Allen Family to Sell Seahawks After Super Bowl LX

They’ve owned the team since the late 1990s.

The Seahawks, NFC champions, will reportedly go up for sale soon. | Kevin Ng-Imagn Images

For the Seahawks, Feb. 8 will reportedly mark the end of an era—and not just because the franchise is playing in its fourth Super Bowl.

The Allen family intends to sell the team following the Super Bowl, according to a Friday afternoon report from ESPN’s Brady Henderson and Seth Wickersham. The family has owned the team since 1997, when Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen purchased it from real-estate magnates Ken Behring and Ken Hofmann.

Paul died in Oct. 2018, and his sister Jody took control of the team upon his death. Since then, Jody has held “a directive from her late brother to eventually sell both (Seattle and the NBA’s Trail Blazers) and donate the proceeds to charity.”

After Henderson and Wickersham’s report broke, the estate issued a statement stressing that the team is not for sale at this time and indicating it would be at some point in the indeterminate future.

The Allens have overseen the most successful era of Seahawks football since the team’s 1976 founding; Seattle has won four conference titles and Super Bowl XLVIII under their stewardship.

“One team executive told ESPN that the Seahawks could fetch $7 billion to $8 billion,” Henderson and Wickersham wrote, which would break an NFL record set by the Commanders upon their 2023 sale.

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