Author: Steve Adams

The Seidler family is nearing a deal to sell the Padres to a group led by private equity billionaire José E. Feliciano and his wife Kwanza Jones, per Jared Diamond and Miriam Gottfried of the Wall Street Journal. The deal values the Padres franchise at close to $3.9 billion, which would shatter the previous record for a big league franchise in a sale. Steve Cohen’s $2.4 billion purchase of the Mets in 2020 currently stands as the record.

Dennis Lin of The Athletic reported yesterday that the sale process was nearing its conclusion, suggesting that the Seidlers could find a price upwards of $3.5 billion. Per the Wall Street Journal duo, San Diego received multiple bids valuing the franchise at more than $3.5 billion. In addition to Feliciano’s group, the three finalist bidders were groups led by Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob, Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores, and Dan Friedkin, who owns the English Premier League’s Everton club.

Feliciano himself is the majority owner of the EPL’s Chelsea F.C. He’s also the co-founder of Clearlake Capital, a private equity firm with more than $90 billion of assets under management and a focus on the technology, industry and consumer sectors. Jones is the founder and CEO of Supercharged, a media company based in Santa Monica.

Padres ownership has been in a state of relative tumult since late owner Peter Seidler passed away in November of 2023. Seidler’s willingness to spend at aggressive levels well beyond prior iterations of Padres ownership ushered in a new era of baseball in San Diego — one that saw the Friars emerge as perennial contenders and major players in free agency. From 2009-14, the Padres ranked in the bottom six MLB teams in terms of payroll each season. Under Seidler’s watch, payroll soared to north of $200MM, including a record $249MM Opening Day payroll in 2023. The Friars have run a $200MM+ Opening Day payroll in four of the past five seasons.

Since Peter’s passing, there’s been infighting among his widow and siblings. Sheel Seidler, Peter’s wife, filed suit against his brothers Bob and Matt Seidler, alleging that they breached fiduciary duty and committed fraud as successors to his trust. She accused them of selling assets to themselves at below-market prices in an effort to consolidate control of the franchise. Matt countered by accusing Sheel of “manufacturing claims” to secure control of the franchise herself. The allegations were never litigated in full; Sheel’s claims were settled outside of court earlier this year.

In the meantime, Peter’s other brother, John, was approved as the franchise’s new control person in February of 2025. John announced last November that his family had begun “a process of evaluating our future with the Padres, including a potential sale of the franchise.” In the months to follow, as many as five serious bidders emerged. The Feliciano, Lacob, Gores and Friedkin groups were the final four, it seems.

It bears emphasizing that nothing has been finalized just yet. Diamond and Gottfried report that an official announcement could come early next week, however. Even after the deal is agreed upon, Feliciano and Jones won’t immediately take over control of the club. They’ll still need to be approved by 75% of the league’s other owners at the next MLB owners meetings in June. Lin, Ken Rosenthal and Britt Ghiroli of The Athletic add that the final net amount of the deal will need to factor in the approximately $300MM of debt the franchise has accrued. Regardless, it’ll be a record-shattering agreement if the proposed agreement is pushed across the finish line next week.

Time will tell precisely what the ownership transition means for future iterations of the Padres. Eye-popping sticker price notwithstanding, there’s no guarantee that Feliciano and Jones will have the same appetite for spending as their late predecessor, Peter Seidler.

Even in the two years since Peter’s untimely passing, payroll has been scaled back to an extent. The Padres have trotted out $200MM+ Opening Day payrolls in each of the past two seasons, placing them in the top-10 of the league in both instances, but that’s a ways removed from the team’s franchise-record $249MM mark set in 2023. In each of the past two offseasons, reports have surfaced about some degree of financial limitations for president of baseball operations A.J. Preller.

San Diego has made one notable free-agent acquisition in each of those offseasons — Nick Pivetta last year, Michael King this year — but the rest of their additions have all been much smaller in scale. Even Pivetta’s four-year, $55MM contract required a creative structure that paid him only $4MM in 2025 before his salary jumped to $19MM in 2026. The final two seasons of the deal are player options, giving him the right to opt out at season’s end (though his recent injury could very well sway him to forgo that opportunity).

While there are instances of new ownership prompting a radical uptick in spending — e.g. Cohen’s purchase of the Mets and Peter Seidler’s rise from minority stakeholder to majority owner of the Padres in 2020 — that’s certainly not true in every instance. The Orioles have spent more under David Rubenstein than under John and Lou Angelos, for instance, but haven’t pushed payroll beyond the levels previously established by the late Peter Angelos (John and Lou’s father). Jeffrey Loria’s sale of the Marlins to Bruce Sherman hasn’t pushed Miami out of the perennial payroll cellar. The Royals’ payroll under current owner John Sherman, who purchased the team for $1 billion in 2020, hasn’t been all that different than it was under former owner David Glass.

Regardless of what happens with club payroll, the new ownership group should bring about some stability and continuity, ending the tumultuous uncertainty that has surrounded the club over the past few seasons. And the colossal sale price for the franchise — further evidence of the game’s broader financial health — figures to be a number that is routinely cited in upcoming labor talks between the league and the Players Association as the 2022-26 collective bargaining agreement nears its conclusion on Dec. 1.