Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. Actually, you may not remember it, but you have heard this one before.
Three years ago, Sean Combs said he wants to own an NFL team. Earlier this week, Combs reiterated his goal.
“I love sports, but I’m more of a owner type of guy, so I have aspirations to become -- which it will happen -- I will become the first African-American majority owner,” Combs told Bloomberg TV. “Not having a small stake but actually owning an NFL team. I think it’s time for that. A majority of players that are in the NFL are African-American, but there are no African-American owners. So that’s one of my dreams.”
With an estimated net worth of $580 million, Combs arguably wouldn’t have the cash to pull it off any time soon. As franchise values exceed $1 billion, it would be a challenge for Combs to come up with the kind of dollars needed to acquire a majority stake in an NFL team -- which technically can be done by owning less than half of the total interest.
Still, there’s a difference between having an estimated net worth of $580 million and the ability to raise $300 million in cash, and to line up enough investors for the rest.
While Combs, who turns 44 in early November, likely will have more money as time goes by, NFL franchise values are going up even faster. That will make it even harder to acquire controlling interest in an NFL franchise. (The last two men to buy NFL teams, Jimmy Haslam and Shahid Khan, have an estimated net worth of $1.45 billion and $3.1 billion, respectively.)
Some think Jay Z, who launched a sports agency earlier this year, would like to own an NFL team. Jay Z’s net worth is only (only?) $475 million; his wife’s money is believed to make them a billionaire couple.
Combs isn’t interested in starting a sports agency of his own.
When I get the calls, ‘Well, we need to do Bad Boy Sports,’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s not my lane,’” Combs said. “I stay in my lane. This is the lane that I want to do. And I’m just me; I do my own thing.”
If that’s the case, he needs to stay in the “make as much money as I possibly can” lane, and hope he gets to the point where he has the cash to buy a team before the bar moves too much higher.