That’s a direct result of the NFL’s business model, in which all 32 teams receive equal shares of the league’s multibillion-dollar national broadcast deals. That income alone can account for roughly 60 percent of a team’s revenue.

The crux of some of the league’s deep-seated resistance, according to several people familiar with the NFL’s behind-the-scenes decision-making, is the prospect of the NFL’s proprietary business information being aired publicly if firms with financial-disclosure requirements owned parts of teams. (To a certain extent, that’s the case with the publicly owned Green Bay Packers, the lone NFL team with shareholders in a throwback to the franchise’s unique history.)

On the other hand, owners want each NFL team that sells to set a record price because their own net worth increases accordingly.

In the case of the Commanders, the team’s storied history as one of just 10 teams to have won three or more Super Bowls adds to its value. The team also boasts a cachet that can’t be quantified, given its unrivaled proximity to political power.

Those are among the reasons McCann believes that a buyer will emerge who can clear the NFL’s high ownership bar. Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has expressed interest in the Commanders but did not submit one of the initial bids. Because of Bezos’s vast net worth, NFL requirements would not be an obstacle.

“This is a team that has a legacy to it that should attract a lot of bidders,” McCann said. “It’s a great market with a great fan base. There are other NFL teams in smaller markets, so maybe eventually the league will loosen the rules. My instinct is that [the Commanders] isn’t the sale that’s going to force that change.”

Though Black athletes account for 58 percent of NFL rosters, the league has no Black owners among its 32 teams and just two minority owners: the Jaguars’ Khan, who is Pakistani, and the Bills’ Kim Pegula, who was born in South Korea and co-owns the team with her husband, Terry.

The league and owners approved a resolution last March endorsing diversity in franchise ownership. When Walton’s group announced in June that it had reached an agreement with the Pat Bowlen Trust to buy the Broncos, it also said that it had added a prominent Black business executive — Mellody Hobson, the co-CEO of Ariel Investments — as an investor. In July, the month before the transaction was ratified by the owners, the group added Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state. She became the first Black woman to serve in that role when she succeeded Colin Powell in January 2005.

The Fritz Pollard Alliance, the diversity group that works closely with the NFL, said the league and owners must add specifics to their expression of support for minority ownership.

“We recognize how impactful ownership would be in terms of diversity,” said Rod Graves, the group’s executive director. “But if we’re going to get there, then what are our goals? … It’s not enough to say, ‘We’re open to diversity in those areas.’ We need a commitment. And without that commitment, to me, we leave the opportunity for those objectives to be hollow. And I just believe that if the league is truly committed to diversity of ownership, then we need a true plan that outlines the details of how we’re going to get there.”

Commissioner Roger Goodell voiced his wish to diversify the NFL’s ownership ranks during his Super Bowl news conference in 2022, which coincided with the start of the Broncos’ sales process.

“We would love to see a diverse owner of the team, whether that’s a person of color or a female or a Black man. We think that would be a really positive step for us,” Goodell said then. “It’s something we have encouraged. It’s one of the reasons we have reached out to find candidates who can do that. We have no timetable.”

Daniel Snyder calls England his usual residence in recent filing

Charles Grantham, director of Seton Hall University’s Center for Sport Management, says change simply won’t happen until and unless the NFL changes its ownership requirements.

“These NFL franchise values have been increasing so much, it has essentially priced minority buyers out of the ballpark,” said Grantham, former executive director of the NBA Players Association, in an interview. “It’s a supply-and-demand business, and so far, the NFL can demand” owners with vast individual wealth.

Entertainment mogul Byron Allen, who is Black, was among the Broncos bidders recruited by Goodell and Kraft. But Allen’s offer and all others were trumped by the record price paid by Walton, whose ownership group included prominent Black co-owners with limited shares in the team, such as Hobson and Rice.

As Goodell noted at the outset of the Broncos auction, individual team owners decide to whom they want to sell. Their fellow owners, in turn, must approve the transaction. In that way, the league operates much like a private, exclusive club with an exorbitant cost of entry, three-fourths majority required for admission and no compulsion to explain why some are denied.

So in Grantham’s view, the owners must reconcile the incompatibility of its two stated positions: insisting it values diversity while insisting that only owners able to put down $2 billion or more can join the club.

“I’m not ready to say these guys did this intentionally,” Grantham said, “but going forward … they’re going to have to change and modify their constitution. Otherwise, at this point, I don’t see a minority owning a football team.”