IRVING, Texas. — NFL owners voted to approve the Las Vegas Raiders’ sale of 15 percent of the franchise at the special league meeting Wednesday. Silver Lake co-CEO and Endeavor board chairman Egon Durban and Discovery Land Company founder and chairman Michael Meldman have each acquired an equal 7.5 percent stake in the Raiders.
Mark Davis is still the controlling owner of the Raiders, which means he’s the one who holds decision-making power. As of 2022, the NFL dropped the minimum percentage of a team that a longstanding owner must control from 5 percent to 1 percent for teams with the same owner for at least 10 years. Davis has owned the team since his father Al died in 2011, so he would fall into that group.
The transaction marks the second time this year that Davis has agreed to sell a chunk of the Raiders equity. In October, Davis sold about 10.5 percent of the Raiders to former NFL quarterback Tom Brady, co-founder of Knighthead Capital Management Tom Wagner and former NFL defensive lineman Richard Seymour. Brady and Wagner purchased stakes worth about 5 percent each while Seymour purchased a 0.5 percent stake.
In total, the Raiders have sold about 25.5 percent of the franchise in 2024. To be clear, all of those shares didn’t come from Davis; they were split between him and some of the Raiders’ minority owners.
The Raiders 2024 media guide lists six other “interest holders” in the franchise: A. Boscacci, Jill Boscacci Lovingfoss, First Football, the Winkenbach Family, Fox Football and the Sargent Family. That group will now be expanded to include Brady, Wagner, Seymour, Durban and Meldman.
Davis’ reasons for selling shares of the Raiders are varied. Brady and Seymour were partly brought in to help Davis make football decisions. Before joining the ownership group, Seymour was on the Raiders’ hiring committee that led to the hiring of general manager Tom Telesco and coach Antonio Pierce this offseason. Brady hasn’t had that type of formal involvement yet — he’s been busy working as a Fox analyst — but Davis said he could help the Raiders “select a quarterback in the future and potentially train him as well.” He plans to lean on Brady’s football knowledge and called it a “huge benefit to the organization.”
As for the transactions with Wagner, Durban and Meldman, the primary motivator appears to be Davis becoming more liquid. The value of the Raiders has skyrocketed since their relocation from Oakland to Las Vegas. Earlier this year, CNBC valued the franchise at $7.8 billion. While the exact terms are unknown, Davis earned hundreds of millions of dollars by selling stakes to Brady, Seymour, Wagner, Durban and Meldman collectively.
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(Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
