Costly Loss for Sports Team Owners Embedded in Trump Tax Bill

Billy House

Sat, May 17, 2025, 7:00 AM 4 min read

(Bloomberg) -- The owner’s box could soon be less opulent.

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A lucrative tax break that sports team owners can use to shelter billions of dollars of income would be halved in value under House Republicans’ draft legislation to enact Donald Trump’s signature tax plan.

The tax break came under fire after a 2021 ProPublica investigation based on leaked returns showed the shelter helped billionaire team owners pay lower effective tax rates than their players or even concession stand workers. Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, a former Microsoft Corp. chief executive officer, used paper losses from his stake in the team to save about $140 million on his taxes over five years, ProPublica found.

The bill itself is the subject of heated negotiations going into the weekend, after the House Budget Committee on Friday failed to advance the legislation over hard-line conservatives’ cost concerns.

The boon for franchise owners has its origins in sweeping tax legislation passed in 2004 under President George W. Bush, a former part-owner of the Texas Rangers major league baseball team.

Trump has a tortured history with sports team ownership that includes failed attempts to acquire the Buffalo Bills and then-Baltimore Colts football teams. He owned a team in the defunct USFL and played a key role in the league’s battle with the National Football League.

His administration set its sights on the sports team break and initially pushed to end it entirely, said Mark Weinstein, a tax-focused partner at Hogan Lovells. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee took a middle course, approving a tax bill on Wednesday that would instead cut the value of the break by 50%.

The reduction would only apply to owners who purchase teams after the law takes effect, though the change could affect teams’ resale values.

One fan of curtailing the break is Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

“The Commanders sold for $6 billion,” he said, referring the the 2023 sale of the NFL’s Washington Commanders to a group led by Apollo Global Management co-founder Josh Harris, who also owns the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. “They don’t need any help.”

Some sports accountants and lobbyists greeted the scaled-back House GOP provision with a “bit of a sigh of relief” given the White House’s efforts to eliminate it completely, Weinstein said. Owners also dodged other risks such as curbing tax-exempt bonds to finance stadium build-outs, he said.