This will be the first sale of a team since the NFL ownership collectively decided to invite private equity into the mix. Put simply, the value of NFL franchises are so inflationary, that now it is only institutional money, not a given individual's money, that can afford to not only purchase a given team, but to follow it up by instantly, reliably funding its prohibitively expensive day-to-day operations. The Seattle Seahawks are the first test case since private equity has been invited into the fold.
The bottom-line debate of this centers around one's personal perception of private equity. My personal perception? Private equity ruins EVERYTHING it comes into contact with and now that this pestilence has been allowed into the NFL, it will ruin the league as well. Private equity will start with robbing the consumers to market saturation (fans), move on to robbing the employees (the players and team employees), and finish by tapping out the league's administration (team ownership structure). In other words, the transfer of wealth from the NFL to the shareholders of private equity IS THE VERY DEFINITON of fiduciary duty. By law, they have a legal responsibility to drain as much wealth from the NFL as possible and then return that wealth to private equity shareholders.
Private equity is the historical vehicle used for destroying viable business. They do so by maximizing the exploitation of target consumers, robbing established benefits/pensions of employees, selling off critical company infrastructure, and returning all of the stripped assets back to the shareholder. The most recent example being the relatively empty streets of suddenly unaffordable Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, private equity sold off the valuable strip properties and then forced the hospitality businesses to pay rent for the very infrastructure that they once owned. Like Las Vegas, the terminal clock for the NFL is now ticking as well. Private equity are the vultures circling to strip it to the bone. They are legally compelled to do so because legislators no longer write law. Legislators don't even comprehend the laws that they are voting on. Private equity wrote those laws for our legislators. Private equity has become our legislative body. It is called oligarchy for a reason.