Culture
How Tom Brady could buy into the Raiders and why he wants a piece of the NFL pie
Tom Brady, a surefire future Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee and arguably the greatest player in NFL history, could be on the precipice of NFL ownership.
Brady and businessman Tom Wagner, the co-founder of Knighthead Capital Management, came to an agreement with Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis to buy into the franchise last year. Their bid will be discussed at the NFL’s owners’ meetings on Tuesday in Atlanta, according to a league source. The league’s financial committee will review Brady’s bid, with a potential vote to follow.
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Here’s an explainer of how Brady and the Raiders got here:
What is the process for Brady becoming a part-owner of the Raiders?
Brady and Wagner had to reach an agreement with Davis to purchase a minority stake in the franchise, which they did in May 2023. From there, the bid is reviewed by the NFL’s finance committee, which was formed last year and is composed of owners. The committee decides if the bid will proceed to a vote. If it does, the bid must be approved by 24 of the NFL’s 32 majority owners.
What would his ownership share be, and how much is he paying for it?
According to league sources, the agreement between Brady, Wagner and Davis is for a 10 percent stake in the Raiders. CNBC estimated the value of the Raiders to be $7.8 billion last month, but that doesn’t mean Brady and Wagner have to pay $780 million.
That’s because a valuation is based on the estimated price the Raiders would draw if Davis sold the entire stake. The price Brady and Wagner agreed on with Davis has not been disclosed, but it’ll likely be substantially less than 10 percent of the valuation of the Raiders.
How does one pay for, say, a 10 percent share of an NFL team? Does he have to come up with cash, or is it a payout over a longer period?
Brady and Wagner have to pay cash. If they don’t have the full amount on hand, they’ll have to take out a loan.
Why has the process taken so long?
It has taken some time to nail down the final price. According to The Washington Post, the NFL’s finance committee raised concerns last year that Davis was giving Brady and Wagner too much of a discount. The Post reported earlier this month that Brady and Wagner have since increased their offer to “far more money than originally proposed.”
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What would be different for Brady given his TV broadcasting career?
The NFL has already placed restrictions on Brady in his role as a Fox analyst. He’s not allowed access to other teams’ facilities and practices, nor can he attend broadcast production meetings, which usually include meetings with coaches and players ahead of games.
In the scenario that he’s approved as a minority owner, however, the restrictions would increase. According to an ESPN report in August, Brady wouldn’t be able to publicly criticize officials or other teams and could be fined or suspended if the league feels he breaks that policy. He would also have to abide by the league’s gambling and anti-tampering policies, and he would be limited to “strictly social communication” with members of other teams, per the report.
What is Brady’s connection to Raiders owner Mark Davis?
In January 2020, Brady attended UFC 246 and was photographed smiling while talking to Davis, whom he’d previously met, and then-Raiders executive Marcel Reece. The Raiders were moving to Las Vegas, while Brady was coming off what would be his final season with the New England Patriots. With Brady set to become an unrestricted free agent that March, rumors were swirling that he could potentially sign with the Raiders to replace then-starting quarterback Derek Carr.
The Raiders considered pursuing Brady, but then-coach Jon Gruden, who had personnel power, ultimately decided against it and stuck with Carr. Brady went on to sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but the Raiders’ flirtation was the start of a deeper relationship with Davis, who took over as head of the franchise following the death of his father, Al, in 2011.
In May 2022, Brady attended a Las Vegas Aces game. He caught up with Davis, who purchased the WNBA franchise in 2021, and expressed his admiration for what they were building. On the court, the team was thriving and en route to its first WNBA championship. From a fan base perspective, the Aces were regularly selling out games and drawing some of the best attendance numbers in the league.
“I think (Brady) was just really impressed with how far women’s basketball has come,” Davis told The Athletic last year. “And he was also impressed by the excitement and the enthusiasm of the crowd in Las Vegas.”
Shortly after the game, Brady’s representatives reached out to Davis and asked whether he would be willing to sell a minority stake in the Aces. In March 2023, the Aces announced that Brady had reached an agreement with Davis to become a minority owner. The purchase was approved by the WNBA’s other owners in October. The percentage of Brady’s stake and the amount he paid for it remain undisclosed.
“He knew that I was in it, and I think he just felt he wanted to be a part of it,” Davis said. “His people contacted me and we talked about it, and he became a partner.”
In May 2023, Davis told ESPN he had come to an agreement with Brady for the former quarterback to purchase a minority ownership stake in the Raiders.
“We’re excited for Tom to join the Raiders,” Davis told ESPN, “and it’s exciting because he will be just the third player in the history of the National Football League (after George Halas Sr. and Jerry Richardson) to become an owner.”
Mark Davis and Tom Brady attend UFC 246 in Las Vegas on Jan. 18, 2020. (Jeff Bottari / Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
Why is Brady trying to purchase a share of the Raiders — and not the Patriots, Buccaneers or his hometown San Francisco 49ers?
It all starts with the existing business relationship between Brady and Davis. You can’t buy a stake in a team without an owner being willing to sell a portion of his or her stake and it’s unclear if that would’ve been possible with the Patriots, Buccaneers or 49ers. The Patriots, for one, are 100 percent owned by Robert Kraft and he told Fox Business in February 2023, “I’m never selling it. We’ve set it up so it hopefully stays in the family for many decades to come.”
It’s also possible Brady viewed the Raiders as a more attractive investment. Among the four aforementioned teams, only the Patriots — valued at $7.9 billion — are worth more than the Raiders, per CNBC’s estimation. Their report has the 49ers at $7.4 billion and the Bucs at $6.05 billion.
The report also suggests that the Raiders are generating more revenue than those three other teams. According to CNBC, the Raiders generated $780 million in revenue in the past year, which trails only the Dallas Cowboys ($1.22 billion) and Los Angeles Rams ($825 million). That, plus Davis being willing to sell, is likely part of the reason this came together.
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Does this mean Brady would have any sort of control of the Raiders?
No. To be considered a majority owner by the NFL, someone who buys into the franchise must acquire at least a 30 percent stake. At that point, they could have voting rights and team control. Because Brady and Wagner are purchasing only 10 percent of the Raiders, they won’t have control. That’s another reason why they won’t pay 10 percent of the valuation of the Raiders.
“If somebody buys what’s called a limited partnership share, they pay a much lower valuation because they don’t have any control,” a former NFL executive told The Athletic last month. “They’re basically just passive investors. It’d be like if you were selling the garage of your house. You wouldn’t sell it on a per-square-foot basis. Somebody would pay a lot less because they don’t own the house.”
How many other minority owners do the Raiders have?
Davis and his mother, Carol Davis, are listed as co-owners of the Raiders and own 47 percent of the franchise. That number would drop if Brady and Wagner’s bid is approved, but the Davis family would remain the principal owners. As of 2022, the NFL dropped the minimum percentage of a team that a longstanding owner must control from 5 percent to 1 percent for teams with the same owner for at least 10 years.
When the late Al Davis became principal owner in 1972, he founded a company called A.D. Football Inc. alongside eight partners. The original eight partners have passed, but their heirs became limited partners.
The Raiders 2024 media guide lists six other “interest holders” in the franchise: A. Boscacci, Jill Boscacci Lovingfoss, First Football, Winkenbach Family, Fox Football and Sargent Family.
Could Brady still return to play in the NFL as a part-owner?
No. NFL rules state that employees can’t own equity in a team unless they are family members of the team’s owner.
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What is the Raiders’ succession plan after Mark Davis? Could Brady eventually become the primary owner?
It’s unknown. Mark Davis, 69, has no siblings and is single with no children. Carol Davis is in her 90s. If they still have stakes in the franchise when they die, their ownership stakes could either be passed on to someone else in the family or sold.
Brady could attempt to purchase their stakes in the latter scenario. He could also attempt to purchase their stakes while they’re living — or those of the other limited partners. Not only would he need to cross the 30 percent threshold, but he’d also need to own more shares than Carol and Mark Davis to become the “controlling” owner. If Carol and Mark Davis ever decided to sell, there would likely be suitors beyond Brady.
“It’ll be a real ‘Game of Thrones’ when that happens,” a former NFL executive told The Athletic. “When something’s worth $1,000, there’s not a fight. When something’s worth $10 billion, it gets pretty ugly.”
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(Top illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Cooper Neill and Ethan Miller / Getty Images and Matthew Pearce / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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