Whether due to questionable personal conduct or disastrous team-building decisions, many fans can find issues with the billionaire owners of their favorite sports franchises. While some are certainly better than others, today we look at the absolute worst of the worst—identifying the seven most hated sports owners in modern history.
Robert Irsay
Irsay purchased the Baltimore Colts in 1972, just a year removed from their win in Super Bowl V, but the NFL franchise immediately took a plunge into poverty under his leadership.
The team was in such bad shape that when the Colts drafted future Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway, the former Stanford signal caller refused to sign with the team—declaring he’d rather play professional baseball for the New York Yankees and demanding a trade. Irsay begrudgingly obliged the request, eventually sending Elway to the Denver Broncos.
In 1984, Irsay urged the city of Baltimore and its taxpayers to splurge for expensive improvements to old Memorial Stadium. The renovation negotiations ended particularly poorly and the Maryland state legislature passed a law allowing Baltimore to seize the team from the overbearing owner.
But rather than give up his franchise, Irsay infamously moved the Colts to Indianapolis in the middle of the night, making no public announcement—as Baltimore fans awoke astounded seeing that their hometown team had vanished.
Marge Schott
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One of the very first women to own a major league baseball team, Schott is mainly remembered for her incendiary statements on a variety of political and social topics during her fifteen years as owner of the Cincinnati Reds.
Schott was originally praised by fans for sustaining bottom-barrel prices for tickets and concessions during home games at the team’s stadium. Nevertheless, her cost-controlling policies could not conceal her openly insensitive personal opinions.
Schott reportedly often referred to certain Reds players using racial slurs, had a policy of refusing to hire African-American employees, and was an Adolf Hitler apologist.
Major League Baseball suspended the Reds racist owner for the duration of the 1993 season before again banning Schott from the team’s day-to-day operations in 1998 after more controversial remarks led to calls for her complete removal.
The following year, Schott finally sold her controlling interest in the Reds franchise—ending her tumultuous tenure for good.
Donald Sterling
Another owner ousted for racist vitriol, the Los Angeles Clippers maniacal mogul was known for his love of frivolous lawsuits as well as his laughingstock product on the court. Donald Sterling purchased the Clippers in 1981 and under his guidance, the franchise had the worst winning percentage in all four major American sports leagues.
Sterling would even heckle his own players while sitting courtside and constantly made headlines for his involvement in multiple discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits.
Sterling was eventually forced to surrender control of the team to his wife in 2014 after he was banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million dollars following the release of a racist video recording.
Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and lacking the mental capacity to capably run a team, Sterling relinquished control of the franchise after his lifetime ban and his wife was granted permission to sell 100% of the Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a staggering $2 billion dollar sum.
Peter Angelos
Angelos bought the Baltimore Orioles in 1993, and proceeded to do everything he could to destroy one of the model franchises in major league baseball—consistently alienating countless Orioles legends, stubbornly ignoring the obvious wealth of talent in the Latin American prospect pipeline for years, all while constantly micromanaging his economic advisors and overruling his staff on personnel decisions.
Now being run by the 94-year old billionaire’s sons, the Orioles fired general manager Dan Duquette along with manager Buck Showalter in 2018— turning over the team’s baseball operations to analytics apostle Mike Elias, who previously worked for tanking specialist Jeff Luhnow in Houston.
Under Elias’ leadership, the Orioles have had three 100-plus loss seasons in the past five years but are a talented young team on the upswing despite their perpetually inept ownership.
Robert Sarver
The previously under-the-radar owner of the Phoenix Suns became national news in 2021, after a scathing report based on interviews from more than 70 team employees accused Sarver and other members of his front office of rampant racist and misogynistic behavior.
After an ensuing independent investigation by the NBA found even more evidence of egregious wrongdoings, commissioner Adam Silver handed out the maximum allowed fine of $10 million dollars and suspended Sarver for one year in both the NBA and the WNBA.
Due mainly to public outcry from NBA players, fans, and sponsors, Sarver announced he would begin the process of selling both the Suns and the Mercury—eventually accepting the purchase of both teams by United Wholesale Mortgage’s CEO Mat Ishbia for a record-high $4 billion dollar purchase price.
Antonio Brown
Brown’s extremely short-lived tenure as a majority owner in the National Arena League with the Albany Empire was engulfed by controversy and confusion.
Since Brown joined the team’s ownership group in March of 2023, reports began to surface that players and team staff members were not being paid or were being flat out released.
Prior to this season, Albany had won back-to-back NAL titles as well as the AFL title in 2019. But after Brown failed to pay extensive overdue membership fees for his new franchise, the team was expelled from the league in a shocking turn of events.
Following his expedited departure, Brown has reversed course yet again—claiming he is not and was never the actual owner of the team, but rather is a representative of a foreign trust, further adding to the confusion on why the former NFL All-Pro wide receiver was ever involved in the management of the arena league team in the first place.
Dan Snyder
Snyder purchased the Washington Redskins in 1999, taking the previously dominant franchise and turning it into a perennial laughing stock with his extensive mismanagement of the roster, front office and coaching staff—often based on uneducated impulsive decisions.
The obstructive owner didn’t just meddle with draft picks or play favorites with players over his 24-year reign of terror, but established a horrific working environment for employees defined by multiple sexual harassment scandals and countless other lawsuits—with the most recent accusing Snyder of withholding shared revenue from other teams and cooking his own books.
Add in a botched name change along with an atrociously outdated stadium that has repeatedly proven to be hazardous for both players and fans alike—and Snyder undoubtedly takes the title of worst owner in modern sports history.
The weight of multiple investigations as well as the mounting outside pressure from the media finally forced Snyder to sell the Washington football franchise this summer, much to the delight of the long-beleaguered fanbase in the nation’s capital.
