News & Politics

Dan Snyder, Resentful Ex: Takeaways From ESPN’s Latest Report on the Former Commanders Owner

Snyder reportedly isn't happy that the team is succeeding without him. Oh no!

Former Commanders owner Dan Snyder. Photograph by Flickr user Keith Allison.

For Washington Commanders fans, it was a good news/bad news weekend. The bad news? The team’s wildly improbable, preposterously successful turnaround season finally came to an end—one win short of the dang Super Bowl—with a road loss to the Philadelphia Eagles.

The good news? Dan Snyder continues to be the former owner of the franchise.

Maybe you missed it: amid the excitement over the Commanders’ first appearance in an NFC Championship game since 1992, ESPN on Saturday published a lengthy report on how Snyder has been doing since selling the team to an ownership group led by Josh Harris in 2023. The short answer is, not great! 

According to ESPN’s Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta—ace reporters who are deeply plugged into professional football circles, and who have been covering this rodeo for a good long time—Snyder has pocketed the roughly $6 billion sale price of the franchise and decamped to England and/or his very large Where’s Waldo yacht, where he has spent at least some portion of his time playing the role of bitter ex, resenting the Commanders for living their best lives without him.

Or, as a dinner companion of Snyder’s reportedly told a colleague about the team’s success: “He f—-ing hates it.”

Of course, that’s not the only juicy tidbit in the article. Here are some other takeaways:

Snyder never wanted to sell the team—and tried to blow up the deal at the very last minute

This part of the article is mildly infuriating—and also extremely funny, arguably a window into the awesome, four-dimensional chess-playing mind power that made Snyder’s ownership tenure so successful in the first place. Months into negotiating with Harris, here’s one way Snyder hoped to hold onto the Commanders—despite the team being mired in sexual harassment and financial misconduct scandals and allegations:

One idea, the source said, was to announce that he had years earlier given up alcohol, and to say that much of his alleged misbehavior over the years that caused so much league and fellow owner angst happened while he was drunk.

Another entry from the Six Sigma Files:

Snyder also purposefully set a minimum price of $6 billion for the Commanders, knowing that few people, even among the ultrarich, could afford that price tag.

After NFL owners approved the sale to Harris for $6.05 billion, a North American sports franchise record, the league fined Snyder $60 million for allegedly sexually harassing a team employee, fostering a toxic workplace culture, and withholding revenue from the NFL. (Pro Tip: billionaires don’t like it when you pocket their money!)

According to ESPN, Snyder was infuriated with the fine—because it dropped the amount he would pocket just below the $6 billion figure he had in his head:

“There’s no way I’m paying,” Snyder told confidants about the league fine.

But wait! It gets pettier. Just before the deal was supposed to close, multiple sources told ESPN, Snyder refused to share his bank information, preventing Harris from wiring him the money. What reportedly followed are a series of late-night phone calls to Snyder and his wife, urging him to, you know, just take the money.

“I don’t want to do this,” Snyder told a confidant.

A rally celebrating Harris’ ownership group was scheduled for later that day at the since-renamed FedEx Field.

But as 1 a.m. became 2 a.m., Snyder was refusing to hand over the stadium keys.

“I don’t care!” Snyder said, according to sources with direct knowledge of what transpired in those hours. “It would be trespassing if anyone goes there. It’s still mine!”

In the end, Snyder sold the team—and ultimately paid the fine—instead of pouting his way through it.

NFL People do NOT like Snyder

The NFL is run by 32 team owners, many with egos to match their immense net worth. It is steered by a league office that serves at the pleasure of those owners—while trying to save them from their worst ideas and impulses. It’s populated by a small galaxy of agents, lawyers, executives, and other decision-makers, all of whom have their own agendas and axes to grind. Like the White House or Capitol Hill, it’s a place of fierce internal politicking, backbiting, rivalries, and resentments.

And yet: there’s also a strong omertà within the league, especially when it comes to owners. Dirty laundry mostly stays in the house; it seldom gets dumped on the sidewalk. Only not when it comes to Snyder. The ESPN article states that “fellow owners roundly hated” the former Commanders owner—it probably didn’t help that Snyder reportedly had dug up dirt on them and threatened to use it—and the fact that numerous knowledgable people were willing to divulge extremely unflattering details about Snyder to Wickersham and Van Natta suggests that they are hardly alone. 

This sentence is particularly telling:

Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue recently told confidants that Snyder is “the worst owner in the history of the National Football League.”

I covered sports for two decades, and I’ve retained a pretty good knowledge of how that world operates. Would Tagliabue ever say such a thing publicly? Absolutely no chance. Would that quote ever make it into a ESPN report if Tagliabue wasn’t okay with it being there? Also no chance.

Snyder’s support of Donald Trump could pay off

The current president has already shown a willingness to use the power of his office to make life, uh, more agreeable for his supporters. Could Snyder—a Trump supporter who donated $1 million to his 2017 inaugural committee and was reportedly pretty upset when a Trump biopic he partially funded ended up portraying Trump negatively—get a little legal quid for his quo?

Maybe! The ESPN report explains how:

Snyder left the United States with a raft of legal action against him or the team during his tenure, including expected subpoenas from federal and civil lawsuits, investigations by multiple attorneys general and a two-year-old FBI and IRS inquiry into the Commanders’ finances.

Since November 2022, federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, have been investigating deceptive business practices alleged in an April 2022 letter that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent to the Federal Trade Commission.

A federal grand jury was impaneled, team financial records were subpoenaed, and several former team executives met with prosecutors, sources with firsthand knowledge told ESPN. No indictments have been returned. President Donald Trump this week appointed a new interim U.S. attorney for the district, and the future of the inquiry will be up to him.

English Premier League fans should be on high alert 

According to ESPN, Snyder is a “a devout Anglophile who today adores London’s history, culture and nightlife.” Sounds lovely! Perhaps he’ll live happily ever after.

Or perhaps not:

According to sources in London sports circles, Snyder in recent months has shopped for a piece of a soccer team, preferably in the Premier League, where exponential growth in team valuations rivals the NFL. A source close to the Premier League acknowledged hearing of Snyder’s interest in a club but said no formal move has been made. “I keep hearing he wants another act as a team owner—the Premier League is his dream,” said another source who was briefed on Snyder’s Premier League fandom and keen interest in an ownership stake.

Such a move would be “an act of redemption,” the source said. “He could maybe prove people wrong by getting a Premier League team. … He could reinvent himself there … “

Some quick advice for our team-owning friends across the pond: run. Do not walk. Run.

Living in London, Snyder is “often surrounded by a security detail”

To borrow from English slang: U wut m8? Look, it’s not unusual for billionaires to take extreme security measures. Still—at least in our estimation—the only way Snyder could ever generate enough personal animosity in the UK to need a security detail would be to buy a Premier League team.

Nobody wants to buy Snyder’s former DC area houses

Incoming Trump administration billionaires are driving a mini-boom in the DC area’s ultra-luxe housing market—except, apparently, for Snyder. ESPN reports that the 30,000-square-foot Potomac mansion Snyder gifted to the American Cancer Society (after failing to sell it for $35 million) remains unsold, as does Snyder’s estate in Virginia near Mount Vernon (asking price: $60 million, or what the NFL might fine you for alleged sexual harassment and hiding money from other owners).

Snyder is evolving

Near the end of the ESPN article, we discover that Snyder has been growing. Changing. A person close to his inner circle says that while Snyder is still angry about selling the Commanders, and “in denial” about why he had to do so in the first place, he’s also experiencing a new emotion:

“Sadness—for himself. It’s killing him … it’s devastating for him.”

Dan Snyder is sad. For Dan Snyder. Oh no! Anyway, the Commanders currently own the 29th pick in the first round of the 2025 NFL Draft, which will be held April 24-26 in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Patrick Hruby
Deputy Editor

Patrick Hruby joined the magazine in 2022. He previously worked as an editor or writer for ESPN, VICE, Sports on Earth, Global Sport Matters, and The Washington Times, and has contributed to publications including The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.