The Seattle Seahawks are officially for sale. Although various entities have pegged the Seahawks’ value at around $6.8 billion, many experts believe they’ll eventually get sold for anywhere from $7 billion to $11 billion. That’s an almost unfathomable amount of money and means only the wealthiest people in the world are expecting to bid on them.
Whoever ends up buying them could have a sizable impact on the Sounders, too, and not just because that new owner would immediately become the new landlord of Lumen Field as the new operator of First & Goal.
Here’s what I know about how the Seahawks’ potential sale could affect the Sounders:
The Allen Estate already owns 25% of the Sounders
When Adrian Hanauer originally agreed to bring the Sounders from the USL into MLS, he made a deal with Seahawks owner Paul Allen: In exchange for the Seahawks running the Sounders' entire business operation for five years and giving them a team-friendly lease on Lumen Field, Allen would get a 25% stake in the Sounders.
At the time, it seemed like a master-stroke. For the rough equivalent of $7.5 million, the Sounders off-loaded one of their biggest startup expenses, tapped into the Seahawks' vast expertise and secured assurances that their stadium would look and feel like a proper soccer pitch (even if it was FieldTurf).
During those consequential five seasons, the Sounders became arguably the most successful expansion story in professional North American sports history, set virtually every MLS attendance record and built a foundation as strong as any in North American soccer history.
How well that agreement aged depends on perspective. With the Sounders now valued at around $900 million, Allen's investment is effectively worth about $225 million. Meanwhile, the Seahawks' involvement in the Sounders is essentially no different from the standard tenant-landlord agreement, with the occasional social-media post thrown in.
What happens to the Seahawks’ stake in Sounders?
Notably, the Seahawks’ stake in the Sounders is not technically up for sale right now, as those are two distinct assets in the Allen Estate portfolio. But the directive that led Jody Allen to sell the Portland Trail Blazers and now the Seahawks is the same one that will eventually force her to sell the Sounders stake, so it’s not at all hard to imagine the two assets becoming intertwined in the near future.
For what amounts to a virtual rounding error on the Seahawks sale, a new owner could quite easily take control of rapidly increasing asset that also includes a significant share of the Seattle Reign. The Sounders’ valuation has increased by roughly 3000% (or 30x) since it was purchased in 2007, meaning it has effectively doubled annually.
That rate has obviously slowed down in recent years, but as recently as 2018 the Sounders were valued at less half of what they are now.
An aggressive buyer could then take the 25% Allen stake, combine it with the 20% equity stake the Sounders currently have on the market and suddenly take control over the whole operation.
How might a new owner change things?
That’s obviously impossible to say, but even if a new Seahawks owner were to pass on owning any part of the Sounders, they’d still effectively be their new landlord. It stands to reason that part of why the Sounders have been sort of slow-walking their potential move to Longacres is that they want to see how this new dynamic plays out.
The Sounders’ current lease at Lumen Field runs through the 2032 season, which is still a long way off in a sense, but also starting to get into business time when it comes to finding alternate plans.
For all the Sounders' talk of exploring a stadium at Longacres, I think they have to remain open to staying at Lumen Field. The problem isn’t so much the amount of money they’re currently paying to use the facility, it’s the relative lack of control they have over what happens there and how they can use it. As I’ve stated previously, the Sounders have limited ability to sell ad inventory, don’t have their own locker rooms and have very little say over scheduling or how the gameday experience feels. (And there’s no grass. Have we ever talked about that?) Those are all seemingly fixable problems if both parties want to find solutions.
The reality of the matter is the Sounders will never find a better stadium location than Lumen, have an identity that is closely linked to playing in a downtown environment and would lose untold community equity if they were to move to the suburbs. First & Goal would presumably be interested in keeping the Sounders and Reign at Lumen, too, as they collectively attracted about 1 million fans last year and filled more than 40 dates. Both are significantly more than the Seahawks, by the way.
There’s also a somewhat remote possibility that the Seahawks’ new owner will see the same 2032 lease expiration as an opportunity to build something even bigger and grander, potentially leaving Lumen to the Sounders. I don’t think that’s particularly likely, but I’m also not in the business of predicting what people who can spend $10 billion on a sports team will do with their money.
