Seattle Seahawks chair Jody Allen says team not for sale in statement

Seattle Seahawks chair Jody Allen has shot down any chance of the team being sold in the near future.

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In a statement released by the Seahawks on Tuesday morning, Allen said neither the Seahawks nor the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers are currently for sale and that no sales discussions are currently ongoing.

Allen is trustee of the Paul G. Allen Trust and chair of both the Seahawks and Trail Blazers, having assumed control of the teams after her brother Paul Allen died in 2018.

In May, Oregon-based sports business reporter John Canzano reported that both the Seahawks and Trail Blazers are to be sold, stating that there isn’t much “wiggle room” about it. In the report, Canzano cited a source in saying, “Paul directed that the trust be liquidated upon his death and the assets used to fund his passion projects. None of this us up in the air. The instructions are clear: The sports franchises and everything in the trust must be sold.”

Jody Allen’s statement did acknowledge her brother’s wishes for the teams to eventually be sold in order to fund his philanthropic interests but indicated that time is still far off in the future.

“As we’ve stated before, neither of the teams is for sale and there are no sales discussions happening,” reads the statement. “A time will come when that changes given Paul’s plans to dedicate the vast majority of his wealth to philanthropy, but estates of this size and complexity can take 10 to 20 years to wind down. There is no pre-ordained timeline by which the teams must be sold.”

The statement falls in line with what Brock Huard, a Seattle Sports contributor, said on The Mike Salk Show shortly after Canzano’s report in May. He reported that the Seahawks would not be sold any time soon due to a fiduciary responsibility by the Paul G. Allen Trust related to a poison pill in a contract between the team and the City of Seattle.

“I used to work in real estate development, and I worked for the company that actually developed the north lot of then CenturyLink Field (now Lumen Field, the Seahawks’ home stadium),” Huard said at the time. “And just knowing some of the ins and the outs of the contract and all the parties that were involved when Paul Allen developed that stadium, I’ve gotten on pretty good account from people pretty close to the situation that there was basically a poison pill enacted into the deal (by Seattle) that said, ‘You can’t go and turn around and sell the (team)’ … until – and I’m pretty confident that it’s 2025, 2026. We’re still some years away from the trust being able to do that. Otherwise, (with) that poison pill, (the Seahawks) would have had to donate hundreds of millions of dollars back to the city, and that just was not going to happen. So I don’t think a sale is imminent.”

You can read Jody Allen’s full statement here:

Statement from Jody Allen, Chair of the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks, Trustee of the Paul G. Allen Trust pic.twitter.com/y3G5aSVhng

— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) July 5, 2022

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