When the 32 N.F.L. owners meet for their quarterly meeting this month in Manhattan, it will once again be under the shadow of a man hundreds of miles away, President Trump.
In recent weeks, the president has attacked the N.F.L. for choosing Bad Bunny, a rapper critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as its headlining performer at the Super Bowl in February, and criticized changes to the kickoff rules designed to reduce injuries. This summer, he threatened to delay a stadium deal for the Washington Commanders if they didn’t revert to their former name, which was considered offensive to many Native Americans.
While no sports league wants to be caught in the president’s cross hairs, the league has learned from its past run-ins with Mr. Trump, like when he urged the owners to fire players who protested during the national anthem in 2017. This time around, the N.F.L. has tried as best it can to insulate itself from his attacks.
In February, the Saints owner Gayle Benson invited the president to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, where he schmoozed with Commissioner Roger Goodell. The Commanders owner Josh Harris joined Mr. Goodell in the Oval Office, where they announced that the 2027 draft would be held in Washington, D.C. (Mr. Harris gave the president a team jersey, saying he was “the ultimate Commander.”)
Management of the president, in other words, has become one of their headaches. More than most sports leagues, the N.F.L. is a business driven by its owners, a group of almost entirely older white men, many of whom made billions in finance, oil and gas, and real estate before buying their teams and agreeing to share the league’s revenue as if they were members of a socialist commune.
As a collective, they have a hand in most major decisions of consequence, decisions that are often made at the league’s quarterly meetings, which are held at exclusive hotels around the country like the Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., or the Biltmore in Phoenix.
Though the president won’t be on any official agenda when they gather at InterContinental Hotel in Midtown Manhattan a few blocks from the league’s headquarters, the owners may be briefed on the Super Bowl halftime show and other issues that involve the Trump administration, including the expansive alliance the league entered into with ESPN that requires regulatory approval.
In any season, the league meetings reveal how the N.F.L. has become the country’s pre-eminent sports league: No matter how big the crisis, the league and its owners try to minimize distractions and keep the focus on the games that help the N.F.L. rake in more than $23 billion a year from media companies, sponsors and fans eager to be associated with it.
And yet, for all the business imperatives, when they make their decisions inside their meetings, those owners are driven in part by their own highly personal alliances, friendships and beliefs about the league’s mission.
This account is based on conversations with dozens of owners, team executives and N.F.L. officials, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal league business.
The High School Cafeteria
Many of the owners are creatures of habit and like to sit in the same place each time they meet.
“The league meetings in the room were very much like a high school cafeteria,” said a former league lawyer, Frank Hawkins. The seating chart in effect serves as a proxy for their status and their beefs.
Putting a small plaque with each owner’s name at their seats would have been simple. But until about a decade ago, no one did. So underlings raced to meeting rooms hours in advance to make sure their boss had his or her regular spot.
Amy Trask was hired by the Los Angeles Raiders as a lawyer in 1987 — “a man’s job” in a man’s league — and she had her hands full dealing with the lawsuits her boss, the Raiders’ colorful owner, Al Davis, was involved in. But one task that she sweated more than most was ensuring that he got his favorite spot at owners meetings: the last seat at the table to the commissioner’s right so he could swing his chair around to the head of the table and get a full view of the meeting in front of him. It also made it easier to grab a cup of coffee.
“I would get there at 5 in the morning and sneak through the kitchen to put our names on chairs,” Ms. Trask said.
These days, John Mara of the New York Giants and Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers — two third-generation owners whose families are close — sit near each other. For years, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys sat next to his close ally, Dan Snyder, until Mr. Snyder sold the Washington Commanders in 2023. They led the bloc of owners that pushed for faster revenue growth.
The owners who inherited their franchises — the Rooneys in Pittsburgh, the Maras in New York, among others — tend to view their job as that of a trustee. Newer, wealthier owners — Stephen Ross of the Miami Dolphins (a real estate fortune), David Tepper of the Carolina Panthers (hedge fund money) — are often focused more on maximizing their investments.
The newer owners are often methodical in their decisions, made after significant research by the league staff and internal deliberation. In years past, the league had more maverick owners, like Mr. Davis or Hugh Culverhouse of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were far less wealthy and took more outlandish positions.
Several newer owners who paid billions, not millions, for their clubs pushed the league to loosen its rules to allow private equity firms to buy minority stakes in N.F.L. teams. They have been eager to reopen negotiations with the league’s network partners to secure even more lucrative rights deals that could also drive up the cost for fans wanting to watch N.F.L. games.
When new owners join the league, where they will sit — literally and metaphorically — is a matter of importance. Mr. Snyder approached Shahid Khan soon after Mr. Khan used the fortune he had made in the car bumper and headlight business to buy the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2011. Mr. Snyder, who had visited Mr. Khan’s yacht in the South of France years before, wanted Mr. Khan to sit with him and Mr. Jones.
“You need to hang with us or otherwise they’re going to screw you,” Mr. Snyder said, without specifying how Mr. Khan might get screwed.
Mr. Khan instead followed the only advice Wayne Weaver, the Jaguars’ previous owner, gave him: Continue to sit in the front row of the middle table. Mr. Weaver didn’t say why, but Mr. Khan learned over time that the seat was near the New England Patriots and Cowboys, which gave him access to the two most powerful owners in the room.
The Power Centers
Robert Kraft of the Patriots is among the most connected owners in the league, leading the powerful media committee, which helps negotiate broadcasting rights deals, the N.F.L.’s largest source of revenue. He has a chameleon-like ability to work with all sides. He talks with Mr. Goodell so frequently that he has been dubbed the “shadow commissioner,” and has known Mr. Trump for decades. In March, he contacted the president to help Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul Weiss, reach a settlement with the White House after the president targeted high-profile firms with punitive executive orders.
These days, Mr. Kraft goes in and out of the meetings, mostly attending discussions of topics he cares about. Jonathan Kraft, the oldest of Mr. Kraft’s four sons, often represents the team. When the elder Mr. Kraft is there, he plucks away at his iPad, surfing the web, but “there’s no question who’s No. 1 — it’s Robert,” Mr. Khan said.
Mr. Jones speaks — and sometimes shouts — more than anyone else. Though he can take time making his point, as the ultimate alpha male with the most valuable team, he is given a wide berth.
“Where he’s going to go and how long he is going to ramble, no one knows,” Mr. Khan said. “I mean, he definitely has a hall pass.”
Mr. Jones, though, has also pushed his fellow owners to the limit.
On one conference call with the six owners on the compensation committee who were trying to give Mr. Goodell a big pay raise, Mr. Jones said he had hired David Boies, the famous antitrust lawyer, because he was thinking of suing everyone on the committee. According to an owner on the call, within an instant, the only sound on the line was the click-click-click of the other owners hanging up.
The Los Angeles Move
Meetings can get intense. The 2016 special meeting to vote on whether the St. Louis Rams or the Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers would be allowed to move to Los Angeles was so critical that the Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen, who was rarely seen in N.F.L. circles, attended.
Initially, there appeared to be more votes in favor of the Chargers-Raiders bid, but not the 24 needed to pass. However, the Rams’ presentation, made by the team’s top executive, Kevin Demoff, with lobbying by Mr. Jones, persuaded some owners to switch their votes. Mr. Allen, who had an oracle-like reputation, also backed the Rams proposal.
But the Rams didn’t have 24, either, so Mr. Jones persuaded the commissioner to switch to secret ballots so owners could set aside their loyalties and vote more freely. (He also asked for a drinks cart to help lubricate the discussion.) The gambit worked. Not long after, the owners voted 30 to 2 to grant the Rams the right to move to Los Angeles.
The choice was seismic. The Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who led the stadium committee and favored the Chargers-Raiders stadium proposal, felt betrayed by his friends and stopped going to league meetings. He sold his team two years later.
The Chargers owner Dean Spanos limped back to San Diego to beg for taxpayer funding, but since he had shown a willingness to leave once, voters rejected a ballot measure to pay for a new stadium. He exercised his option to move in with the Rams in Los Angeles, where the Chargers are overshadowed by many other teams.
The owners abandoned longtime fans in Oakland, St. Louis and San Diego, where lawmakers had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on stadiums and improvements for the teams. The City and County of St. Louis sued the N.F.L., claiming it had abandoned its own relocation guidelines to help the Rams owner E. Stanley Kroenke move to Los Angeles. They won a $790 million settlement.
But the owners got what they wanted: a return to Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest media market, where the Rams built a $5 billion stadium that could host Super Bowls. (And did, in 2022.)
Exit Snyder
Sometimes, the owners make news just before they enter the room. In 2022, they were wrestling with how to get Mr. Snyder to sell his scandal-plagued Commanders. Mr. Goodell had fined the team $10 million after an investigation uncovered sexual harassment in the front office. During his more than two decades in the league, Mr. Snyder was abrasive and his teams performed poorly. But the owners were wary of forcing him to sell, because that might trigger lawsuits and set a precedent for other owners.
The Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay wasn’t intimidated. In October that year, he arrived 45 minutes late to the meeting in New York. He stopped at the rope where reporters were standing. With little prompting, he launched into a speech on why Mr. Snyder should be out of the league, a sentiment the owners shared but would not say on the record.
The other owners read Mr. Irsay’s comments on Twitter while they were in the meeting. This was the beginning of the end for Mr. Snyder. Two weeks later, he announced he had hired bankers to find a potential buyer.
Less than a year later, Mr. Snyder sold his team for a record $6 billion to a group led by Mr. Harris, a private equity billionaire, who now sits near Mr. Jones at the quarterly meetings.
Ken Belson is a Times reporter covering sports, power and money at the N.F.L. and other professional sports leagues.
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