Dear Jeff Bezos: Go ahead, buy the Commanders
It can't get worse than Dan Snyder... or can it?
Dear readers,
Football season has (mercifully) been over for a couple of weeks. Though spring is not exactly in the air in the Northeast, we’re hanging onto photos of the warm environs at baseball spring training in Florida as we plead for the warmth to travel north.
And yet, the NFL news cycle stops for no one. Today, we’ve got a story about about a potential buyer of an NFL franchise — Ian’s hometown Washington Commanders — and it’s a doozy. Strap in for this one.
-Ian and Calder
The newest Bezos buy
For several years, we’ve been reporting on the malevolent misdeeds of Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder, who we’ve variously referred to as “a demonic homunculus,” “a ghoul, “a patsy,” and, most plainly, “a horrible man.” Our most fervent wish has been that Snyder — who has been accused of sexually harassing his female employees, defrauding the NFL, and possibly lying to a Congressional committee tasked with investigating these aforementioned crimes — would either be expelled from the NFL by his fellow owners (unlikely) or forced to sell in the face of overwhelming public pressure (somewhat more likely). Last November, our dream partly came true when news broke that Synder had hired Bank of America to consider selling the team.
But alas, we should have listened to that age-old adage: Be careful what you wish for.
This week, the Washington Post reported that the Commanders have at least one potentially interested buyer: America’s favorite plutocrat (and, ironically, the Post’s owner), Jeff Bezos.
According to the Post, Bezos has enlisted the help of a swanky New York-based investment firm to evaluate a possible bid for the Commanders, who finished the 2022 season with an 8-8-1 record, the picture of mediocrity and good for last place in the surprisingly competitive NFC East. At this point, Bezos’s interest in buying the team is purely speculative, but it does seem to be sincere. As the Post wrote, the move to hire a major investment firm “represents a concrete sign of [Bezos’s] interest in conducting due diligence and potentially in moving forward in the process.” In other words, he’s not screwing around.
It goes without saying the Bezos-ification of an NFL team — even a middling one like the Commanders — would be a bad thing. Bezos’s world-bestriding business empire already gives him control over our e-commerce (Amazon), our internet (AWS), our food (Whole Foods), our news (the Washington Post), our healthcare (OneMed), and, to a non-negligible degree, our politics. Would owning an NFL team really materially expand his control over our lives? Probably not. But at a certain point, isn’t enough enough? For most millionaires and billionaires, purchasing a major American sporting franchise is a crowning achievement, a sign that they’ve made it into the upper echelon of America’s de-facto aristocracy. For Bezos, meanwhile, it’s basically a drop in the bucket. That should tell us something.
On the other hand, there would be a sort of brutal honesty about Bezos entering the NFL. Since its inception, the NFL has been a symbol of a certain vision of American life — punishingly competitive, unapologetically cut-throat, transparently brutal, and, first and foremost, conspicuously opulent. Of course, Bezos is hardly the picture of a hyper-masculine jock, but he does represent the logical culmination of the NFL’s values when applied to our politics and our economics: the winners get gloriously rewarded, and the losers get brutally stomped on. The NFL owners welcoming Bezos with open arms would teach us nothing new about their aspirations, but it would confirm our most cynical suspicions about their outlook: that they are petty tyrants masquerading as Good Sporting Gentlemen. Bezos would instantly be their king.
The pro-Bezos argument from a die-hard fan goes like this: He won’t be a penny-pincher. He’s rich enough to invest in real upgrades for the team. He’ll make the fan experience better. He’ll recruit top talent to run the team and then get out of their way as they make good decisions.
It sounds, in fact, a lot like the argument that well-intentioned people made when Bezos decided to buy the Washington Post, a paper that is now actively laying people off.
Bezos got where he did because he has one goal: profit. He’s not a longtime fan of the Commanders, and we doubt he truly cares about their success. A football team is just a good investment.
Sure, he might “innovate.” But any improvements would be distinctly Bezos-ian. FedEx Field, the Commanders’ current home outside D.C., would no doubt become “Amazon Arena.” Maybe fans could order their tailgating materials directly to the stadium and pick them up in those weird little lockers that they have at Whole Foods. The Washington Post’s sports reporters could replace the silly little disclaimer they attach to any article about Bezos (“Bezos owns the Washington Post”) with something more straightforward, like “Fuck it — we give up.”
All things considered, we say to Jeffy B: Go for it. We thought it couldn’t get any worse than Dan Snyder, but you might just prove us wrong. And after all, taking a product and making it worse than anyone imagined is the core of sports owners’ jobs, so you seem to be a natural fit.
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