Disgraced director Daniel Snyder finally leaves the stage in THE WITCH IS DEAD
A 24-year career marked by controversy, instability, and incompetence will come to an end with Dan Snyder’s record $6.05 billion sale of the Washington Commanders.
by_drew Andrew Lawrence
Sat., April 15, 2023, 16:19 BST
The protracted national nightmare may soon come to an end. Since news of the Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder’s decision to sell the iconic NFL team spread this week, NFL fans in and around the nation’s capital haven’t stopped talking about it. After that hurdle has been overcome, the remaining 31 team owners in the league must rubber-stamp the deal.
Mark the historic $6.05 billion deal. The rumored purchase price would surpass the $4.65 billion record price of the recently sold Denver Broncos as well as the estimate Forbes came up with earlier this year for the Dallas Cowboys, supposedly the most expensive sports team in the world.
It doesn’t matter that the 58-year-old Snyder, one of the greatest sports villains of the past 25 years, gets away rich in the trade. Like Dorothy’s farmhouse in the Land of Oz, the rumor of his impending departure has spread around the area. One fan of Commanders wrote, “DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD.” In an interview with radio station WTOP, another person compared the split to being in a “bad marriage/relationship for 20-something years, then you finally get that divorce and find a hotter, young lady that comes and puts a smile on your face.”
Their new darling is Josh Harris, the 58-year-old billionaire private equity shark who already owns pieces of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and the Premier League’s Crystal Palace – a deep pocket who likes to win, in other words. He leads an ownership group that includes basketball icon Magic Johnson and the manufacturing plutocrat Mitchell Rales. Their winning bid comes as something of a surprise given that the Commanders had long looked like Jeff Bezos’s team to lose. But the Amazon founder never made a formal bid for the Commanders, and Snyder never gave the impression that he’d sell to the gazillionaire anyway. That left the door open for Harris and co to sneak through and mark a new chapter in DC sports history. But should the end zone dancing over this new era be happening so soon?
Remember: Snyder, too, was celebrated as a conquering hero when he ponied up a then-record $800m for the Washington Redskins in 1999 – the 34-year-old, Bethesda, Maryland-based media mogul who would breathe new life into a three-time Super Bowl winner that lost its way on the field and financially following the death of legendary team owner Jack Kent Cooke. Born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, before he was shipped off to Henley-on-Thames for private schooling, Snyder has been a fan of the team since boyhood. Early on, he was careful to style himself as the steward of a cherished public trust. “I feel an obligation and a commitment,” he told the Washington Times after the sale. “I wouldn’t have done this unless I felt capable of doing a first-class job on behalf of the fans.”
Snyder’s willingness to reinvest in the team was endearing at first. But the more he overspent on a parade of splashy free agents that ran the gamut from over-the-hill (Deion Sanders) to downright ornery (Albert Haynesworth), the more it became clear that Snyder had more dollars than sense –and no one in his immediate orbit who’d dare question his freewheeling approach to team building. As Washington descended even deeper into football irrelevance, Snyder made things worse by making an enemy of his fourth-estate critics, leaning into the team’s racist nickname, stymieing team stakeholders, gathering “dirt” on other owners, and fostering a culture of workplace sexual harassment so toxic that it triggered a congressional investigation. A rebranding – to the Washington Football Team to the Commanders – didn’t do much to wash away the stains.
In the rogue’s gallery of modern sports owners, not even New York Knicks spoilsport James Dolan holds a candle to Snyder – the worst Washington football team owner since the first Washington football team owner. When he wasn’t razing protected forestland to make sight lines for his Potomac estate, he was trampling on the memory of fallen hero Sean Taylor. All the while football fans that didn’t outright desert the team to join the championship bandwagons of Washington’s other pro teams threw their support behind the arch-rival Dallas Cowboys or cross-parkway Baltimore Ravens instead. FedEx Field, the Commanders’ home stadium, once boasted a league-leading seating capacity of 91,000. Last year, they ranked dead last in attendance, averaging 58,000 fans. The next worst team, Chicago, at least had an excuse: theirs is the league’s smallest stadium.
Ultimately, it was Snyder’s part in the workplace scandal that lost him confidence with NFL team owners and commissioner Roger Goodell, forced Snyder to cede day-to-day control over the team to his wife, Tanya, and set in motion the team’s looming sale. (Or maybe the profit-skimming allegation was the last straw?) Like the LA Clippers’ Donald Sterling and Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, Snyder will be handsomely rewarded for his bad behavior. In a just sports world he’d be sentenced to the jail inside the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium to live out his remaining years in misery.
At a glance Josh Harris comes across as a suite upgrade. Crystal Palace are a stable presence in the Premiership. The 76ers, a perennial championship contender led by an MVP favorite, have been largely successful in Harris’s
Also, time. He pays the luxury tax and remains out of the spotlight – he’s a fan’s owner. But he hasn’t performed as well as a manager of the New Jersey Devils, who have dropped out of the NHL’s elite in the last decade. Worse, Harris appears to be attempting to fill an unfillable void. Prior to the Commanders bid, he competed for the Denver Broncos and the New York Mets, losing to Walmart heir Rob Walton and hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, respectively. Harris must first sell his stake in the Pittsburgh Steelers in order to consolidate his winning bid for the Commanders.
It’s enough to make you believe that any old squad will suffice for Harris, whose politics may also leave something to be desired. The Philadelphia Board of Ethics charged mayoral candidate Jeff Brown this week with illegally cooperating with a super PAC that allegedly accepted dark money from Sixers ownership. Harris’ Apollo Global Management firm reportedly made a $184 million loan to Jared Kusher’s private company four years ago.
In exchange for a job advising the Trump administration on infrastructure expenditures, ostensibly. The kicker: Both incidents surfaced when the Sixers were looking for a new downtown facility. Add in Magic Johnson’s interference as a Lakers owner-executive, and the Commanders may find themselves making as many headlines for their off-field maneuvers as they ever did.
Still, it appeared as if Snyder would never leave. He was so at ease in his villainy, so content with the team’s mediocrity, so content playing the villain. And when he inevitably does bugger off to his super boat or something, only rival fans who have grown accustomed to his incompetence are going to cry. Harris has a lot of work to do to regain public trust, but for the time being, the fans are on his side. However, a lot might happen once the money is exchanged.
Suffering for a long time Washington football supporters should be happy to say goodbye to Snyder; it’s easily the best news the team has received in years. But they should be cautious about what they wish for. In the end, the Wicked Witch of the West proved to be a formidable villain.
