Roughly $4 billion

[Whatever]

The world will never have a shortage of poor people who think they know how to better manage the finances of the wealthy.

If you're pointing at franchise valuation, the Bengals were ranked 32nd by Forbes last year. The Jags are 31st. Jaguars owner Shad Khan also owns an English Premier League soccer team and has literally wasted hundreds of millions on All Elite Wrestling so his son can live out his dreams of being a fantasy booker.

Everything is relative. To us, the Brown family could just wipe their asses with our yearly salary. However, when it comes to talent contacts, the club competes with entities that can buy and sell them multiple times over. The aforementioned Shad Khan is worth $13.4 billion. Robert Kraft is worth $11.7 billion. Jerry Jones is worth $16+ billion. That $4 billion doesn't sound so impressive now, does it?

[Hammerstripes]

(02-17-2025, 04:02 PM)TJHoushmandzadeh Wrote: If you are worth $4bn it’s a choice to not have cash to hand.

They’d have access to all the cash necessary. There might be a cost involved but it is their choice to not incur that cost.

Lol, no it's not.  Not when it's your only business.

It's no different that having a house that you bought in the 80s for 40k and now it's worth $1 million.  That doesn't mean you'll have a ton of cash just laying around.

[Hammerstripes]

(02-17-2025, 05:32 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: They actually owned only 10% when the team was created, they just had the reins of the team. They've spent most of that 57 years buying up ownership over, including picking up 10% in 2003 and 30% in 2011 so now they're one of only three people to have ownership in the team (One guy owns I think only like 3-5%, and another owns just 1 share of the 586 total.) To throw that into context it means as recently as when they drafted Palmer that they only actually owned ~55% of the team and ~65% when they drafted Dalton.


I'm absolutely sure they have $100m saved between them, but keep in mind that just Burrow, Orlando, Chase, and Hendrickson along with signing just your 1st round picks in a 3 year span are ~$360m guaranteed at signing of cash that needs to go into escrow and I am not sure if practical guarantees need to also go in or if its just guaranteed at signing. If it's practical as well, then that number will be much higher.

While the Browns aren't hurting financially, and they can afford to spend more overall, they do probably have a limit of how much guaranteed money in a time span they can dole out.


The NFL imposes a debt limit on owners. You can only leverage the worth of your team so much to get cash, and once you do that, you obviously can't do it again until you pay off that debt, so it's not an unlimited solution.

Pretty sure the Raiders ran into this a few years ago when they traded Mack because they couldn't afford to put the money in escrow for a guaranteed contract.

[Essex Johnson]

(02-16-2025, 03:18 PM)Clark W Griswold Wrote: Hope this continues to put pressure on the family…can’t really plead poor any more. They have plenty of money to get all of the deals done and improve through FA…

https://www.si.com/nfl/bengals/allbengals-insiders-plus/look-bengals-ownership-family-worth-nearly-4-billion-as-of-latest-forbes-400-list-01jm29rxmktg

Net worth has little to do with a nfl team, the nfl does not base cap space on a owners net worth

[reuben.ahmed]

4 billion is nothing nowadays, 5 billion is something, that is what they are shooting for. it should be all of our goals in this economy.

[*rfaulk34*]

(02-16-2025, 04:14 PM)FormerlyBengalRugby Wrote: Overall value and money on hand are two separate ballparks.

Consider a start up company that has a boom and is valued at 200k, but the person running it has no cash on hand because everything is being funneled into the business. The business may be worth that much, but the person is only liquid for maybe 10 to 15k and one bump in the road buckles the business.

The Brown family and the Bengals are far from poor and need to spend more, but think your conclusion was a tad simplistic.

Imagine the Browns have owned and been running the team since the late '60s, always being cheap and hoarding money. Imagine during that time that the NFL has a policy for revenue sharing, so that you get free money every year. Then imagine that lately, the NFL is giving you hundreds of millions of dollars, every year. 

People need to drop this 'cash poor' BS. They've been making money hand over fist for decades. They're not some startup company.

[*rfaulk34*]

(02-18-2025, 12:26 PM)Whatever Wrote: The world will never have a shortage of poor people who think they know how to better manage the finances of the wealthy.

If you're pointing at franchise valuation, the Bengals were ranked 32nd by Forbes last year.  The Jags are 31st.  Jaguars owner Shad Khan also owns an English Premier League soccer team and has literally wasted hundreds of millions on All Elite Wrestling so his son can live out his dreams of being a fantasy booker.  

Everything is relative.  To us, the Brown family could just wipe their asses with our yearly salary.  However, when it comes to talent contacts, the club competes with entities that can buy and sell them multiple times over.  The aforementioned Shad Khan is worth $13.4 billion.  Robert Kraft is worth $11.7 billion.  Jerry Jones is worth $16+ billion.  That $4 billion doesn't sound so impressive now, does it?

Who gives a **** how it sounds comparatively? The NFL has a salary cap. Other, wealthier owners can't outspend the less wealthy like the Dodgers do the Reds. The Bengals have more than enough money to be as competitive as ANY NFL franchise. They just have to decide if they're willing to manipulate the cap the way other teams do and be creative to field a championship roster. They don't lack the funds, they lack the want.

I don't get why anyone is bothering to debate this because there is no question that the Bengals can do whatever they choose to do, money not being a limiting factor. 

[Clark W Griswold]

(3 hours ago)rfaulk34 Wrote: Who gives a **** how it sounds comparatively? The NFL has a salary cap. Other, wealthier owners can't outspend the less wealthy like the Dodgers do the Reds. The Bengals have more than enough money to be as competitive as ANY NFL franchise. They just have to decide if they're willing to manipulate the cap the way other teams do and be creative to field a championship roster. They don't lack the funds, they lack the want.

I don't get why anyone is bothering to debate this because there is no question that the Bengals can do whatever they choose to do, money not being a limiting factor. 

Thank you as this was the reason I first posted this. They have plenty of $ to sign who this team needs and keep them competitive.
They are not as rich as other NFL owners but they are rich enough and the salary cap evens a lot of that out.

This ownership group should have plenty of cash because they appear to spend far less than most other billionaires. There are no yachts/multiple huge homes around the world/$1 million cars in the garage (that we know of). They are a frugal family so now they need to invest that money back into the business that has given them everything they have. No excuse not to.