The David Rubenstein ShowKraft Group Founder, Chairman, and CEO Robert Kraft talks about his career as owner of the New England Patriots and how he became one of the most successful sports owners in history. He speaks on "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations" recorded August 15 in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Over the past quarter century, the most successful sports owner in the world has been Robert Kraft. He's taken his team, the New England Patriots, to six Super Bowl championships with the help of Tom Brady, his star quarterback. I had a chance to sit down with Robert Kraft at his Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts to talk about how he's been so successful as a sports team owner, but also his new found and very deeply felt interest in fighting anti Semitism. Bob, in your wildest dreams when you bought this team in nineteen ninety four, did you ever imagine you'd win six Super Bowls and be the most famous owner in professional sports?
Well, I sat in the stands of the old Foxboro Stadium, and then when they came here, I sat in the stands here and dreamt about one day trying to buy this team and own it and run it the way I wanted. I said, if I could ever get this team, I just dream of having home playoff games and going to the Super Bowl and winning it.
Now, when you bought the team, I think you paid roughly one hundred and seventy five million dollars, something like the one hundred and seventy two, one hundred and seventy two million dollars. Okay, one hundred and seventy two million dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, the highest price ever paid for a football team at the time.
For any sports franchise anywhere in the world.
Okay, so I'm sure your friends said, Bob, are you crazy?
My friends, my wife, it's the one time in our marriage that she was ready to really wring my neck.
But now the Commanders, they were sold recently for a purchase price of six billion dollars and they haven't won six Super Bowls. So if you put your team up for sale, presumably it's worth eight billion, ten billion or more. Would you ever consider selling or you're never going to sell.
Never in my lifetime will we sell this team. And I hope my children keep it going as well. It also builds community. It's a way to build bridges. You bring people of all background together. I think back to when we were privileged to win our first Super Bowl three four months after nine to eleven in Boston, a city of six hundred thousand people. A million and a half people came out on the streets very cold day, you know, black, white, Asian, gay, every background, all putting community and team first. And that's a privilege and an honor. So I look at this team as like a community asset and I'm never going to sell it.
So let me ask you about the NFL general. The NFL prices for or the value of the team's going up, as I mentioned earlier, and that's because TV contracts have gone up. How much higher do you think TV contracts can really go? Is there any limit to how much you can get paid by the casters?
Well, I've been privileged to be chair of the Media Committee for the last couple of decades, and three years ago we three seasons ago we were able to do seven to ten year contracts that exceeded one hundred and thirty billion dollars and that was tremendous because it gave us great stability in the league where we could do a ten year labor deal. We basically share fifty to fifty with the players the revenue, so you know, they have been able to grow and succeed with us. It's you know, we know linear TV is really challenged now and we've been doing things that we brought in two tech partners now who Amazon and Google or YouTube, and I think we are developing our own NFL plus where we go direct to consumer, and I think we'll have some serious decisions to make down the road when we see what happens in the whole media environment.
Now, the NFL is the most popular, I guess spectator sport in the United States. You could argue it gets better TV ratings than virtually any other sport. But around the world, the most popular sport seems to be for this purpose, what it's called soccer in this country and football outside. Can you make American football as popular outside the United States as European football is around the world or is that not realistic?
I don't think it's realistic, partly because to play the sport of soccer, all you need is a ball. Really, you don't need equipment, you don't need anything but at and a ball. Two thirds of the world's population can actually play the game. Unfortunately, except for Europe, we haven't really had the game play. Like We're going to Germany this year and the stadium we're playing has fifty five or sixty thousand seats and demand for tickets was three million within the first twenty four hours, So the demand is there and the appreciation of the game, and I think we're going to work to have the game appreciated more globally. And I think with gaming coming on that people throughout the world our sport has a forty second delay between plays that prop betting and other kinds of gaming. Is we educate more internationally, That's where the marketplace really is open for us. But I don't think, unfortunately, they'll be playing the game all over the world.
One of the issues in the NFL has had to deal with is the concussion issue when you were playing football. I wasn't probably as big a deal when I played football when I was ten or twelve. You know, I wasn't getting hit in the head that much by people were weighing two or three hundred pounds. Today you have a lot of players a weigh three hundred pounds. They hit you, you can really get hurt. You've settled the litigation I think on concussions, And do you think the concussion issue has largely been addressed and do you think better helmets will help the problem in the future a bit.
I think the advancement that has come with the medical support. In the end, I go back to where we were this is our thirtieth season, pinched myself. But the medical advancement and looking to keep the game as healthy as possible with the helmets weave and have an independent doctor who sits above, who can take any player out of the game or have him be tested, because you know, guys sometimes wouldn't want to go out because they don't want to lose their job. I really believe the medical and safety is better than it's ever been.
So let me ask you about one of the most faithful decisions I guess your team ever made. Somebody decided the draft a goy named Tom Brady who had played football at University of Michigan. Initially I think it was at Michigan. He wasn't the number one draft pick, and you know, somebody must have seen something in him. Who was the person who said, hey, let's take Tom Brady a gamble on him.
Well, that gentleman was a man by the name of Dick Raybind. In that draft there were seven quarterbacks taken, I think by the third or fourth round, and this man, Dick Raybind And I remember in the draft room him saying to Belichick, you know, Tom Brady's still there. He's tremendous value, but we had three quarterbacks. And then the fourth round came, the fifth round came, the sixth round came, and the last pick of the sixth round, which is known as a compensatory pick, draft pick number one ninety nine. We wound up taking Tom Brady.
So how did it feel when he decided to leave the team? You obviously could have kept him, I guess, but he decided to leave or and he decided to go to the Tampa Bay team and they won the Super Bowl his first year. So did you say I should have kept him, or you say, look, I made a long term decision, and I'm okay with it.
I always would talk to him, and he would take less money to play for the Patriots, and you know, we have a salary cap, so I always assured him that whatever money I didn't pay him wasn't going into my pocket. It was going to other players who would be around him. And if we won those kind of trophies, he would be the biggest beneficiary for the rest of his life, which in fact has happened. And you know, if the Patriots can't win a Super Bowl, I'm always rooting. If we're out of it, I'm rooting for Tom Brady, and after being with us for twenty years, we could have franchised him or done other things. I said to him when he did his last contract two years before that, at year twenty, he would decide whether he stayed with us or not. I think he had earned that right, and for his own personal reasons, he felt it was best to move on.
You also have the most success full coach practically in football history, Bill Belichick, who you brought back to this team. I guess about twenty some years ago. He had been coaching at the New York Giants for a while, been here, and then you brought him back as the head coach.
You'd been with us twenty four years. He has the longest serving.
Coach in NFL history. Nobody's I think, probably, Well, somebody may have coached twenty four years of one team. Maybe George hallis because he was the owner of the team. But now six Super Bowls. He's now been with you twenty four years. Is he going to stay for another X number of years? Or he can stay forever?
I'll let you ask him, he asked. Okay, all right, decide what's right for you.
Let's talk about your background. Where were you born? I guess from your accent you were probably born or raised in Massachusetts.
Probably I still pot my kit here, okay, but I grew up in Brookline, mass went to public schools.
Were you an athlete?
Well, I like to think I was an athlete. Wait. My favorite sport was football, but we observed the Sabbath, and unfortunately in high school I couldn't play football because of that. But I was able to get a full academic scholarship to Columbia College, and I went there and played football there and just loved the game and realized how football in life is the greatest training ground for people in business or life or anything.
What did you do after you graduated from Columbia?
I was privileged to go to Harvard Business School.
So after you graduated from Harvard Business School, what did you do?
My father in law had a couple box plants and he wanted me to join them, and I didn't want to be I wanted to go into business for myself. My father advised me, since my wife at the time was the equivalent of an only child, that I should do that and out of respect, which I did. I did it two years and I was going to leave, and I was asked what I could do to stay, and I said, you know, I'd want to buy into the company. I didn't want to be working for other people, even if they were relatives, and so I was able to do a leverage buyout.
So you were in the private equity world.
I started on my own. Yeah, interest rates were favorable, and I bought half the company. And then there was an opportunity to take over a paper mill up in Canada, and I decided I wanted to do it. I offered my father in law half the company. He passed on it, and so I did it, and fifty one years later, we've developed that into an international company. We're in over one hundred and twenty countries in the world and we're number six and paper and Packaging and preumber six.
But it's a private owned company. You're not going to take a public.
Or sell it or anything not in my lifetime.
Okay, So you're not selling the Patriots, you're not selling the packaging company. I guess you don't like to sell.
Things, right, I really don't.
Well, that's why you wouldn't be good in the private equity business, because we like to sell things.
I get emotional attached to and to the people working there. We try to create a family environment in everything we're involved in. I've learned that people want to be part of something that's bigger than themselves.
So let's talk about the team.
I see today that someone writes a check and they bought the team. Unfortunately for me, it was a much more complicated process. There were three steps. There were two hundred acres of parking that was owned by one group, and I got that land under option in eighty five. That went to ninety five, and coincidentally, I bought the team in ninety four, so I was able to exercise the option, but that option on the land was for parking. In eighty eight eighty nine, the stadium went into bankruptcy because of the Michael Jackson tour. I at that time, Victor Kayam owned the team. He bid seventeen million dollars for the stadium. I bid twenty five. The judge awarded it to us. When I bought the stadium in eighty eight, it had a lease that went till one with an operating covenant which means the team never move without our permission, and finally in ninety four, which was the latter. Getting close to near the end of the lease, they wanted to move the team to Saint Louis. I wouldn't let James Orthwine, who owned the team. He was part of the bud family, Budweiser family, and they had a publicly finance stadium in Saint Louis. They wanted to move it, and I wouldn't let him.
Do That worked out, okay for you. Your late wife wasn't was a little nervous. I guess.
Before I went out to buy the team from Orthwine in Saint Louis, she said, what are you going to pay? And I said, well, the right numbers one fifteen, I might go to one, twenty one, twenty two. And when I came back and told her that I went to one seventy, she went nuts. And Orthwine's lawyer from Saint Louis called me and said, we will offer you seventy five million dollars to let the lease expire and let us move. And he called me at home, and my wife heard that. She said, wait a minute. You paid twenty five million dollars for this. He's paying your seventy five million dollars. You'll still own the stadium, You'll get another team, And I said, no. I remember when I was a kid, my team, my baseball team was the Boston Braves. They played at bu Field. They moved and they never came back, and I was heartsick. And that's that's why it wasn't about the money. It was about the passion.
One of the other things you're passionate about is the need to fight anti Semitism. You've created a foundation against anti Semitism, to fight against anti Semitism. Why are you so passionate about that cause? And is anti Semitism on the rise?
I think anti Semitism is on the rise, and it's very disturbing to me because it's symbolic of really it starts with anti Semitism, then that hatred goes against every other minority community, whether it's the Black community, the lgp QT plus, or the Asian community. And you know, the Jewish people in this country represent a little over two percent of the population, but receive over fifty percent of the religious hate crimes. And there are many things going on in America today that remind me of what went on in Nazi Germany in the thirties. You know, it had book burning in Nazi Germany where they couldn't read Albert Einstein or Helen Keller or other kinds of books. This is America, the greatest country in the world, and those kinds of things shouldn't be going on.
Let me ask you have a pin on you That pin, I guess is a pin for your foundation. What does it represent?
It's a blue square that we wanted to find something that symbolized pushing back against hatred, and that is a symbol of unity and solidarity against all kinds of hate. And I'm technologically incompetent, but even I could get this blue This little emoji is on everybody's cell phone an iPad, and you can put it on every message. Every email I sent has this little blue square.
So you made a very large contribution to this foundation to help enhance its reputation and people knowing about it. And I assume other people are contributing as well.
We've had amazing support our family and now has committed over seventy five million dollars to a Bank of America has committed ten million dollars. There are many families who have made seven figure gifts. I shouldn't say their names unless they give us permission. But we've touched a nerve. There's something going on in this country where people want to push back and are looking for a vehicle. And I think this little blue square, it's hope it goes viral and push us back against all hatred and bigotry and let us preserve the American dream that I think both you and I have experienced.
So let's talk about Israel for a moment. You were awarded what is called the Jewish Nobel Prize. It's called the Genesis Prize for contributions if you've made to Israel and the Jewish people over many, many years. So did you ever visit Israel as a young person? Was that very important to you or were you just not that connected to Israel?
When I got married, someone gave us a honeymoon gift of a trip to the Holy Land. I went there in nineteen sixty three when the country was fifteen years old. And so I've watched the advancement, you know, it's what that was sixty years ago. Wow, And the country is amazing. And I think what Israel has done technology wise and the contributions it's made have been tremendous.
So the secret to your success is prayer then obviously you say you've been praying a lot.
Or prayer is very spirituality, prayer and giving thanks to the Almighty God, and understanding how privileged we are and if we have our health and can pay our bills.
Now, how many grandchildren do you have? I have eight grandchildren, and do they come to the games.
And you know, that's the one thing and why I would never sell this or do anything. As your family gets dispersed and everyone goes different places, it's the one thing, you know. I used to take my sons to the games. I used to get them out of religious school on Sundays without their mother's knowledge. And we come in and we tailgate here and spend the day here and get to know all our neighbors who sat in the seats around us, and it's lasting memories.
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