One observation runs across every chapter of The 32 Families. It is not about football. It is about what family enterprises have to build, and when they have to build it, to preserve a concentrated illiquid asset across generations.
The Rooneys have held the Pittsburgh Steelers since 1933. The McCaskey-Halas family has held the Chicago Bears since 1920. The Mara family has held half of the New York Giants since 1925. In a world where roughly two-thirds of family businesses fail to make it past the founder's generation, and where fewer than one in ten make it to a third generation, seven current NFL families have held their franchise across at least three generations. That is a startling rate of continuity for a concentrated, illiquid, cash-hungry asset. The question the book asks is: what did those seven families do that the families that lost control (Snyder-era Commanders, Culverhouse-era Buccaneers, Mecom-era Saints) did not?
The central thesis: pre-existing family-office infrastructure is the single most important variable in multi-generational franchise-family control preservation. Not wealth. Not the size of the franchise. Not the caliber of the operating team. The infrastructure — the LP agreements, the GST trusts, the discount-partnership architecture, the succession-consultant relationships, the credible-appraisal history — that has to be in place before the estate event forces it into use.
The Rooneys had multi-generational family-partnership and trust structures established across the mid-20th century; the transitions were executed cleanly because the infrastructure was already in place. The Halas-McCaskey family established generation-skipping trust structures in the mid-20th century well before the modern IRC Sections 2611–2664 GST framework was codified in 1986. The Ford family Class B share structure has been maintained across four generations through disciplined family-trust planning. The families that experienced substantial disputes and forced-sale threats all lacked the pre-existing family-office infrastructure that permits smooth generational transitions.
Practitioners advising ultra-high-net-worth families should recognize this: family-office infrastructure investment must precede the estate event by years or decades to be effective. The 32 chapters that follow document this pattern in specific IRC-cited detail across 32 families spanning oil-and-gas fortunes, real-estate development empires, technology billionaires, hedge-fund founders, multi-generational NFL-anchor families, and immigrant-entrepreneur success stories. The Common Architecture chapter documents the cross-sectional patterns. The Lessons Learned chapter distills the practitioner playbook. The three appendices provide reference-work durability.
The thesis is not new to family-office practitioners. What is new is the empirical case — 32 families, cross-referenced against 100 years of NFL ownership transitions, all traceable to public disclosures, forced sales, courthouse filings, and the specific IRC provisions (Sections 6166, 2704, 2036, 2702, 2611–2664, 170(h), 4940–4945, 509(a), 303) that make or break the family-office architecture at the estate event.
The 32 Families: A Practitioner's Field Guide to NFL Franchise Ownership is 32 chapters, three appendices (comparative table, CAGR analysis, succession-consultant diagnostic), a Common Architecture chapter, and a Lessons Learned playbook. Written for CPAs, MBAs, estate attorneys, family-office CIOs, and the curious NFL fan with practitioner sensibilities. By Philip A. Baratelli, CPA + MBA.
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