SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- According to San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York, interested parties have approached his family "probably on a weekly basis" to attempt to buy a piece of the 97% of the team the Yorks own.
This week, it seems, three of the parties who approached the York family about buying in came with the right offer. According to a league source, the 49ers are working to complete the sale of more than 6% of the team to three Bay Area families.
Sportico, which first reported the pending sale on Thursday morning, said the sales will be done at a franchise valuation of more than $8.5 billion. If the deal is completed at that number, the valuation would be the largest ever for a sports franchise in a transaction.
The Khosla family, Deeter family and Griffith family are the buyers, with the Khoslas purchasing 3.1%, the Deeters obtaining 2.1% and the Griffiths acquiring 1%, The Athletic reported Thursday afternoon.
The NFL is expected to formally approve the transactions at the spring owners' meetings in Minneapolis next week. The 49ers declined to comment on the proposed sales on Thursday.
While the Niners have been receiving offers for the past few months, York said at March's league meetings that his family had been considering a sale of up to 10% of their ownership stake. At the time, he called it a "family asset allocation decision" based on the wants and needs of various family members.
"It's just one of those things where if there's an opportunity that makes sense, we would always explore that, but I'm not sure what we're going to end up doing," York said then. "And if we do, we would try to find the right people who would help bolster everything that we're doing in and around the team, on the field, off the field and just make sure that we had good partners that are with us."
All three of the reported buyers have venture capital backgrounds. Vinod Khosla is co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures in Menlo Park. Byron Deeter is partner at Bessemer Venture Partners in Redwood City and San Francisco and William Griffith is partner at Iconiq Capital in San Francisco.
In other franchise-related news, the Los Angeles Chargers are requesting approval to sell an 8% stake in the team to a private investment firm, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing a person with knowledge of the approval request sent in a memo to NFL team owners.
The newspaper said Chargers owner Dean Spanos and siblings Michael Spanos and Alexis Spanos Ruhl will attempt to sell the stake in the franchise to private investment firm Arctos at next week's NFL team owners meetings.
