The Pohlad family decided to maintain its controlling stake in the Minnesota Twins when new investors emerged and gave the club a chance to pay down a significant amount of the team’s $500MM debt. That’s according to two members of the Pohlad family, executive chair Joe Pohlad and his brother Tom, who spoke to Bill Lukitsch of the Minnesota Star Tribune.
“That was really the driver,” Joe said, then revealing the $500MM number. Previous reporting had mentioned a debt of around $400MM or $425MM but it seems it was actually notable higher than those numbers.
The exact identities of the minority investors are currently unknown, as the Pohlads have not disclosed details, pending approval of the partnership by the league. The piece does mention that the investors are from Minnesota and the East Coast, though little is known beyond that. Once approved, Lukitsch notes that the deal will clear some of the debt and give the Pohlads more room to invest in payroll and stadium upgrades.
The family had been exploring a sale of the franchise since late last year, reportedly seeking $1.7 billion from investors. As mentioned, Joe said the debt was the main driver behind the intended sale. Tom also noted: “We never wanted to sell. But we also had to think about what’s in the best interest of the Twins, what’s in the best interest of the community.” With these minority investors, the Pohlads are going to hold majority ownership and hopefully pay down some or all of the debt.
Tom argued that the team’s middle market revenues “don’t necessarily support” a top-class stadium or a consistently high-performing team. Twins fans may not be satisfied with that explanation, although it is true that attendance at Target Field declined to roughly 1.8 million in 2025, compared to nearly 2 million in 2024. That figure was at 2.3 million in 2019 and has not fully recovered in the years following the pandemic.
Beyond ticket sales, the club’s regional sports network deal with Diamond Sports Group (now Main Street Sports) was not renewed after the 2024 season. This led Major League Baseball to manage the team’s broadcasts in 2025, a situation generally understood give clubs less revenue than a traditional RSN deal. Revenue pitfalls aside, Tom acknowledges that fans are right to be dissatisfied with the team’s performance. “It’s been 34 years since the World Series, and, up until 2023, 21 years since we had a playoff win,” he notes, “and that’s unacceptable.”
The Pohlad family has controlled the Twins since purchasing the team for around $40 million in 1984. Carl Pohlad, the family patriarch, was the original control person until his passing in 2009. He was succeeded by his sons and eventually his grandsons, the aforementioned Joe and Tom. Since the start of 1985, the team has a record of 2976-3295 (.475). The team won the World Series in 1991 but hasn’t had a ton of postseason success since then. Fans have generally criticized the Pohlads in recent years for a lack of spending in payroll as well as the lack of playoff success.
Heading into the final day of the season, the Twins have posted a record of 70-91 (.435), ranking fourth in the AL Central. The team fared better early in the season but fell out of contention by the trade deadline, leading many to expect a sell-off. However, the sell-off ended up being much more vast than anticipated. In addition to trading pending free agents like Chris Paddack, Harrison Bader, and Willi Castro, they also traded star closer Jhoan Duran to the Phillies and controllable reliever Griffin Jax to the Rays. They also shed significant payroll by sending Carlos Correa to Houston, with Minnesota responsible for $33MM of the $103.4MM remaining on his contract at the time of the swap. All told, the Twins traded away 10 big-league players and signaled the start of a rebuild for the franchise.
The decrease in spending has even extended beyond payroll cuts. Earlier this month, the club announced that they will not renew the contracts of four people on their pro scouting staff, leaving just one major league scout heading into the offseason. On the one hand, the cuts follow the trend of teams relying less on traditional scouting in favor of analytics. However, as reported by Dan Hayes of the Athletic, the team’s decision to pare back its scouting department was about cutting costs rather than analytics.
It’s currently not confirmed if the Twins plan on making further payroll cuts or if they now feel better about the financial picture. Pitching-wise, the team has Pablo Lopez and Joe Ryan under control through 2027, while Byron Buxton continues to lead the offense. The club also has four Top 100 prospects according to MLB.com, with outfielders Walker Jenkins (No. 14) and Emmanuel Rodriguez (No. 67) finishing this year at AAA. The Twins could try to put another competitive team together or they could target further spending cuts by making players like Lopez or Ryan available in trades this winter.
No RSN revenue any longer equals more debt for the small markets. Not that the large markets making local TV money that pays their payroll wants to acknowledge that.
The system has been broken for a while now. The game is dying in flyover country because of it. It’s sad to see.
The system isn’t perfect, but the system isn’t the reason a team from the AL Central can’t make the playoffs. Part of the value of a regional divisional system is that it allows all the ‘flyover country’ teams to play each other and one gets a playoff spot each year, at minimum.
Cleveland is on their way to the playoffs with one and a half good hitters in their lineup. It’s not as if a central organization has to build a behemoth to contend with the Yankees or the Red Sox. The Twins have failed to put together a good team. Constant injuries to several of their building block players has obviously hindered them, but at the end of the day, their failures are on them, not the system.
Good old grumpy and whiny “This one belongs to the Reds”…
I feel bad for Twins fans. Ownership is basically saying that they should expect their stadium to be mediocre and if the team contends that will be lucky not design (so expect minimal additions if any those years).
Minnesota will follow the John Fisher model but maybe not to the same extent.
500m in debt not the 400m that was reported earlier. That’s the reason no buyer wanted to own the Twins. I think the Pohlads just have wealth mismanagement in their family. If Cleveland, Tampa and Athletics can navigate frugal ownership, and still make playoff runs, Twins can too.
The Pohlads are up there with Reinsdorf, Nutting, Monfort and Fisher as the most tone deaf billionaires. Carl was inept but at least he found lightning in a bottle with some good hires and two WS and an ability to make money. His heritage can’t find success in the private or public sectors.
Sounds like their goal is to alienate their fans so the team can be sold to owners who will look to relocate it. That would leave the baseball fans with just the St Paul Saints to root for and given the makeup of the Twins team and it’s declining payroll, the MLB team in Minneapolis will soon be just a glorified AAA team anyway.