SEATTLE (AP) — The new owners of the Seattle Seahawks were officially introduced to the city on the day the franchise was set to raise the Super Bowl banner before starting the 2026 season.
After spending a record $9.6 billion to take over one of the league's most successful franchises, the approach of the new regime is simply that there's not much that needs to be changed in the short term.
“We do have great management, they got us to the Super Bowl,”
owner Vinod Khosla said Wednesday about general manager John Schneider and coach Mike Macdonald. "By the way, how lucky is it, how often do you get to buy a team that just won the Super Bowl? So, the best thing we can do is not mess with a lot.”
Khosla, who will run the team along with his son Neal and wife Neeru, said they will work closely with management and give input when needed. But he stressed the final decision will be with the people in charge of the on-field product.
“I don’t think our approach is going to be telling them what to do,” he said. “Our approach will be lots of discussions and then leave it to management to decide whether they agree with us or not. So very much a plan of handing them the baton and let them take responsibility for the results, which hopefully is another Super Bowl very soon this year.”
The Khoslas have been on the job less than a week after closing the purchase from the estate of the late Paul Allen following the approval late last month from NFL owners. They have had to make few decisions so far, but Neal Khosla did say the team would bring back white throwback uniforms for 2027.
Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. His current net worth is $13.7 billion, Forbes reported this summer. The company invests in experimental technologies such as biomedicine, robotics, and was the first venture firm to invest in OpenAI, per Forbes.
The Allen estate announced shortly after the Super Bowl win in February that it had begun the process of selling the team. The Khosla family had held a minority stake in the San Francisco 49ers and had been to Seattle as fans for the first time about a month earlier when the Seahawks knocked the Niners out of the playoffs with a 41-6 win.
The experience that day helped convince them to make a bid to purchase the Seahawks.
“One of my reflections coming out of that was like, I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a venue this loud and this passionate and it’s a 30-point game in the fourth quarter,” Neal Khosla said. “You saw how special the fan base is. I think we walked away going, ‘Oh my God, this is built different.’ So that was kind of the first cue to us that this franchise, I think, has something really special in how it’s connected to the community and what the fan base is.”
Vinod Khosla became a football fan soon after immigrating from India to Pittsburgh in 1976 to attend Carnegie Mellon. He fell in love with the Steelers initially and has watched games closely with Neal over the years. He views a football team like an extended family and wants to operate the franchise in that fashion.
The Seahawks have been in the Allen family since 1997, when Paul Allen bought the team for $194 million from then-owner Ken Behring. Allen was critical in keeping the Seahawks in Seattle, which is where the team is expected to remain.
The Seahawks have a lease at Lumen Field that runs through 2032 with three 10-year options.
Since Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, died in 2018 from complications of non-Hodgkin lymphoma at 65, the Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers have been owned by his sister, Jody.
The estate agreed last September to sell the Trail Blazers to an investment group led by Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon. The Trail Blazers will remain in Portland as part of the deal.
The Seahawks ownership group also includes several minority partners, including Mark Stevens, the Aramburuzabala family, Val Blavatnik, Sheryl Sokoloff, Gonzalo Hevia Baillères, Jesse van der Werf, Samir Kaul, Sunny Gupta, Nader Naini, Penny Pritzker, Carlyle and Dynasty Equity, and Sixth Street.
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