Seahawks sale would set NFL record, after two-year run-up in league values

The estate of the late Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has signed a formal agreement to sell the Seattle Seahawks, for a reported $9.612 billion, to a group led by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures. The price – undisclosed but confirmed independently by multiple outlets – would be the highest ever paid for an NFL franchise.

The Seahawks released a statement to this effect on July 11. The sale still needs the approval of NFL owners, who are scheduled to vote on it at their meeting in Atlanta on Aug. 26.

Khosla’s wife, Neeru, is set to serve as controlling owner, with son Neal Khosla figuring prominently in day-to-day operations. Khosla must divest an existing minority stake in the San Francisco 49ers before any purchase can close. Most of the proceeds are earmarked for charity, chiefly the Paul G. Allen Foundation, under the terms of Paul Allen’s will.

$9.612 billion is 59 percent more than the previous record for an outright NFL sale, the $6.05 billion Josh Harris paid for the Washington Commanders (former Redskins) in 2023. The $12.5 billion associated with the Miami Dolphins reflects a team valuation implied by the sale, this past March, of a sliver of equity: a 1 percent minority stake. Control of the Dolphins never changed hands. There have been a number of such deals since last autumn.

Meeting in New York on Oct. 21-22, 2025, the NFL owners approved three equity sales in a single sitting: 10 percent of the New York Giants to Julia Koch and her family for $1 billion, an 8 percent split of the New England Patriots between Dean Metropoulos (5%) and Sixth Street (3%), and 3.2 percent of the San Francisco 49ers to Pete Briger Jr., of Fortress Investment Group.

In none of these cases did control change hands. John Mara and Steve Tisch remain in place at the Giants, Robert Kraft remains at the Patriots, and Jed York remains at the 49ers. But all three put fresh, high dollar-figures on teams that had not been priced in years.

Kraft himself bought the Patriots outright in 1994 for $172 million. Compare that with this year’s $9 billion-plus valuation for the same team’s minority stake.

The Dolphins have in fact sold more than one sliver. Owner Stephen Ross sold 10 percent to Ares Management and 3 percent to Joe Tsai and Oliver Weisberg at an $8.1 billion valuation in 2024; by March of this year, Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin was buying 1 percent of the same holding company at $12.5 billion. Same team, same owner, and a valuation up by more than half in under two years, at least on paper. The sale of a minority stake needn’t be a single quest for liquidity. Resale, it seems, can serve as a tool for financing.

Ross himself attached a still-higher number to the team in January, telling Bloomberg that he had turned down offers approaching $15 billion to buy the Dolphins outright. That is nearly double the valuation of 2024. Ross added that he had no plans to sell and intended to pass the team to his son-in-law, Daniel Sillman.

Money has been moving into the investment firms behind these deals as much as into the teams themselves. KKR purchased sports-investor Arctos Partners for about $1 billion in January. Weeks later, Arctos – now under KKR – won NFL approval for an initial 3 percent stake in the Cleveland Browns at a $9 billion valuation. This deal was tied to the building of a new stadium, with a stated gap of $840 million between the project’s cost and what the Haslam family had already pledged. An asset manager has bought the investor rather than the team. Institutional capital now takes NFL exposure seriously enough to buy the middleman.

None of this required the league to open its doors to outside money. That came about on its own momentum, before any of the deals above.

NFL owners voted in August 2024 to admit a vetted list of private equity firms – Arctos, Ares Management, Sixth Street, and a consortium of Blackstone, Carlyle, CVC, Dynasty Equity and Ludis – to take stakes of 3 to 10 percent in single teams, with a cap of six teams per firm and a requirement that some controlling owner hold at least 30 percent. The NFL was the last of the major American leagues to make this move.

MLB opened to private equity in 2019, the NBA in 2020, the NHL in 2021. The case for a $9.6 billion outright sale would have been shakier without that pool of buyers and comparables built up over the better part of two years.

In March the NFL approved the sale of a 3.5 percent stake in the Las Vegas Raiders to Egon Durban of Silver Lake at a valuation of more than $11 billion, with a further 3.5 percent expected to follow. The reporting here (CNBC) relies on an unnamed source “with firsthand knowledge” rather than an on-record team or league statement, but it suggests that team valuations were climbing before news broke of the Seahawks deal.