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Flag On The Play: NFL Owners Get Bonanza From GOP Tax Bill While Fans Suffer

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https://americansfortaxfairness.org/nfl-owners/

As New Season Opens, Fairer Taxes Could Narrow 7,000-1 Income Gap

As the new National Football League (NFL) season kicks off this week, the 
economic gap between team owners and their most loyal fans is wider than 
the beefiest offensive lineman, according to a new analysis by Americans 
for Tax Fairness (ATF). The mean average of NFL owner wealth is $10.6 
billion, which translates roughly into $600 million of annual income. In 
stark contrast, the median NFL fan has an income of just $85,000, or 
around 7,000 times less than an owner. That huge wealth and income 
difference means team owners will be big winners from Republican economic 
policies while team fans will suffer losses. 

“Economic inequality is as much on display in the new NFL season as 
pinpoint passing, acrobatic catches and slashing runs,” said David Kass, 
ATF’s executive director. “The fans who loyally support their favorite 
teams through good years and bad, putting up with steadily rising ticket 
prices and concession-stand gouging, have little in common with the 
billionaires who own the franchises. It’s the owners, for instance, who 
will benefit from Trump-GOP economic policies in the form of huge tax 
cuts; while fans will lose money from a combination of cuts to public 
services and Trump’s chaotic tariff regime.”

The recently enacted economic policies of the Trump administration are a 
huge windfall for the handful of wealthy NFL owners, while making it 
significantly harder for millions of football fans to afford tickets and 
stadium concessions. The top 0.1% of highest-income households (of which 
every owner is certainly a member) will each on average receive a tax cut 
of over $286,000 next year. Between the 29 owners examined in this report, 
that tax cut alone is enough money to pay for over 66,000 free game-day 
tickets. Additionally, the families of these ultra-wealthy owners will 
each save $6.4 million thanks to Trump’s estate-tax cut, a provision that 
benefits fewer than 0.2% of families. 

Meanwhile, the modest tax benefit the median fan is expected to receive 
from the Trump-GOP tax-and-spending plan will be completely wiped out and 
then some by Trump’s tariff hikes, likely costing the median fan $700 a 
year due to higher prices. An NFL fan who wants to order a hot dog at the 
game better hope that pork is not coming from Canada (which provides 67% 
of U.S. imports) or it will be subject to a 35% tariff price hike, making 
that hot dog $2.23 more expensive on average. Want to wash that overpriced 
hot dog down with a cold Modelo beer? Get ready to pay the 25% tariff 
price hike, or $2.29 cent more, to enjoy that icy beverage from Mexico 
(the source of 85% of all our beer imports). 

Even without taking tariffs into account, the price of watching a 
professional football game has skyrocketed in recent years. Because the 
league has sold particular broadcast rights to so many different streaming 
services, it’s estimated a stay-at-home fan would have to pay upwards of a 
thousand dollars in subscription costs to have access to every game this 
season. The price of seeing the game in person (combining the cost of 
tickets, parking and concessions) has shot up around the league an average 
of 40% over the past decade, far outpacing inflation.

https://americansfortaxfairness.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Screenshot-
2025-09-04-at-3.01.34-PM-1200x853.png

Source: Americans for Tax Fairness

 

All but four of the league’s 32 teams are owned by an identified 
billionaire, billionaire family or billionaire partnership. The median 
ownership net worth among the 29 teams privately owned for which data is 
available is $7.1 billion. Median U.S. household wealth in 2022 (the 
latest year with available data) was $192,700–that’s 35,000 times less.

Even compared to their players, NFL owners are making out like bandits. 
Though 100-million-dollar NFL pay packages make the headlines, the median 
league player makes  $860,000 a year. And the opportunity to earn that 
amount is brief: the average player survives in the league for only about 
three years. 

The tax treatment of the income players make by risking their health in 
violent contests each week is radically different from the treatment of 
passive investment income enjoyed by the owners up in the skyboxes. That 
average NFL player would pay a marginal income-tax rate of 37% on the top 
part of his salary; while if an owner made the same $860,000 from stock 
dividends or the profit from selling a winning investment, he would pay a 
top rate of only 20%. 

In fact, we already know that at least some billionaire NFL owners are 
paying incredibly low federal income taxes, thanks to IRS documents 
uncovered by ProPublica. Stan Kroenke and Ann Walton, owners of the Los 
Angeles Rams and heirs to the Walmart fortune, paid an effective tax rate 
of just 14% on $786 million of income over six years. Another Walmart 
heir, Denver Broncos owner Rob Walton, paid an effective tax rate of just 
20.6% on $3.9 billion of income over six years. Importantly both of these 
income figures excluded unrealized capital gains, which likely pushes 
these NFL owners’ real effective tax rate down into the low single digits. 


Green Bay Fans vs Billionaire Owners:

How could the NFL function without the investments of a small clique of 
ultra-wealthy individuals? And without massive tax cuts how could these 
billionaires even afford to keep these teams running? We need billionaire 
team owners, right?

Wrong. There is one NFL team that has no billionaire backers, and is 
instead owned by the fans: the storied Green Bay Packers. Unlike every 
other team in the league, the Packers are a public, non-profit 
organization owned by more than 500,000 fans, with no individual allowed 
to hold more than 4% of total shares. Since it’s a non-profit, owners get 
no dividends or share appreciation but they do get a democratic say in the 
team’s operations and pride in being part of a community project. 

If billionaire ownership were really essential to NFL success,the Green 
Bay Packers should be the worst team in the league. But in fact the 
Packers are the 4th best team over the last decade, not in spite of their 
lack of billionaire backing but very much because of it. Not only do they 
have a spectacular winning record, but they are also much more profitable 
than the average team despite the lack of billionaire-engineered profit 
motive. The Packers are ranked the 12th most valuable team (worth an 
estimated $6.3 billion) and had the 12th highest revenue in 2024 ($638 
million), despite serving the smallest media market of any team. The 
Packers are also one of the least reckless teams when it comes to debt 
financing, with their outstanding debt about a quarter of the NFL average. 

 

How We Can Make the Economic Game More Fair

President Biden proposed equalizing tax rates at higher incomes so that 
investment income was treated the same as work income. Sen. Bernie Sanders 
(I-VT) has proposed reducing the estate-tax exemption and increasing the 
tax rate on huge family fortunes like those of NFL owners. The top 
Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden (OR), has a plan to 
annually tax the unrealized gains of billionaires. All these reforms would 
narrow the wealth and income divides between fans and owners, putting them 
on a more level economic playing field. 

METHODOLOGY: Wealth estimates of NFL owners are published periodically. 
The income estimate is based on a recent examination of billionaires’ 
wealth versus income conducted by a team of eminent economists, including 
wealth expert Gabriel Zucman. Significantly, that income estimate does not 
include unrealized capital gains–the increase in value of assets not sold. 
At the wealth levels enjoyed by NFL owners, this form of income can be as 
good as money in the bank because investors can borrow against it at low 
interest rates and avoid paying taxes that would result from selling the 
underlying asset. A significant portion of each owner’s wealth is in the 
team itself and NFL teams appreciate in value quickly: the average 
appraised value of a league franchise jumped 20% between 2024 and 2025. 
Team ownership has become a more liquid (and therefore valuable) 
investment since the league last year approved selling minority stakes in 
franchises to private equity firms.


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama 
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.

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Flag On The Play: NFL Owners Get Bonanza From GOP Tax Bill While Fans Suffer "Leroy N. Soetoro" <leroysoetoro@americans-first.com> - 2025-11-08 23:05 +0000

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