Washington Football Team minority owners are pushing majority owner Dan Snyder to sell the franchise, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s Andrew Beaton and Cara Lombardo.
According to the WSJ, Snyder has no interest in selling the team.
FedEx CEO Fred Smith, Black Diamond Capital Chairman Robert Rothman and NVR Inc. board chairman Dwight Schar has hired an investment firm to sell its 40% stake in the franchise, according to the WSJ.
De Journal reports that the minority interests have attracted interest in the past, but that prospective buyers are away from deals citing Snyder’s reluctance to give one of the new buyers the option to eventually buy control of the team. Per de Journal, any bet sold by minority partners would also become more valuable if the entire team was sold.
The internal pressure comes because Snyder recently filed a case accusing a former teammate of assisting in a alleged defamatory plot against the long-time team owner.
On Monday, in a federal District Court filing, Snyder requested documents from a former team-executive assistant, Mary-Ellen Blair, to support a defamation suit against an Indian media company that he claims published defamatory information about him.
“We are aggressively pursuing Mary-Ellen Blair, a disgruntled former employee who is clearly in the pocket of another and complicating this arrangement to slander Mr Snyder, to ensure that the full weight of the law heavy on all those comes responsible for these heinous acts, ”said one of Snyder’s lawyers, Joe Tacopina, in a statement to the New York Times.
All of this comes on the heels of a recent name change of the franchise. On July 23, the club announced that it would temporarily call itself the ‘Washington Football Team’, effectively immediately, as it dropped a new name to adopt at a later date.
On July 13, the team first said it would “retire” its old nickname after criticizing and pressuring sponsors. Snyder insisted for years that he would never change the name of the team.
“For updated purposes for market clarity and consistency, we will call ourselves the ‘Washington Football Team’ in anticipation of accepting a new name,” the team said in a release. “We encourage fans, the media and all other parties to use” Washington Football Team “directly. The Redskins’ name and logo will be officially retired at the beginning of the 2020 season.”
End of July survey by Sports IllustratedJenny Vrentas and Michael Rosenberg state that although Snyder showed the “Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation” as evidence of the franchise’s commitment to Native American communities, tribal officials and public records tell a less flattering version of the story.
End of July survey by the Washington Post, found that more than a dozen women plead sexual harassment and verbal abuse by former team members.
Snyder bought the Washington team in 1999 for about $ 800 million, which at the time was a record price for an American sports franchise.
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