Dan Snyder, the bloated tick sucking away any prestige the Washington Commanders once had, has strong competition to stake his claim as the worst team owner in major American professional sports.
After all, Bob Nutting actively refuses to allow his Pittsburgh Pirates to be competitive. Cincinnati Reds owner Bob Castellini openly antagonizes his own fans in his quest for the bottom of the NL Central. And Jimmy Haslam’s mismanagement of the Cleveland Browns — the team that traded away its foreseeable draft future, then gave Deshaun Watson $230 million fully guaranteed despite more than 20 accusations of sexual misconduct and what the league described as “predatory behavior” — is set to spread to the Milwaukee Bucks.
But Snyder keeps building his resume as not just a terrible owner but a horrible human being. His franchise is dysfunctional on the field and off. And a new ESPN report from Don Van Natta details his latest scam, how it allegedly chased out three minority stakeholders in Washington and how it even managed to rope Roger Goodell and NFL leadership into a tornado of garbage decision-making.
This story, not to be confused with the other stories related to Snyder’s absolute void of leadership, begins with a $55 million loan taken out under the Commanders’ name. That loan that required approval from minority team owners Robert Rothman, Dwight Schar and Frederick W. Smith, whose stake in the franchise totaled roughly 40 percent. The trio alleged approval was never asked of them and summarily never given.
Documents currently under investigation as part of a federal investigation into Washington’s mismanagement and potential large-scale fraud show Bank of America asked multiple times for board of directors approval for this line of credit. It was never produced. Team officials would later admit it never existed.
This led the non-Snyder owners to press the NFL to force the team’s majority owner for answers. But, per Van Natta, commissioner Goodell — whose signature adorns the loan documents in question — and the league’s executive offices shut that down, moved the complaint from arbitration to mediation and kept the lid on the whole affair until now. According to sources, this mediation resulted in all three minority partners selling their shares, which would be worth $2.8 billion if Snyder sells the team at his reported $7 billion asking price in 2023, for only $875 million in 2021. Snyder was the beneficiary of that sale.
The league did not investigate Snyder’s loan or whether he’d broken any protocol in securing it without running it by his fellow owners or the board of directors.
If true, it’s yet another damning report for both the Commanders and Goodell, whose efforts to sweep a Snyder scandal under the rug have once again thrown him into the spotlight. Per Van Natta’s source, this wasn’t an accidental misstep; it was potentially criminal fraud:
“Three billionaires — not a few whistleblowers — alleged to the NFL arbitrator that their partner had possibly committed bank fraud,” the source said. “This is jail time type of fraud. The NFL owes them as much of a fair shake as it owes Snyder. And the league had no interest in finding out what happened. They buried it and didn’t investigate it and covered it up.”
Rothman, Schar and Smith’s concerns led them to dig further into Snyder’s team-related finances. What they found was a trail of questionable decisions so spendthriftly stupid they could only belong to Snyder. These allegations, aside from taking a $55 million loan without telling anyone, include:
- Charging the Commanders $4.5 million for the right to apply the team’s logo to Snyder’s private jet.
- Using team funds to pay staffers on Snyder’s private yacht.
- Arbitrarily blocking minority owner’s efforts to sell their shares in the team.
- Failure to pay stakeholders quarterly profits on time.
- Expensing more than $7 million in personal costs over a three-plus year period. This included a yacht party in the south of France as well as more than $1 million for “vehicle costs.”
- Generally ignoring the team’s board of directors and firing members therein on a whim.
- Paying himself a $10 million salary to serve as team owner (Washington has won two playoff games in his 24 years at the helm).
This is all very stupid but all very believable. Snyder allegedly asked for a clandestine line of credit not just to cover his losses from running a dysfunctional franchise but to gloss over the money he was taking from the team to fund his lavish lifestyle. Goodell approved the loan — there’s no allegedly there — but may not have investigated whether it had full board approval and Bank of America (who is currently handling negotiations for a potential team sale) went forward with the $55 million line of credit despite the absence of that board vote.
When everything went pear-shaped, the league did its best to quietly come to a conclusion that suited everyone. It wound up finding one that only gave Snyder more control and, potentially, shares of the team worth $2 billion more now than they were two years ago. League owners, by a 32-0 vote, approved his move to take on an additional $450 million in debt to finance this buyout — all while awaiting the report from the NFL’s official investigation into allegations surrounding the franchise’s toxic workplace environment and leadership.
It’s a saga that makes everyone involved look stupid, which means it’s a classic Daniel Snyder affair. The NFL retains the nuclear option of forcing him to sell via a three-quarters vote of his fellow owners. That’s something that seemed doubtful in the past, but more likely with each scandal — especially now as Snyder has reportedly threatened to sue the league should it fail to “indemnify him against future legal liability and costs” in any potential sale. Which is very much a move someone proud of his well-run franchise would make.
The Commanders are currently accepting sealed bids to acquire the franchise. Whomever wins can rest easy knowing Snyder has set the bar for competence so low in Washington D.C. that they’d need to hire a deep-sea drilling team to find it.