The Super Bowl champions are officially for sale.
The news the Seahawks didn’t want coming out when it did Super Bowl week became official Wednesday.
The Paul G. Allen Estate of the franchise’s late owner, who bought the team 29 years ago and saved it from leaving Seattle for California, announced the team is up for sale.
“The Estate of Paul G. Allen today announced it has commenced a formal sale process for the Seattle Seahawks NFL franchise, consistent with Allen’s directive to eventually sell his sports holdings and direct all Estate proceeds to philanthropy,” a statement the estate issued Wednesday through the team said.
The statement said the Allen & Company investment bank plus the Latham & Watkins law firm will handle the sale.
“(The Seahawks’ sale) is estimated to continue through the 2026 offseason,” the statement said. “NFL owners must then ratify a final purchase agreement.”
Because of the Allens’ supreme standing among league owners and NFL headquarters, the sale is expected to be approved easily. It could close by the start of or during next season.
Since Paul Allen’s death in 2018, the Seahawks have been owned by Jody Allen, his sister. She is the team’s chair, with Bert Kolde the vice chair.
The sale announcement comes 10 days after Jody Allen accepted the Vince Lombardi Trophy on the field in Santa Clara, California, minutes after the Seahawks finished their 29-13 win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60. It is the second NFL championship in the franchise’s 50-year history.
Both have come in the last dozen years, under the Allens’ ownership.
Now, a new era in Seahawks football begins.
The sale is a sports rarity, in more ways than one. It’s almost unheard of for a franchise to go up for sale within days of winning a major professional sports championship.
And the Seahawks are expected to easily exceed the Washington Commanders’ sale for $6.05 billion in 2023 as the highest price in NFL history. Some believe the Seahawks’ final closing price will perhaps push the Los Angeles Lakers’ recent purchase for $10 billion for the highest in North American sports history. What changes with the Seahawks sale?
That’s what fans want to know.
The sale will not affect Seahawks players this coming offseason and next season. Their contracts are binding. A new owner inherits those and must honor them. Life is undoubtedly about to change for team president Chuck Arnold, a Tacoma-native and graduate of Curtis High School, and his business side of the Seahawks. Owners rich enough to buy an NFL franchise usually have their own business and money people come with them to a new team.
What will also change: The regular operations for coach Mike Macdonald and general manager John Schneider, in how the football side of the franchise interacts with and get guidance from ownership.
In the week late last month following Seattle’s win in the NFC championship game, Macdonald talked openly how instrumental Jody Allen was in his first season as a head coach at any level, Seattle’s 2024 season. That was in the months after Allen with Kolde chose Schneider’s path forward for the franchise over 15-year coach Pete Carroll’s when she fired Carroll in January 2024.
Macdonald said at the Super Bowl that Allen guided him with clear vision while he was “in a fog” as a rookie, 36-year-old head coach in 2024.
Opposite Allen’s reputation that she’s not involved in daily football matters, Macdonald said he has been meeting weekly with Allen, via Zoom, the day following Seahawks games.
“She’s been incredibly supportive. We haven’t hit the mark all the time, and so when she gives feedback it’s very simple,” Macdonald said. “And it’s through, like, a great lens that maybe if I’m kind of in the fog, you don’t see it.”
The coach said his owner’s questions are “piercing.”
“It gets right to the point. And it’s helpful,” Macdonald said.
“She’s been awesome.”
Schneider as GM is ownership’s first point of contact with the Seahawks’ football operations. He also has publicly thanked and praised Allen for her leadership and support of the football operation. Allen last summer gave Schneider a four-year contract extension through 2031.
Macdonald, now 38, signed a six-year contract to be the Seahawks’ coach through 2029. And now he’s done in just two years what only Carroll has done in franchise history: win the Super Bowl.
That’s why whoever buys the Seahawks is unlikely to change the football operations and those who led them, at least initially. They are the opposite of broken.
They are currently at the pinnacle of the sport. Who will buy the Seahawks?
Kolde sat in the front of a press conference by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in the San Jose Convention Center days before Super Bowl 60. At that, Kolde said he, chair Jody Allen and other leaders from Vulcan, LLC, the company Paul Allen formed to manage the Seahawks, have studied the recent sales of North American sports franchises.
That includes the NBA’s Boston Celtics (for $6 billion), the Lakers (for that record $10 billion) and the most recent sale of an NFL team. That was the Commanders for their $6.05 billion three years ago.
“We study all teams, all the sales. That’s something we keep abreast of,” the Seahawks’ vice chair said Feb. 2.
The Allen Estate put its Portland Trail Blazers, the NBA team it owns, up for sale in September. Kolde said this month he expects that sale to be final this spring. It’s about to go to a group led by the owner of the National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes for a reported $4.25 billion.
“Still tracking to close in a couple months,” Kolde said.
With the Blazers sale closing, it made sense (and billions of dollars) the Seahawks were next.
The News Tribune asked Kolde off the stage following Goodell’s news conference days before Super Bowl 60 if the Seahawks already had local buyers on the horizon to sell to.
“Nothing to add,” Kolde said to that.
Is there is anything in the estate’s instructions for the sale of the Seahawks that contractually assures the franchise remains in Seattle? A stipulation it must be sold to local owners? A contract from whoever buys the team that binds them to keep the Seahawks in the city?
Asked those questions, Kolde referenced the team’s 30-year lease with Lumen Field runs through 2031. He did not comment on the 20-year option the team has with the stadium and the local, government-created district that runs it beyond 2031.
“l’m not going to get into all of that, all of that detail,” Kolde said.
“But the Allen family put a lot into saving the Seahawks, keeping them in Seattle (by Paul Allen buying the team in 1997 from Ken Behring, who tried to move the team to Southern California),” Kolde said. “We campaigned around the state (for the new stadium that opened in 2002 and replaced the Kingdome). The voters agreed with us. And we put together Lumen Field.
“And we delivered on everything we promised in that campaign. The team. The stadium. Soccer balls were on our posters. The Sounders launched as the most successful MLS team. The World Cup is coming; we talked about World Cup back in that campaign.
“So we’ve been all about sports in the community for decades. So the lease has six years or so …”
NFL owners have wanted the Seahawks to sell sooner than later, so they can learn the latest relative valuations of their teams in this post-COVID world— plus with the league’s new media rights deals. Those provide $11 billion in annual revenue to the NFL. The league signed that a couple years ago.
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