The U.S National League’s Denver Broncos Up for Sale and a DAO Could Be the Next Owner 

The U.S National Football League franchise Denver Broncos officially announced that it would be up for sale on Tuesday. The team stated that The Pat Bowlen Trust had begun the sale process at $4 billion, which could see a Decentralised Autonomous Organization (DAO) led by Cisco System’s Sean O Brian. The Broncos will become the second team in the NFL to be owned by cooperatives alongside the Green Bay Packers if the sale gets the greenlight.

Denver Broncos NFL Team Up for Sale

The U.S National League’s Denver Broncos is the first NFL franchise to go up for sale after the former Carolina Panthers owner Richardson sold his franchise in December 2017. Richardson sold the organization to David Tepper for a league-record $2.275 billion, and the Broncos deal looks to break that chronicle.

“Selling an NFL team is a complex process involving numerous parties and league approval procedures. Nonetheless, the trustees hope to have the sale completed by the start of the 2022 NFL season,” CEO Joe Ellis said in a statement. “The Broncos are a special franchise that is part of the fabric of this region, and whoever emerges as the new owner will certainly understand what the team means to our great fans and this community.”

ESPN estimated that the sale would hit a total of $4 billion, the amount a DAO is willing to offer for the purchase. The move has been engineered by Sean O’Brien, who said the DAO would be going live this week.

The Potential of a DAO Running an NFL Franchise

Sean O’Brien, who has been in Cisco Systems’ legal department for ten years, announced that the DAO would also incorporate a cooperative, and participants in the DAO would have a parallel ownership share of the cooperative.

Ever since the death of the former owner Pat Bowlen in 2017, trust has run the team. The NFL said that it would like the purchase deal to be sealed by the commencement of the 2022/23 season. Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers team is a community-owned cooperative incorporated in 1923 in a structure similar to DAOs. The process would be the one used during the purchase of the Denver Broncos. 

As per the rules, the team should be run by single ownership, which has at least 30% equity in the team with the least expectations for a family ownership structure, preventing the team’s inheritance.

The NFL  structured its rules in 1980, which barred decentralized community-driven ownership that the Green Bay Packers is using, which has limited ownership packages that restrict the team to a limit of 32 owners, and the NFL approved its sales.