The long national nightmare could soon be over. NFL fans in and around the nation’s capital haven’t stopped buzzing since word spread this week that Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder had agreed to sell the storied NFL franchise. With that hurdle cleared, it’s now down to the league’s 31 other team owners to rubber stamp the record $6.05bn deal. The rumored purchase price would exceed the guestimate Forbes came up with earlier this year for the Dallas Cowboys, ostensibly the world’s most valuable sports franchise, as well as the record $4.65bn cost of the recently sold Denver Broncos.
Never mind that the 58-year-old Snyder, one of the great sports villains of the last quarter-century, makes off like a bandit in the exchange. The news of his imminent departure has landed like Dorothy’s farmhouse in the Land of Oz. “DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD,” tweeted one Commanders fan. Another, speaking to radio station WTOP, likened the breakup to a “bad marriage/relationship for 20-something years, then you finally get that divorce and find a hotter, young lady that comes and puts a smile on your face.”
Their new darling is Josh Harris, the 58-year-old billionaire private equity shark who already owns pieces of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and the Premier League’s Crystal Palace – a deep pocket who likes to win, in other words. He leads an ownership group that includes basketball icon Magic Johnson and the manufacturing plutocrat Mitchell Rales. Their winning bid comes as something of a surprise given that the Commanders had long looked like Jeff Bezos’s team to lose. But the Amazon founder never made a formal bid for the Commanders, and Snyder never gave the impression that he’d sell to the gazillionaire anyway. That left the door open for Harris and co to sneak through and mark a new chapter in DC sports history. But should the end zone dancing over this new era be happening so soon?
Remember: Snyder, too, was celebrated as a conquering hero when he ponied up a then-record $800m for the Washington Redskins in 1999 – the 34-year-old, Bethesda, Maryland-based media mogul who would breathe new life into a three-time Super Bowl winner that lost its way on the field and financially following the death of legendary team owner Jack Kent Cooke. Born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, before he was shipped off to Henley-on-Thames for private schooling, Snyder has been a fan of the team since boyhood. Early on, he was careful to style himself as the steward of a cherished public trust. “I feel an obligation and a commitment,” he told the Washington Times after the sale. “I wouldn’t have done this unless I felt capable of doing a first-class job on behalf of the fans.”
Snyder’s willingness to reinvest in the team was endearing at first. But the more he overspent on a parade of splashy free agents that ran the gamut from over-the-hill (Deion Sanders) to downright ornery (Albert Haynesworth), the more it became clear that Snyder had more dollars than sense –and no one in his immediate orbit who’d dare question his freewheeling approach to team building. As Washington descended even deeper into football irrelevance, Snyder made things worse by making an enemy of his fourth-estate critics, leaning into the team’s racist nickname, stymieing team stakeholders, gathering “dirt” on other owners, and fostering a culture of workplace sexual harassment so toxic that it triggered a congressional investigation. A rebranding – to the Washington Football Team to the Commanders – didn’t do much to wash away the stains.
In the rogue’s gallery of modern sports owners, not even New York Knicks spoilsport James Dolan holds a candle to Snyder – the worst Washington football team owner since the first Washington football team owner. When he wasn’t razing protected forestland to make sight lines for his Potomac estate, he was trampling on the memory of fallen hero Sean Taylor. All the while football fans that didn’t outright desert the team to join the championship bandwagons of Washington’s other pro teams threw their support behind the arch-rival Dallas Cowboys or cross-parkway Baltimore Ravens instead. FedEx Field, the Commanders’ home stadium, once boasted a league-leading seating capacity of 91,000. Last year, they ranked dead last in attendance, averaging 58,000 fans. The next worst team, Chicago, at least had an excuse: theirs is the league’s smallest stadium.
Ultimately, it was Snyder’s part in the workplace scandal that lost him confidence with NFL team owners and commissioner Roger Goodell, forced Snyder to cede day-to-day control over the team to his wife, Tanya, and set in motion the team’s looming sale. (Or maybe the profit-skimming allegation was the last straw?) Like the LA Clippers’ Donald Sterling and Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, Snyder will be handsomely rewarded for his bad behavior. In a just sports world he’d be sentenced to the jail inside the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium to live out his remaining years in misery.
At a glance Josh Harris comes across as a suite upgrade. Crystal Palace are a stable presence in the Premiership. The 76ers, a perennial championship contender led by an MVP favorite, have been largely successful in Harris’s time, too. He goes over the luxury tax, stays out of the headlines – he’s a fan’s owner. But he hasn’t fared as well managing the Devils, who have fallen from the NHL’s elite in the past decade. Perhaps worse: Harris would seem to be grasping to plug an unfillable void. Before the Commanders bid, he had jockeyed to buy the Broncos and baseball’s New York Mets –losing out, respectively, to Walmart scion Rob Walton and hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. To consolidate his winning bid for the Commanders, Harris must first sell his slice of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
It’s enough to make you think any old team will do for Harris, whose politics may leave something to be desired as well. This week Philadelphia’s Board of Ethics accused mayoral candidate Jeff Brown of illegally coordinating with a super PAC that is alleged to have received dark money from Sixers ownership. Four years ago Harris’s Apollo Global Management firm reportedly extended a $184m loan to Jared Kusher’s private company, ostensibly in exchange for a job advising the Trump administration on infrastructure spending. The kicker: Both scandals came up as the Sixers were house hunting for a new downtown arena. Throw in all the meddling Magic Johnson did while an owner–executive with the Lakers, and the Commanders could well find themselves making as many headlines for their off-field machinations as they ever did.
Still: it seemed like Snyder would never leave. He was so at home in his odiousness, so at peace with the team’s mediocrity, so happy playing the villain. And when he does eventually bugger off to his super yacht or whatever, only rival fans who have come to count on his incompetence are likely to shed a tear. Harris has a lot of work to do restoring the public trust, and for the moment the fans are firmly with him. But a lot can change after the money changes hands.
Long suffering Washington football fans should feel good about kissing Snyder goodbye – it’s easily the best news the team has gotten in years. But they should also be careful what they’ve wished for. The Wicked Witch of the West turned out to be quite a formidable villain in the end, too.