Commanders Sale Could Impact Future NFL Team Purchases

New owners need to pay at least 30% cash for a team, and the prices have skyrocketed to the point where the pool of potential buyers is microscopic.

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The Commanders sale to Josh Harris is going to happen, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some interesting twists and turns to come. The NFL’s finance committee met Wednesday—that one being a part of the regularly scheduled committee meetings that lead up to the league’s spring meeting May 22–23 in Minneapolis—and they did, indeed, discuss Harris’s group’s bid for the team. What they didn’t do was vote on the structure of the deal.

So there are two things people should know about that.

One, that makes it less likely that Harris will be voted through when the owners meet next week since the group buying the team has to be approved by the finance committee. It’s unclear whether they’ve even made their presentation to the committee, and all of that needs to be buttoned up before the 31 owners and Packers president Mark Murphy vote to approve the sale.

The Commanders are selling for $6.05 billion, and NFL rules dictate that the Josh Harris group has to be able to pay cash for a minimum of 30% of the team.  :: Denny Medley/USA TODAY Sports

Two, as incredibly wealthy as Harris and his most prominent partner, Mitchell Rales, the Commanders are selling for $6.05 billion, and almost no one has the cash on hand (or very few people who don’t have the last name Walton) to pay that outright. NFL rules dictate that a new primary owner has to be able to pay cash for a minimum of 30% of the team, and there have been rumblings that Harris’s group may be taking on more than the allowable amount of debt to purchase the team.

That, of course, will get ironed out. The NFL wants the Harris group (he and Rales would be seen as major assets to the league among owners), Harris was already vetted as a runner-up during the Broncos process and Dan Snyder finally looks fully ready to exit the pro football stage. So, for folks in D.C., at this point, there shouldn’t be anything at all to worry about.

But this sale could be the one that changes how NFL rules read on buying a franchise, mostly because the prices of the teams, in 2023, have skyrocketed to the point where the pool of potential buyers is pretty microscopic. And if guys such as Harris and Rales aren’t ready to pony up the actual cash needed to finish a sale like this one inside the NFL guardrails, that’d probably be a pretty good sign that change should be afoot soon.