that they’re asset-holders, not business managers.
Look at the structure of the ownership group whose bid seems close to being approved: It is led by Josh Harris, the billionaire private equity guy who also owns the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils,* but Harris reportedly will own only 30% of the team — the minimum required by the NFL. The rest will be made up by 17 different limited partners, including Magic Johnson, who will supposedly own ~4%. The bid also includes over a billion dollars of debt to buy the team, which is the most the NFL would allow.
*Just worth pointing out: Harris made his fortune by co-founding Apollo Global Management in 1990, along with Leon Black, who would later give $158 million to Jeffrey Epstein for “tax and estate planning” (wink wink).
In other words, this is a very different ownership structure than the NFL is used to. For decades, the league has tried to limit its teams to individual principal owners. To this day, many of its most prominent franchises are still owned by the same dynastic families that have owned the teams since the league’s inception: the New York Giants and the Maras, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Rooneys, the Detroit Lions and the Fords, etc. Owners who bought into the league in the modern era still presided over their franchises like monarchs, like Jerry Jones in Dallas or Al Davis in Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland. Even Snyder claimed to run Washington as a family business, frequently invoking his wife or his father.
The whole thing has a very nineteenth-century, Adam Smith flavor to it, and it has been useful to preserve the image of an owner as the godhead of the organization, overseeing and making sure it runs smoothly. But now that is no longer tenable.
The problem is the teams are worth too much money. It was useful to maintain the illusion of the NFL as a family-run business when you could buy a team for a measly few hundred million dollars. But now that the going rate is well in the billions, it’s harder to limit your ownership pool. Even a billionaire like Harris has trouble putting together the cash for these teams without stretching the limits of debt-financing and partnerships, and for a few years now there has even been speculation that the NFL will rescind its rule against private equity ownership. The only way NFL owners can continue to see their assets appreciate is to allow some level of financialization into the process.
But once you start doing this, you might start to question things a little. After all, if the Commanders can function with 18 different ownership partners, then why not 28? Or 280? Or 280,000? Heck, why not make every resident of the District of Columbia a “partner” in the team by turning the team into a publicly owned asset? The owners themselves have already admitted you don’t need a single owner running the team for maximum efficiency. In fact, the Snyder example shows all the downsides allowing ownership to concentrate in one individual’s hands, and in return you get none of the supposed benefits.
The only reason to continue to run them as privately-owned enterprises is to maintain a small group of people that has immense power over the masses. In other words, the only reason to do it is to maintain the supremacy of the capitalist class.