AS 63,000 DIEHARD FANS pour into Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, for the Buccaneers’ season opener against the Washington Commanders, billionaire Josh Harris, Washington’s new controlling owner, is feeling the heat. It is 90 degrees on this early September afternoon, and sweat is seeping through his maroon polo. He paces the field perimeter with security in tow, beaming as he shakes hands, poses for pictures and signs hats for Commanders supporters praying for a winning season (the team’s last one was in 2016). Harris hears an eager fan shouting his name. His T-shirt reads: “We almost always almost win.” A humorously defeatist attitude befitting the last 30 years of Washington football.
“They went through a lot, and they’ve been there a long time waiting for this,” says the 59-year-old Harris. “Having grown up [near D.C.], it’s very personal for me. Obviously, you have to deliver, right? I stay up at night thinking about that.”
As the Harris era begins, there’s a lot at stake. The $6 billion he paid for the Commanders last year—besting interest from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Tilman Fertitta—ended Daniel Snyder’s scandal-plagued tenure and set a record for the sale of an NFL team. To get the deal done, Harris assembled a 23-person ownership group that included David Blitzer—a top exec at Blackstone and Harris’ partner in his other sports endeavors through Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment—as well as NBA legend Magic Johnson and billionaires Mitch Rales (Danaher Corp.) and Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.
Harris didn’t make any rash changes after the deal closed in July 2023, but after a disappointing 4-13 season, he cleaned house, bringing in a new head coach, general manager and quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels, the second pick in this spring’s draft.
For a kid who grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, whose parents spent 25 years on the waiting list for season tickets to see the then-Washington Redskins play at historic RFK Stadium, it’s a dream come true. It also fits nicely into the private equity titan’s sports portfolio, which includes the Philadelphia 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, English soccer club Crystal Palace and Nascar team Joe Gibbs Racing.
Soon Harris is likely to be joined in the exclusive NFL owners’ club by more of his buyout-fund brethren. Last month the NFL became the last major professional league to open its doors to private equity firms, with owners voting 31-1—Cincinnati’s Brown family was the only dissent—to allow a select group of approved firms to buy up to 10% of each team, subject to several other restrictions, such as a minimum holding period of six years. It’s a watershed moment for a league that has seen team values skyrocket into the multibillion-dollar range, severely limiting the pool of potential buyers.
Even Harris, worth an estimated $9.3 billion, worried that owning a professional football team would soon be out of reach. When hedge fund heavyweight David Tepper bought the Carolina Panthers in 2018 for $2.3 billion, it was the most anyone had ever paid for an NFL franchise. No other team came up for sale until 2022, when Pat Bowlen’s heirs put the Denver Broncos on the market. Harris put together a group to make an offer, but a group led by the Walton family outbid him to pay a staggering $4.7 billion, doubling Tepper’s record.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1728887664/articles/2bKOIJtyI1728910086867/0377038262.jpg]
“The way the NFL was heading, forget about The Forbes 400,” Harris says. “You had to be in The Forbes 50.”
Inviting Wall Street to the NFL party is a game changer. The eight private equity funds approved by the NFL to invest, including Blackstone, Carlyle, Arctos and Ares Management, currently have dry powder in excess of $160 billion. That’s a lot of firepower. It will ensure that franchise values, which by Forbes’ reckoning have appreciated more than 60% in the last three years, continue to rise. In fact, barely two weeks after the ink was dry on the NFL’s ownership rule change, Arctos was in talks with Stephen Ross, owner of the Miami Dolphins, to buy a stake in his team that would value it north of $7 billion.
For private equity firms like Arctos, it’s a no-brainer. NFL teams are underleveraged, yet they rake in so much from media rights deals it’s almost impossible not to turn a profit whether they win or lose. Since 2000, NFL teams have significantly outperformed nearly every other asset, including stocks, real estate, bonds—and, yes, private equity funds. If you adjust for risk, the numbers look even better.
“In business you’re graded by Ebitda and stock price and cash flow,” Harris says. “In sports you’re graded by creating positive memories.”
Joshua Harris, the eldest son of an orthodontist who was a collegiate rower at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, is a lifelong sports devotee. Growing up in Maryland, he played Little League, basketball and soccer. When he was 9, he found his true love, wrestling, after winning a tournament at summer camp. He would go on to compete competitively all the way through high school at the Field School in D.C. and in college at Penn, representing the Quakers at 118 pounds.
After excelling in economics his freshman year, he transferred to the Wharton School and, like many of the college’s Reagan-era graduates, made his way to Wall Street. He landed at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the peak of Michael Milken’s junk bond-fueled profitability. He worked for two years in mergers at the firm’s New York office under the tutelage of Milken’s right-hand man, Leon Black. During Harris’ short stint at Drexel, the firm was making headlines for its involvement in the Ivan Boesky insider trading scandal, and Milken’s operation came under investigation by the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s office. Harris left in 1988 to pursue an MBA from Harvard and in 1990 accepted a job at Blackstone. Just two months later, however, he quit to join Leon Black and Marc Rowan, both refugees from Drexel’s collapse, to start Apollo Advisors.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1728887664/articles/2bKOIJtyI1728910086867/3zW1BeKPX1728910271842.jpg]
The trio spent the next 30 years building Apollo into one of the world’s largest private equity firms, now managing $700 billion in assets. Harris was known to be demanding and obsessive about details. His most notable deal was acquiring Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell in 2008, using $2 billion of its distressed bank debt. After managing it through a prolonged bankruptcy and a 2010 IPO, Harris and partners wound up netting a $10 billion profit by the time they fully cashed out in 2013. Black became tainted by his close ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, whom he paid $158 million for tax and estate planning services, and when Black stepped down under pressure in 2021, Apollo’s board picked Rowan, not Harris, to succeed him as CEO.
Harris quit later that year but didn’t stay away from private equity for long. He launched 26North in 2022 and has already built it to $23 billion in assets, announcing its first buyout—of ArchKey, a Missouri-based electrical contractor for commercial buildings—in September for more than $1 billion.
“The ability to generate alpha was harder with over half a trillion or a trillion dollars, so I wanted to go back to basics,” he says. “I wanted to go back to what I had done when Apollo was much smaller.”
The rise of any asset class is often easy to understand in hindsight, but when Harris first became interested in sports ownership after Apollo’s 2011 IPO gave the billionaire newfound liquidity, it was far from a sure thing that franchise values would continue to go up. The NBA was having a particularly difficult year, dealing with a dispute with its players’ union over revenue sharing that came to a head in a five-month lockout, shortening the 2011-12 season.
“This was post-Michael Jordan, and people were saying maybe the best years of this league were behind us. Certainly, we didn’t believe that, but that’s what a lot of people in the market were saying,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver, then the league’s deputy commissioner under David Stern. “Josh took a long-term view, and he was very analytical in his approach. He did as thorough a due diligence process with the league as any owner had done in my time in the league up till then, and I got here in 1992.”
The Philadelphia 76ers won their last championship in 1983, in the spring of Harris’ freshman year at Penn. He recalls marveling at how the team united and delighted the city. But ever since, the franchise had been stuck in a cycle of irrelevance. It was losing $25 million a year and attendance was sagging. Harris felt that the team’s owner, cable TV giant Comcast, was more passionate about the Flyers, the city’s hockey team, than basketball, and was open to making a deal.
Harris and Blitzer, the Blackstone banker whom Harris had befriended while working in London during the financial crisis, pulled a page from their day jobs to orchestrate a corporate carve-out for $280 million to acquire the team with a group of investors made up of mostly Penn alumni and Philadelphia natives who remembered the Sixers’ 1980s heyday.
“I remember David St...
“They went through a lot, and they’ve been there a long time waiting for this,” says the 59-year-old Harris. “Having grown up [near D.C.], it’s very personal for me. Obviously, you have to deliver, right? I stay up at night thinking about that.”
As the Harris era begins, there’s a lot at stake. The $6 billion he paid for the Commanders last year—besting interest from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Tilman Fertitta—ended Daniel Snyder’s scandal-plagued tenure and set a record for the sale of an NFL team. To get the deal done, Harris assembled a 23-person ownership group that included David Blitzer—a top exec at Blackstone and Harris’ partner in his other sports endeavors through Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment—as well as NBA legend Magic Johnson and billionaires Mitch Rales (Danaher Corp.) and Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.
Harris didn’t make any rash changes after the deal closed in July 2023, but after a disappointing 4-13 season, he cleaned house, bringing in a new head coach, general manager and quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels, the second pick in this spring’s draft.
For a kid who grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, whose parents spent 25 years on the waiting list for season tickets to see the then-Washington Redskins play at historic RFK Stadium, it’s a dream come true. It also fits nicely into the private equity titan’s sports portfolio, which includes the Philadelphia 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, English soccer club Crystal Palace and Nascar team Joe Gibbs Racing.
Soon Harris is likely to be joined in the exclusive NFL owners’ club by more of his buyout-fund brethren. Last month the NFL became the last major professional league to open its doors to private equity firms, with owners voting 31-1—Cincinnati’s Brown family was the only dissent—to allow a select group of approved firms to buy up to 10% of each team, subject to several other restrictions, such as a minimum holding period of six years. It’s a watershed moment for a league that has seen team values skyrocket into the multibillion-dollar range, severely limiting the pool of potential buyers.
Even Harris, worth an estimated $9.3 billion, worried that owning a professional football team would soon be out of reach. When hedge fund heavyweight David Tepper bought the Carolina Panthers in 2018 for $2.3 billion, it was the most anyone had ever paid for an NFL franchise. No other team came up for sale until 2022, when Pat Bowlen’s heirs put the Denver Broncos on the market. Harris put together a group to make an offer, but a group led by the Walton family outbid him to pay a staggering $4.7 billion, doubling Tepper’s record.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1728887664/articles/2bKOIJtyI1728910086867/0377038262.jpg]
“The way the NFL was heading, forget about The Forbes 400,” Harris says. “You had to be in The Forbes 50.”
Inviting Wall Street to the NFL party is a game changer. The eight private equity funds approved by the NFL to invest, including Blackstone, Carlyle, Arctos and Ares Management, currently have dry powder in excess of $160 billion. That’s a lot of firepower. It will ensure that franchise values, which by Forbes’ reckoning have appreciated more than 60% in the last three years, continue to rise. In fact, barely two weeks after the ink was dry on the NFL’s ownership rule change, Arctos was in talks with Stephen Ross, owner of the Miami Dolphins, to buy a stake in his team that would value it north of $7 billion.
For private equity firms like Arctos, it’s a no-brainer. NFL teams are underleveraged, yet they rake in so much from media rights deals it’s almost impossible not to turn a profit whether they win or lose. Since 2000, NFL teams have significantly outperformed nearly every other asset, including stocks, real estate, bonds—and, yes, private equity funds. If you adjust for risk, the numbers look even better.
“In business you’re graded by Ebitda and stock price and cash flow,” Harris says. “In sports you’re graded by creating positive memories.”
Joshua Harris, the eldest son of an orthodontist who was a collegiate rower at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, is a lifelong sports devotee. Growing up in Maryland, he played Little League, basketball and soccer. When he was 9, he found his true love, wrestling, after winning a tournament at summer camp. He would go on to compete competitively all the way through high school at the Field School in D.C. and in college at Penn, representing the Quakers at 118 pounds.
After excelling in economics his freshman year, he transferred to the Wharton School and, like many of the college’s Reagan-era graduates, made his way to Wall Street. He landed at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the peak of Michael Milken’s junk bond-fueled profitability. He worked for two years in mergers at the firm’s New York office under the tutelage of Milken’s right-hand man, Leon Black. During Harris’ short stint at Drexel, the firm was making headlines for its involvement in the Ivan Boesky insider trading scandal, and Milken’s operation came under investigation by the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s office. Harris left in 1988 to pursue an MBA from Harvard and in 1990 accepted a job at Blackstone. Just two months later, however, he quit to join Leon Black and Marc Rowan, both refugees from Drexel’s collapse, to start Apollo Advisors.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1369322608/1728887664/articles/2bKOIJtyI1728910086867/3zW1BeKPX1728910271842.jpg]
The trio spent the next 30 years building Apollo into one of the world’s largest private equity firms, now managing $700 billion in assets. Harris was known to be demanding and obsessive about details. His most notable deal was acquiring Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell in 2008, using $2 billion of its distressed bank debt. After managing it through a prolonged bankruptcy and a 2010 IPO, Harris and partners wound up netting a $10 billion profit by the time they fully cashed out in 2013. Black became tainted by his close ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, whom he paid $158 million for tax and estate planning services, and when Black stepped down under pressure in 2021, Apollo’s board picked Rowan, not Harris, to succeed him as CEO.
Harris quit later that year but didn’t stay away from private equity for long. He launched 26North in 2022 and has already built it to $23 billion in assets, announcing its first buyout—of ArchKey, a Missouri-based electrical contractor for commercial buildings—in September for more than $1 billion.
“The ability to generate alpha was harder with over half a trillion or a trillion dollars, so I wanted to go back to basics,” he says. “I wanted to go back to what I had done when Apollo was much smaller.”
The rise of any asset class is often easy to understand in hindsight, but when Harris first became interested in sports ownership after Apollo’s 2011 IPO gave the billionaire newfound liquidity, it was far from a sure thing that franchise values would continue to go up. The NBA was having a particularly difficult year, dealing with a dispute with its players’ union over revenue sharing that came to a head in a five-month lockout, shortening the 2011-12 season.
“This was post-Michael Jordan, and people were saying maybe the best years of this league were behind us. Certainly, we didn’t believe that, but that’s what a lot of people in the market were saying,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver, then the league’s deputy commissioner under David Stern. “Josh took a long-term view, and he was very analytical in his approach. He did as thorough a due diligence process with the league as any owner had done in my time in the league up till then, and I got here in 1992.”
The Philadelphia 76ers won their last championship in 1983, in the spring of Harris’ freshman year at Penn. He recalls marveling at how the team united and delighted the city. But ever since, the franchise had been stuck in a cycle of irrelevance. It was losing $25 million a year and attendance was sagging. Harris felt that the team’s owner, cable TV giant Comcast, was more passionate about the Flyers, the city’s hockey team, than basketball, and was open to making a deal.
Harris and Blitzer, the Blackstone banker whom Harris had befriended while working in London during the financial crisis, pulled a page from their day jobs to orchestrate a corporate carve-out for $280 million to acquire the team with a group of investors made up of mostly Penn alumni and Philadelphia natives who remembered the Sixers’ 1980s heyday.
“I remember David St...
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Forbes (Digital) - 1 Issue, October - November 2024