Business is business, no matter if that relates to an NFL team or anything else. Buy low and sell high, and the Seattle Seahawks could be on the verge of being sold high. The team is one game away from being the champions of the current season.
Seattle plays the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX in a chance of redemption for the awfulness of the team not giving the ball to Marshawn Lynch at the end of Super Bowl XLIX. The players and coaches have changed, but not the ownership groups. Not completely. And that is about to change.
According to ESPN, the Seattle Seahawks will be sold after the Super Bowl. The sale isn't a shock to 12s, as fans have been waiting on the team to be sold since Paul Allen died in 2018. As part of his trust, the team needed to be sold after his death. There was a slight catch, however.
Seattle Seahawks will reportedly be sold after the Super Bowl
If the team had been sold before 2024, the current Seahawks ownership group, led by Jody Allen (Paul's sister), would have had to give the state of Washington 10 percent of the proceeds of the sale. This was because the state kicked in a bit to help build the stadium that is now Lumen Field. Since mid-2024, the team could be sold, and the ownership doesn't have to give the state anything.
Again, business is business.
The expectation, though, is that the Seahawks could be sold for as much as $7-8 billion. That is a record, and a good return on Paul Allen's initial purchase of the team. He bought the team in 1997 for as little as $194 million. That was a lot of money at the time, but nothing compared to how much the Seahawks could fetch in a new sale.
The problem is that while the Seattle Seahawks could win the Super Bowl in a little over a week, they might face a new ownership group by the beginning of next season. Not since 1991 has a team in the championship game been available to buy.
Ownership groups can do what they want, of course (they are in the NFL business to make money, after all), but a sale so soon after a championship is a bit embarrassing. One might wonder if Paul Allen would have wished the process of selling the team to work out the same.
The biggest concern moving forward is whether the organization works as well as it does now. Under the Allens, the organization's reputation is that all employees are treated fairly and as human beings. A new ownership group might operate more robotically, and could have a long-lasting effect on the Seahawks' success or failure.