Ten days after the Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl 60, the estate of Paul G. Allen announced Wednesday that it has begun a formal sale process for the franchise, adhering to Allen’s directive to eventually sell his sports assets and donate the proceeds to philanthropic efforts.
The Athletic reported last month that the team would be put up for sale following the Super Bowl, though the exact timing was unclear.
The investment bank Allen & Company and law firm Latham & Watkins will lead the sale process, which is expected to continue through the offseason. The last NFL team to change controlling owners was the Washington Commanders, which sold for a record $6.05 billion to a group led by private equity investor Josh Harris in 2023. The process took more than eight months from the time former owner Daniel Snyder announced he was considering selling to when the deal closed. The Denver Broncos, which were held in a trust established by former owner Pat Bowlen, were sold in 2022 to the Walton-Penner family for $4.65 billion after a relatively swift four-month process.
Because the Seahawks are held in a trust, as the Broncos were, it’s Jody Allen’s fiduciary duty as executor of the estate to maximize the franchise’s value in a sale.
The estate is in the process of closing a sale of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers to a group led by billionaire Tom Dundon, who also owns the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes. It still retains a minority ownership stake in Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders.
Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, purchased the Seahawks from Ken Behring for around $200 million in 1997, saving the franchise from leaving Seattle. Nearly 17 years after taking control of the team, he hoisted its first Lombardi Trophy after the Seahawks’ lopsided win over the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. Allen died four years later from complications of non-Hodgkin lymphoma at 65, and his sister took over as chair of the Seahawks and trustee of her brother’s estate.
During the Allen family’s nearly three decades of control, the Seahawks have won two Super Bowls, four NFC championships and 11 division titles.
The NFL’s ownership policy differs from those of other sports leagues, mandating that an individual controlling owner must own at least 30 percent of the team, and the number of minority investors cannot top 24 people (for family ownerships, the individual in control needs only 1 percent so long as the family as a whole has 30 percent).
Because of that policy, along with the ballooning cost of franchises — the Broncos’ sale price more than doubled the previous NFL high ($2.3 billion for the Carolina Panthers in 2018) — and the prospect of new media rights deals soon, the pool of potential buyers for NFL franchises is limited to the ultra-rich.
Rob Walton, the controlling owner of the Broncos after the sale, is worth around $144.8 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. (The Broncos’ controlling owner designation was later transferred from Rob Walton to his son-in-law, Greg Penner.) Forbes estimates that Harris’ wealth is around $11 billion.
Sportico estimated last year that the Seahawks are worth around $6.59 billion, the 14th-highest in the NFL and up 18 percent from the team’s estimated value in 2024. Should the team sell for $8 billion and set a new record for an NFL franchise, the prospective buyer would need to put down at least $2.4 billion for control and fundraise the other $5.6 billion.