Super Bowling for cash with the NFL’s club of billionaires

Amid the comedic wokeness of dueling national anthems, virtue-signaling TV commercials and rappers touching their private parts during halftime festivities, it’s easy to forget the ­Super Bowl and the NFL are a really big business, run by some of the most powerful businessmen (yes, they are mostly men) in America.

Spending for last week’s Super Bowl came in around $15 billion; yearly league revenues are approaching $20 billion. League profits are likely to keep growing given the popularity of this sometimes brutal and increasingly lucrative sport.

Yet covering the NFL’s club of billionaires is difficult. Their thirst for money and power is filtered through carefully staged events and announcements from the NFL’s image-obsessed commissioner, Roger Goodell. 

It’s mostly propaganda, of course. But if you do crack the code, you quickly understand that Goodell’s obsession with wokeness, endless Kumbaya about ­racial issues etc. is a difficult-to-pierce smokescreen.

Though not impossible. I’ve often received a sneak peek into this secretive world through events like the annual owners’ “Inner Circle Tailgate Party.” It occurs once a year before the Super Bowl. It’s largely hidden from the hoi polloi who attend the big game, in a private room just walking distance from the stadium where the game takes place.

There’s good food there, lots of drinking and amazing gossip ­behind velvet ropes and the phalanx of private security guarding billionaire owners, investment bankers, some celebrities and more than a few politicians. If you can get a ticket, as I have over the years, it’s an eye-opening display of power and privilege among the country’s ruling business, cultural and political elites.

Full disclosure: I didn’t attend this year’s fete in Glendale, Ariz., but some of my sources were there to report back about the machinations of the NFL’s cool-kids club. While many Americans were laying odds on the winner of the big game, the honchos were obsessing about two issues in particular, I am told: presidential politics and the next owner of the Washington Commanders.

The tailgate party is a nominally bipartisan confab, so you will see Dems and GOP pols attending. The owners themselves lean heavily Republican and they’re not afraid to throw money at candidates for national office, including the highly unwoke Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.

This year, the owners are changing their tune, not on the party, but on Trump. The word coming from the tailgate is that some of the biggest GOP donors in the league don’t want Trump anywhere near the top of the ticket, citing his cringeworthy baggage like the Jan. 6 riot. 

It’s one reason why Tim Scott, the GOP senator from South Carolina and a rising star in the party, was greeted with open arms by the owners during the Super Bowl festivities. He was often accompanied by GOP House speaker Kevin McCarthy and, according to my contacts, Scott was buttering up attendees for money as he prepares to run for the GOP nomination against a field that includes Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and someone who is said to be the owners’ favorite, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Press reps for Scott and McCarthy didn’t return calls for comment).

Yes, the NFL overlords don’t want Trump to run because they don’t think he can beat Sleepy Joe Biden. They also worry he can’t be beaten for the nomination with so many others splitting the anti-Trump GOP vote.

Sell that team!

The thought of four more years of the increasingly feeble White House occupant, who has moved further to the left than even Barack Obama, was almost enough to ruin the festivities. I said almost because the other big topic was a possible looming, and massive, payday.

It’s no secret that Commanders owner Dan Snyder is under pressure by the league to sell the team following accusations of a toxic workplace. The league is prodding him to unload the Commanders possibly before the next owners meeting in March. His asking price for the storied franchise (formerly known as the Washington Redskins) will be around $6 billion and league rules mandate that any principal owner put down at least 30% equity in the bid.

Here’s why the owners turned giddy when the topic turned to Snyder (and away from Biden): The way teams are valued, the more he gets for the Commanders, the more other franchises are worth. He bought the team in 1999 for a then-record $800 million, so at $6 billion you can see how the numbers start adding up across the league.

Not a lot of people have that kind of bank, however. The bidders that the owners were talking about include people like Josh Harris of Harris Blitzer Sports Entertainment, a former top exec at private equity firm Apollo who now owns various sports franchises including the Philadelphia 76ers. The other is Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, who is also said to be eyeing the team.

Harris is a billionaire. Whether he’s enough of a billionaire to make the numbers work is ­unclear. (He didn’t return a call for comment.) Bezos, on the other hand, is worth around $120 billion, much of it liquid and a chunk of it in Amazon stock. That means he’s guaranteed to meet Snyder’s and the league’s numbers and make the owners even richer.

Nothing like a few more billions added to your net worth to make you forget about four more years of Sleepy Joe.