NFL
How Cardboard Made Robert Kraft Rich Enough to Buy the New England Patriots
Agustin Mojica began as a contributing writer for Sportscasting in 2018. He's been writing professionally for the past seven years and writing as a hobbyist for more than a decade. Gus has his grandfather to thank for his early interest in baseball, especially the Chicago Cubs. He also grew up in Michael Jordan's Bulls heyday, so he'll never shake the NBA. Gus is into gaming as a hobby, particularly fighting games. In his view, the gaming world is the oldest esports scene, and following that growth helps with writing about the business side of sports, as well as any esports connections that come up in sports writing.
Get to know Agustin Mojica betterPublished10 Oct 2020
The involving a bargain bin price on Cam Newton shows that Kraft has a plan. Newton is playing like everyone should’ve assumed he would.
The quarterback has created far more value for New England than his disrespectful market value implied. See, Kraft is tells a more complex story than NFL fans might think.
Robert Kraft’s beginnings with the Rand-Whitney Group
RELATED: Robert Kraft Just Got the Best News About His Embarrassing Scandal
According to The Famous People, Robert Kraft was born in 1941. His father was a dress manufacturer, who wanted Kraft to become a rabbi. Instead, he went to Columbia University. Afterward, he completed his MBA at Harvard Business School. During his studies, he met his wife Myra Hyatt, who came from a family in the paper business.
His father-in-law, Jacob Hyatt, ran the Rand-Whitney Group. It was a regional paper manufacturing concern, and they were happy to have the MBA-holding Kraft on board. A contemporaneous Boston Globe report says that in 1968, Kraft gained control of the company via a leveraged buyout. He remains the company’s chairman to this day.
Kraft becomes the owner of the biggest paper conglomerate in the U.S.
RELATED: Robert Kraft’s Political Connections to Donald Trump and Barack Obama Confuse Us All
Kraft’s Kraft became a billionaire.
In recent years, Kraft has turned his business global. A 2012 press release from IFP notes that the company is also New England’s largest paper exporter, and one of the largest in that space in the country. While the Patriots for most of Kraft’s public appearances, it is this project that takes up most of his time.
Kraft also has an even the cutting-edge stuff, too. The Kraft Group helped Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez put up a bid for the New York Mets, as well as investing big in the Overwatch esports league.
How the Kraft Group maneuvered to buy the New England Patriots
Speaking of the Patriots, even the story of how Kraft came to own the team is a bit more interesting than one might assume. It wasn’t a pure brute force cash purchase. Instead, it involved legal maneuvering on Kraft’s part, the result of decades of experience with such dealings outside the sports world.
According to Heavy, Kraft got directly involved in 1994 when he realized then-Patriots owner James Busch Orthwein intended to move the team to Jacksonville, Florida. But even this wasn’t the first overture Kraft made toward owning the team; he already snapped up Foxboro Stadium for $22 million in bankruptcy proceedings 1992. The team couldn’t move without breaking the of the lease, requiring a buyout.
Orthwein, struggling with an unprofitable team, scraped together a $75 million offer on the lease. Kraft refused and made his move to own the team himself. He owned the land surrounding the stadium, the stadium itself, and was the barrier to Orthwein bailing out of the New England area. Kraft put up a $172 million offer on the team, well below a competing $200 million bid.
But because any other buyer would have to deal with Kraft’s land machinations, Orthwein was essentially compelled to sell to him. Kraft made a series of risky moves that went against his usual business practices. But it all paid off — just like the switch to Cam Newton looks like it might in 2020.
