New York Giants to sell 10% for $1bn

The New York Giants are hoping to sell a 10 percent stake in the franchise to Julia Koch and her family, according to Sportico and others. The deal is subject to the approval of the owners of the National Football League (NFL) – scheduled to review the deal in October, according to Bloomberg. The Giants are valued at $10 billion and a 10 percent stake therefore at $1 billion. This would be the most expensive minority stake in NFL history.

The record belongs at present to the 2 percent stake in the Chicago Bears purchased by the McCaskey and Ryan families last year. The Bears were then valued at $8.8 billion, of which 2 percent is $176 million and 10 percent, $880 million.

The majority owners of the Giants remain the Mara family. As Morningstar tells it, a bookmaker named Tim Mara founded the Giants with $500 and, in 1925, made it one of the professional league’s five original teams. The Maras sold about half in 1991 to the founder of Loews Corp., Bob Tisch, for $75 billion, and members of the Tisch family have served on the board ever since.

Julia Koch is the widow of David Koch and President of the David H. Koch Foundation. David Koch was co-owner, with Charles Koch, of Koch Industries – a company founded by their father, Fred C. Koch, in 1940. David and Charles, the so-called “Koch brothers” of American politics, were the founders – with economist Murray Rothbard and Libertarian Party official Edward H. Crane – of a think tank called the Cato Institute, which champions “individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.”

Last year Julia Koch and her children purchased 15 percent of BSE Global, parent company of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, of the WNBA’s New York Liberty and of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.