In his 2021 book It’s Better to be Feared, ESPN’s Seth Wickersham proposed, roughly, that there are two classes of modern NFL owners: the traditionalists and the capitalists.
The traditionalists are the Maras and McCaskeys, the descendants of families who boarded the league elevator on the ground floor in the 1920s (or the decades thereafter while pro football gradually picked off competitor after competitor). The capitalists are figures like incoming Seahawks owner Vinod Khosla, a tech mogul whose primary credential is his net worth—around $16 billion in all. Both groups want to make money, but each has a different relationship both with money itself and, recursively, with the relationship between money and football.
