On Team Owners: In Las Vegas, You Could Not Find Two More Different People Owning NHL Golden Knights And NFL Raiders/WNBA Aces
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — The once-mighty NFL Raiders were being thrashed by a weak two-win Cleveland Browns team in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game at Allegiant Stadium when an LVSportsBiz.com photographer snapped a photo of Raiders owner Mark Davis laughing with a young woman wearing a Raiders shirt in Davis’ suite.
As NFL owners go, Davis is a rather friendly guy who enjoys schmoozing with just about any Raiders fan. But after LVSportsBiz.com published the photo, social media responses were brutal as you might expect. There was one common thread to fans’ comments: Why was Davis laughing it up while the Raiders were losing in such a feeble manner while becoming the laughingstock of a league that his legendary father, Al Davis, once dominated?
Contrast that Davis suite scene from Sunday’s Raiders game with LVSportsBiz.com photos of Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley, who sits during Golden Knights games at T-Mobile Arena with team President of Hockey Operations George McPhee and General Manager Kelly McCrimmon. Let’s just say the Foley-McPhee-McCrimmon vibe is a lot more sedate.
Davis and Foley.
Two very different personalities and two contrasting team owners in Las Vegas.
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What an odd pair, these two men who have transformed the Las Vegas market into the big league home of the NHL Vegas Golden Knights (2017) and NFL Las Vegas Raiders (2020).
There’s the 80-year-old married Foley, an Austin, Texas native and 1967 U.S. Military Academy graduate who founded Fidelity National Financial and Foley Family Wines.
And the 70-year-old unmarried Davis, a Brooklyn, New York native who attended Chico State in California from 1974-79 and inherited the iconic Raiders franchise from his legendary father, Al, in 2011 after the senior Davis died.
What are their similarities? They are both billionaires and they were both Las Vegas outsiders when they launched major league franchises in Las Vegas.
That’s where the similarities end for Las Vegas’ two most high-profile team owners.
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Foley was based in Jacksonville, Florida when he moved to the Summerlin area where the expansion-born Golden Knights are based, while Davis transplanted the Raiders from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay area to Henderson, where he’s building a vast house.
Both have helped shape the Las Vegas sports landscape.
After buying a 15 percent share of the privately-funded, 2016-opened T-Mobile Arena where the VGK play, Foley built community ice rinks in Downtown Summerlin and Henderson and also a small arena in Henderson that is the home to his minor league Silver Knights, the feeder team for the Vegas Golden Knights.
Foley also owns the AFC Bournemouth soccer team of the Premier League in England and has ownership interests in professional soccer clubs in France, Scotland and Portugal. He also owns wineries and lodging facilities in California and Oregon.
Davis, thanks to Southern Nevada’s $750 million public contribution to the Raiders stadium construction, built an NFL stadium on the west side of Interstate 15 that has attracted major events like a Super Bowl, a WWE WrestleMania, several high-profile college football games and dozens of concerts since the domed venue opened in 2020. The Raiders stadium is slated to host a college football national championship game in 2027 and college basketball’s Final Four in 2028.
The stadium, which generates income for Davis from non-Raiders game events, has helped increase the value of the Raiders to a reported $7.7 billion-$7.9 billion from $1.4 billion a decade ago.
Davis also bought the WNBA Aces for $2 million from MGM Resorts International in 2021, with the three-time WNBA champs now valued at a reported $300 million.
Davis spent $40 million to build an Aces training center/headquarters next to his Raiders HQ. At Aces games, Davis sits courtside and is accessible to fans, posing for photos and signing autographs.
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Their business styles and personalities could not be more different.
In 2024, Foley bought out his VGK ownership partners, the Maloof family, after Foley and the Maloofs combined forces about a decade ago to plant the seeds of a NHL franchise in Las Vegas.
In 2024, Davis sold 25.5 percent of the Raiders in two separate deals to minority part-owner/investors. Former NFL quarterback/FOX NFL broadcaster Tom Brady and Knighthead Capital co-founder Tom Wagner bought a combined ten percent stake in the team, while former Patriots/Raiders player Richard Seymour bought a .5 percent share. Davis also sold off another 15 percent of the team to Silver Lake co-CEO Egon Durban and Discovery Land Company founder Michael Meldman.
Davis made hundreds of millions of dollars from selling ownership shares based on a team value that was robust thanks to a new revenue-generating stadium built with what was the biggest public stadium subsidy at the time.
Their public styles are very different at games.
Foley the businessman rarely mingles with fans at VGK games.
Davis the social butterfly enjoys chatting with fans before WNBA Aces games. Davis even signed the hand of a Raiders fan before a preseason game at Allegiant Stadium.
It’s doubtful you well see Foley sign the palm of a VGK fan.
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Foley and Davis also support divergent political causes.
Foley has contributed money to Republican candidates and GOP causes, while Davis has a track record of publicly supporting racial equality and hiring black women to top executive positions like Nikki Fargas as president of the Aces and Sandra Douglass Morgan as president of the Raiders.
In 2021, how many NFL owners posted a tweet supporting George Floyd, the Minnesota man killed by a Minneapolis police officer? Davis did.
Former Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, used to sit next to Davis courtside at Aces games. Sisolak was a big supporter of the public subsidy to help build the Raiders stadium. Sisolak’s daughter also works for Davis’s Aces.
Foley’s Golden Knights do have a program to try and draw Latino fans to VGK games, but few teams attract more diverse crowds than Davis’s Aces and Raiders.
The big difference is Davis’s NFL product in Las Vegas is a losing team in freefall, while Foley’s team won a league championship two years ago in Year 6 and has made the postseason in every year except one since its inaugural year in 2017-18.
The Raiders have had one playoff team since Davis moved the franchise to Las Vegas in 2020.
And after the team made the playoffs under interim coach Rich Bisaccia in 2021, Davis hired a new coach, Josh McDaniels, for the 2022 season before canning him in the middle of the 2023 season. Davis placed Antonio Pierce in the interim coach role in 2023 and hired him as a permanent coach for 2024 before firing him, too. Now veteran Pete Carroll is the Raiders head coach and he just fired the team’s offensive coordinator, Chip Kelly, after the pitiful loss to the Browns.
What is Davis’s next move for the losing Raiders?
Nobody knows.
There is no Raiders master plan like Foley’s Win a Stanley Cup in six years.
PSA
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Buy this book.
