UPDATE (July 20, 2023 5:30 p.m. E.T.): On Thursday, the National Football League approved the sale of the Washington Commanders to Josh Harris.
In Washington, D.C., fans are leaning out of their office windows and cheering themselves hoarse. Sports radio is playing “Celebration” by Kool & The Gang. Did a local team just win a championship? No, something bigger has happened. After a 24-year tenure that can only be described as The Bad, the Worse and the Ugly, Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder is reportedly selling his NFL team. Perhaps not since the 2011 Arab Spring has there been such an outcry of relief at the end of an era of autocracy.
It would take a book to fully outline all of Snyder’s reported pettiness, cruelty and overall awfulness. In fact, in my 2012 book “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love,” I dedicated a whole chapter to him. His was always a noxious tenure, but we had no idea how dreadful it would get. My book is painfully out of date.
Even though people in D.C. are cheering his departure, it would be wrong to characterize Snyder’s exit as punishment. He is on the verge of selling the team to a group led by hedge fund manager Josh Harris for $6.05 billion, which is $5.25 billion more than the $800 million he originally paid for it. Such a payout feels obscene. After years of wretched stewardship, Snyder gets a platinum parachute.
At least 75% of NFL owners would have to approve of the sale, but it's unlikely that Snyder would be selling the team if the other owners weren't eager to see him go. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said last year "there's merit to remove" Snyder from NFL ownership, and there are reports that the league's other owners dislike him.
When I moved here as a young man, this team was everything; every bus stop and barbershop was a site of chatter about the latest D.C. football news. And when Snyder purchased the team, the waiting list for tickets was as long as the Washington Monument is tall.
In almost a quarter century of dysfunction, on the field, Snyder's franchise won only 42% of its games and had 18 losing seasons. Off the field, he was as nasty as he wanted to be. My wife, who teaches D.C. history, has given me her blessing to say that there has never been a private citizen in the area who has been loathed as much as him. There’s a reason for that: He took one of the most beloved franchises we have and ran it into the ground.
Now instead of being the thing everybody wants to talk about, the team is a painful afterthought, like a former love you cross the street to avoid bumping into. This past season, the team wasn’t even that bad and, yet, it had the lowest attendance in the league. That’s Snyder’s legacy: He made being a fan of Washington football feel dirty.
There has never been a private citizen in the area who has been loathed as much as him.
During Snyder’s tenure, there’s been a parade of coaches and general managers, none of whom tasted any kind of sustained success. He was also reportedly imperious and insecure in the way he treated other personnel. Although reports of his mistreatment of employees are legion, this is about far more than reports that he prohibited people from making eye contact with him, successfully sued elderly longtime season ticket holders for not being able to make their payments, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by selling 9/11 swag for profit and oversaw a stadium that’s ranked worst in the league and that we’ve literally seen falling apart. If that’s all there was, dictatorial incompetence, Snyder would not have been shown the door by the NFL ownership fraternity.
So what finally pushed the owners to say they’d had enough? That’s difficult to say. Perhaps it was the accusations of sexual harassment and toxicity that ran through team’s workplace, drawing the attention of Congress. According to a U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform report published last year, women, from cheerleaders to office workers, allegedly did not feel safe in the workplace. The report details that some reportedly felt unsafe around Snyder himself.
After that hearing, Snyder released a statement that said, “I have acknowledged and apologized multiple times in the past for the misconduct which took place at the Team and the harm suffered by some of our valued employees.” But, he added, “While past conduct at the Team was unacceptable, the allegations leveled against me personally in today’s roundtable — many of which are well over 13 years old — are outright lies. I unequivocally deny having participated in any such conduct, at any time and with respect to any person.”
Regarding his behavior toward women, The Washington Post reported in 2020 that, for Snyder’s benefit, in 2008 a team employee secretly recorded the team’s cheerleaders during a bikini photo shoot when they were at least partially exposed. Then again, mistreatment of women has never much bothered the NFL before.
Snyder told the newspaper that he didn’t have “any knowledge of the ten-year old videos referenced in the story. I did not request their creation and I never saw them.” He also said, “The behavior described in the Washington Post’s latest story has no place in our franchise, or in our society.”
We can't forget the debacle over changing the team’s name. For two decades, Snyder defended the racial slur that was the name of the franchise, despite a cacophonous chorus of Indigenous people demanding that he change it. Sounding like a modern-day George Wallace, he infamously vowed, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
Sounding like a modern-day George Wallace, he infamously vowed, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
But in 2020, he buckled like the gargantuan look-at-me team insignia attached to his belt. Snyder didn’t change the name out of some newfound respect for the Indigenous people he’d held in contempt.
He changed the name when FedEx, which owns the naming rights to the stadium where the team plays, said that it would pull its money if he didn’t change the name.
But NFL owners have long tolerated owners who've done or said odious things. Snyder’s greatest sin in their eyes might have been his inability to secure public funding, or even a location, for a new stadium. Discussions with area politicians went nowhere, yet now with Snyder’s dismissal, they appear to be open to discussing it, a sign that Snyder is someone with whom few wanted to do business. That was bad.
Perhaps the last straw was reporting from ESPN that Snyder was using a law firm and private investigators to dig up dirt on his fellow owners. Lawyers for Snyder told ESPN that reports of Snyder digging up dirt on other owners were “categorically false” and said, “He has no ‘dossiers’ compiled on any owners.”
Doubling down on a racist team name and reportedly objectifying women is one thing. But it seems his reported attempt to smear his fellow billionaires was a bridge too far.
Whatever the reason he lost the support of owners and whatever the reason he is selling the team, Snyder’s name will forever be cloaked in infamy. While he may have $6 billion to keep him warm at night, no amount of money will buy him the respect in this community he longed for but tore to shreds. Snyder is done. Let the healing begin.