SEATTLE — After years of speculation over when it would happen, and a month of reports that it would happen soon, the Seattle Seahawks were put up for sale Wednesday.

At some point in the next year or so, the team will have the fourth owner in its more than 50-year history. It will mean the end of the longest and most successful of the three previous tenures, that of the Allen family, with Paul Allen and sister Jody heading up the team since 1997.

Such big news inevitably raises questions.

With the help of Dr. Natalie Welch, the Program Director of the MBA in Sport and Entertainment Management Program at Seattle University, here is an attempt at some answers.

Why now?

It’s been well chronicled that Jody Allen would eventually have to sell the team when she took over as executor of Paul Allen’s estate when he died in October 2018.

From that point forward it was just a matter of when, not if. An inflection point passed in the last year when a clause in Referendum 48 expired. That’s the referendum that helped fund the building of Lumen Field. The clause, put in to assure the team would stay in Seattle for the long haul, dictated that anyone selling the team before May 2024 would have to give 10% of gross proceeds back to the state.

The structure of an estate owning the team runs counter to NFL rules.

It’s thought the league was willing to give Allen time for the clause to expire but began putting pressure on her to sell once it passed.

What likely didn’t factor in is the Seahawks coming off a Super Bowl win. As reports earlier indicated, this has been in the works for a while.

When reports broke the week after the Seahawks clinched a spot in the Super Bowl, the statement from the estate said only that the team “is not for sale” at that time, but noted that “we’ve already said that will change at some point per Paul’s wishes,” which was taken to mean it could happen at any time.

That any time arrived Wednesday.

Is there any chance the Seahawks could move?

Because of what happened with the Sonics, it’s a natural concern for fans.

This is nothing like the Sonics situation, where the team was already embroiled in a stalemate over a new arena and had the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, on board with Clay Bennett buying the team and moving it.

The Seahawks are one of the shining successes of the recent NFL on and off the field, selling out every home game since 2003 and with a stadium that has had continual improvements. The Seahawks have a lease at Lumen through 2031 with three 10-year options that follow.

There’s also no city primed and ready for a team to move to, as there was with the Sonics and Oklahoma City.

As Welch said of a new owner: “I would think they would be smart if they would say they are not moving the team and have no plans to move the team and begin to win over the city.”

Could the Seahawks’ price set a record for an NFL team and a North American sports franchise?

The record for the sale of an NFL franchise is the $6.05 billion that the Washington Commanders sold for in 2023. The highest price paid for a North American sports franchise is the $10 billion valuation for the Los Angeles Lakers when they were sold last summer.

Initial estimates state the Seahawks would go for at least $7-8 billion. But some think a Seahawks sale could threaten that $10 billion number, including Welch.

She noted that every team that has come up for sale in recent years has “blown away” the estimated valuation when they were put on the market.

There’s also the scarcity of an NFL franchise — there are only 32 — that makes them a hot commodity.

“That creates a lot of potential for the number to be on the high end,” she said.

She said it probably doesn’t matter much that the Seahawks just won the Super Bowl.

She said it might inflate the value some but probably not even to the 10% level.

She calls that “a happy coincidence” but said any owner is going to look more at the long-range economics of the team in basing valuations.

“I don’t think it’s as impactful as people might think,” she said.

Whatever it sells for will be a massive leap from the $194 million Paul Allen bought it for in 1997, the $80 million Ken Behring bought it for in 1988, and the $16 million entry fee the original ownership group led by the Nordstrom family paid in 1974.

Why can’t they go to a corporate ownership model like the Green Bay Packers?

The NFL ruled in 1970 at the time of the NFL-AFL merger that aside from the Packers — who were grandfathered in, having been run the way they were since 1923 — teams cannot have a corporate or nonprofit owner. Teams must have a single controlling owner who owns at least 30% with no more than 24 minority investors allowed. If there is a family ownership, the share of the person deemed in control may be as little as 1% as long as the entire family owns at least 30%.

As ESPN noted in 2024, the Packers have more than half a million shareholders who own more than 5.2 million shares in the team.

But the Packers have a structure in which it has a seven-member executive committee and a president — voted on by a board of directors — who acts as an owner.

While Green Bay’s structure may be a nice thought, Welch said it’s not something that would be viewed as realistic for anyone to try to replicate, even if the NFL allowed it.

“Logistically,” she said, “it would be very hard” to implement today.

The NFL does allow private equity, approving it in August 2024. Under that rule change, private equity can account for from 3-10% of an NFL franchise. Those are passive, or nonvoting, stakes and the NFL requires that private-equity investors hold their stakes in a team for at least six years, an attempt to prevent a quick cash-out.

How long might a sale take?

The Seahawks’ statement announcing the sale stated that the process “is estimated to continue through the 2026 offseason.”

That seems to imply that the hope is a sale would be completed by the time the regular season begins — which is about 6 1/2 months away.

The Commanders’ sale took about 8 1/2 months.

“I think it will take at least through the rest of the year with the process to go through and get all of the approvals and for the groups to get enough money together to pull it off,” Welch said.

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