The current owners of the Chicago Bears, the McCaskey and Ryan families, have reached an agreement to share the equity owned by late investor Andrew McKenna in a transaction that values the NFL team at roughly $8.8 billion, according to multiple people familiar with the details.
The two families will share the roughly 2% of the team as part of the agreement, said the people, who were granted anonymity because the details are not public. After the transaction closes, the McCaskeys will own about 77.5% of the Bears, with the Ryans holding the rest.
Determining the fate of the equity held by McKenna, who died in 2023, was not a standard NFL stake sale. The Bears ownership is structured more as a family business than a modern ownership group, and as Sportico previously reported, both the McCaskey and Ryan families had some sort of first refusal rights on McKenna’s stake. Instead of a more contentious disagreement, which could have necessitated a final ruling from commissioner Roger Goodell, the two sides ultimately settled on an agreement to share the equity.
The agreement is currently awaiting approval from the NFL, according to one of the sources. Representatives for the Bears and the league didn’t immediately return a request for comment. Representatives for Galatioto Sports Partners, which was hired to sell the McKenna stake, and the Ryan family declined to comment.
The $8.8 billion price the highest prices ever paid for a piece of an NFL team, at least for now. Earlier this year a trio of local families bought nearly 6% of the San Francisco 49ers at a roughly $8.6 billion valuation. The Miami Dolphins and Philadelphia Eagles also recently brought on new backers at roughly $8.1 billion valuations. The New York Giants are currently selling a minority stake that will likely eclipse all of those numbers.
There are many factors that go into those numbers. Some minority stakes, for example, sell with a variety of rights for the new investor. In return for parking a sizeable amount of cash into an illiquid asset, many NFL minority owners get perks such as access to tickets and gameday parking, Super Bowl rings, travel perks and locker room access. The McKenna stake did not include any of those perks, the sources said.
The McCaskey family has owned the Bears since 1924, when George Halas bought the ream for $100. His daughter Virginia McCaskey controlled the team for decades until she died earlier this year at age 102. The family restructured parts of its ownership to make her son, George, the franchise’s control person.
Pat Ryan Sr. and McKenna initially bought into the team in 1990, collectively buying 20% from the McCaskeys ownership group. Two years earlier, two grandchildren of George Halas sold their shares in the team back to the family; and the team used proceeds from the sale to Ryan and McKenna to help pay down debt burdens. The Ryans have added a small amount of equity since then, and are currently among the largest minority shareholders in the NFL.
Sportico valued the Bears at $6.26 billion, ranking 11th in the league, when it released its most recent NFL valuations almost a year ago.