As the Washington Commanders have carved out one win after another on the way to making the NFC Championship Game for the first time since 1991, one topic we haven’t heard much about is former owner Daniel Snyder.
And that’s probably for good reason. Snyder was forced out after 24 years as the team’s owner and sold the Commanders to a group led by Josh Harris and Magic Johnson in July 2023 for a staggering $6 billion.
That the Commanders have risen so quickly outside of Snyder’s control was the central focus of a bombshell ESPN article by Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta Jr. on January 25 that included some pretty wild tales about Snyder and his attempts to keep the team.
Perhaps the wildest of those was that Snyder contemplated using alcohol to defend his actions — a defense in which Snyder would say he’d been drunk during the myriad of incidents that led him to ultimately being forced to sell his team.
From ESPN: “A source with direct knowledge said that, after months of negotiations with Harris, Snyder was imagining ways to keep his team. One idea, the source said, was to announce that he had years earlier given up alcohol, and to say that much of his alleged misbehavior over the years that caused so much league and fellow owner angst happened while he was drunk. Snyder also purposefully set a minimum price of $6 billion for the Commanders, knowing that few people, even among the ultrarich, could afford that price tag.”
When Snyder ultimately left town, he did so with his reputation in tatters — or cemented depending how you look at it.
“Snyder had been pressured into the sale by fellow owners who roundly hated him and league executives eager to see the franchise returned to its former glory — and profitability,” Wickersham and Van Natta Jr. wrote. “Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue recently told confidants that Snyder is ‘the worst owner in the history of the National Football League.’ ”
Snyder Bought Team for $800 Million in 1999
Snyder’s $6 billion windfall represents one of the greatest returns on investment in professional sports history — a staggering $5.2 billion profit off the $800 million he spent to buy the franchise in 1999.
As Wickersham and Van Natta’s article points out, Snyder’s $6 billion sale of the team came with a close shave at the end. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell fined Snyder $60 million as he walked out the door for his actions as owner. That included fostering an environment of sexual harassment in the workplace, ripping other NFL owners off by manipulating his accounting books and digging up private information on NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones — Snyder’s closest ally as an owner — to use as blackmail against them in order to keep his team.
For all the money Snyder made off the team’s sale, they were as bad as any team in the NFL for almost the entirety of his tenure. In 24 seasons under Snyder, the Commanders won just 2 playoff games — the last before this season in 2005 — and never advanced past the NFC Divisional Round. In that same time, Washington finished above .500 just 5 times.
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Former Commanders Owner Planned ‘Drunk’ Defense to Keep Team