What Are Some Of The Ways You Can Invest In The NFL?

Every now and then, during a live broadcast of a sports game, the cameras will pan up to the executive boxes, to show the audience who is sitting there. These boxes usually contain the best seats in the entire stadium, ones that us normal fans would love a chance to sit in. Of course, they usually cost tens of thousands of dollars, something us normal people could never afford in our wildest dreams.

That is the thing about owners of some of the biggest teams in the world of sport, they have a wealth that is almost incomprehensible to us. Joshua Harris is the owner of the NBA team the Philadelphia 76ers, and has a net worth of $6.2 billion. Sounds impressive, but not compared to Steve Cohen who owns the New York Mets, whose net worth is a staggering $16 billion. Even that pales in comparison to the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, whose owner Steve Ballmer is worth a reported $71.4 billion. You imagine he could afford every seat at the Staples Center to watch the Clippers games, let alone just the courtside ones.

Of course, unless we are incredibly savvy business people, the chances are that we will never accumulate the sort of funds that meant we could afford a little league team, let alone a huge franchise. However, there are potentially a number of ways, both directly and indirectly, for the average fan to get involved with an NFL franchise.

Is it possible for the average fan to gain access to these inner circles? Or is the only real way to make money from the NFL by correctly picking the winning NFL lines on your sports betting app each week? We’ll look into a few of the options and rumours out there for you budding investors, to see if you one day could become the next Cohen, Harris or Ballmer.

The Packers allow fans the chance to buy stock directly

The Green Bay Packers are one of the great NFL institutions. They have 20 Division championships, 9 Conference championships, and have lifted the Super Bowl 4 times, the most recent occasion coming in Super Bowl XLV, where they defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25. The quarterback and MVP that day was one Aaron Rodgers, who 10 years later is still turning out for the Packers, so is undeniably one of their all-time greatest players.

Not only have the Packers been successful on the field, but they have an almost unique method to how the club is run off the field too. They are the only club that sells stock directly to the public. This is because of the ‘Hungry Five’ who started the company as the Green Bay Football Club Corporation, with the idea of it being a non-profit organisation.

At present, there are 361,169 shareholders of the Packers, who owned a combined total of 5,009,562 shares.  The articles of incorporation state that no one person can own more than 20,000 shares, so there is no way for one rich person to dominate the others, and take the club in a direction they don’t agree with. Owners of the stocks got certain perks, such as special stadium tours and the chance to watch the team practice. The next time they open up the chance to buy shares in the Packers, any would-be investor would be smart to buy as many shares as they could afford.

 

Other indirect ways to invest

With the other NFL franchises, you can’t invest in them directly, so one way to do it is to buy shares in some of the companies that are directly affiliated with your favourite teams.

For instance, Gerry Jones is the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, but also is a partner of Legends Hospitality, a company that only supplies food, beverages and retail to some of the biggest NFL stadiums, but also acts as a stadiums operation corporation. Stan Kroenke, owner of the LA Rams as well as other major sports teams across the world, is the chairman of THF Realty, an independent real estate development company that specialises in suburban development. So buying shares in companies that are also owned by NFL owners is another way to indirectly invest in the world of American football.

If you are tech-savvy and spot a company that is creating a new kind of technology that might someday be useful to major sports leagues such as the NFL, then that is the best place to be investing your money. Tech is only going to play a bigger role in the sports in the next 20-30 years, so getting in early with one of these emerging firms could mean you later end up with a big stake in a franchise, and those special executive box seats.