NFL owners yet to approve partial sale of Raiders to Tom Brady

NFL legend Tom Brady is very interested in buying a piece of the Las Vegas Raiders, but first, it sounds like he’ll have to dig a little deeper into his pocketbook than first anticipated.

It’s no secret that NFL franchises are megalodon businesses worth billions of dollars nowadays — at least five billion or more in most cases. So it’s not terribly often that these franchises, or even pieces of them, change hands. However, Brady wanted to initiate that process with Vegas and come on board as a minority owner now that his playing days are over.

The problem appears to be, though, that Raiders owner Mark Davis hoped to sell Brady a chunk of the team at a highly discounted price, up to a 70% discount, apparently. Perhaps Davis believes the exposure of bringing Tom Brady aboard the organization is worth the big discount, or maybe he just wants to hang out with the all-time great QB in his owner’s suite every Sunday. Either way, Brady and Davis were interested in partnership.

In a normal business transaction, Davis could sell as much of his company or asset to Brady as he wanted to and give him a massive discount, too. But in the NFL exists a set of agreed-upon rules and regulations to prevent such deals. Since NFL franchises are extremely rare and immense assets, the sell or partial sale of one of them helps set the market for the others, and a massively discounted sale to Brady could hurt the value of the other 31 franchises.

Plus, according to Washington Post reporter Mark Maske, 24 out of 32 owners must vote for any ownership sale.

“Any sale of ownership of an NFL franchise, even a minority stake, must be ratified by at least 24 of the 32 owners,” he wrote back in October, also noting that “the owners generally follow the recommendation of the seven-owner finance committee.”

Maske added that the belief currently held by that committee is the Raiders’ sale to Brady “can’t happen at that price” which was initially proposed.

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay is a member of the committee and was pretty straightforward when discussing any Brady-Raiders deal going through. “The number just had to be a reasonable number for purchase price,” Irsay said back in October.

Here we are a couple of months later as another round of league meetings passed — and it doesn’t appear Mark Davis and Tom Brady have worked out a new deal they feel good enough about to present to the other owners.