If I was the owner of a professional sports franchise, I would be making sure my house is in order — habitable for human beings.
Call it the “Dan Snyder Decency Inventory.”
We are on the verge of witnessing, for the second time in five months, the forced sale of a sports franchise in this country after complaints that the owner oversaw an environment of abuse and the general sense in the workplace that taking that abuse was part of the job description for employees working for those owners.
The word, I believe, it “toxic.” It’s a word that we used to use to describe poison-filled dumps.
Now it’s become synonymous with corporate bullies — particularly Snyder. And these days, creating a toxic workplace can cost you your franchise.
It was one of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s paid mouthpieces, former federal prosecutor Lisa Friel, who, upon announcing the coverup of the Beth Wilkinson probe into the Washington Commanders, declared in July 2021 that the “culture at the club was very toxic.”
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, who was the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s chairwoman, said “Snyder himself fostered the Commanders’ toxic workplace,” in June 2022 after the committee’s eight-month investigation into the team and the NFL.
Snyder is now on the verge of selling his cherished football team for $6 billion, most likely to a group headed by Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils owner Josh Harris.
Make no mistake — the sale is not Snyder’s idea. His preference would be to continue his decades-long reign over the Washington football franchise. But the abusive organization Snyder fostered turned on its own employees, victimized its own customers and finally wound up consuming the owner himself.
Snyder will follow in the footsteps of former NBA Phoenix Suns and WNBA Mercury owner Robert Sarver, who sold the two teams in December for $4 billion.
The sale came just four months after an investigation sparked by an ESPN report that found the Suns owner used racially insensitive language, made inappropriate sex-related comments and mistreated employees.
The House investigation into Snyder and the Commanders included accounts of the owner ridiculing and demeaning team employees and witnessing others who worked for him do the same, including the harassment of female employees who “were treated like a piece of meat.”
The NBA had suspended Sarver for a year and fined him $10 million. The NFL had some sort of murky banishment of Snyder for a period of time and issued a $10 million fine to the team — not Snyder — to be paid as a charitable contribution.
But attitudes about work have changed dramatically from the time The Washington Post published its July 2020 story of 15 women who said they were harassed sexually and abused verbally while employed by the football team.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the relationship many workers have with their jobs, according to an October 2022 report by the United States Surgeon General.
In September 2018, an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct into the Dallas Mavericks that resulted from a Sports Illustrated story that detailed “numerous instances of sexual harassment and other improper workplace conduct” resulted in owner Mark Cuban agreeing to donate $10 million to organizations that promote women in leadership roles and combat domestic violence at the request of the league.
If that story had come out today instead, Cuban might find himself forced out.
And for Snyder, being forced out of the NFL will be his legacy — not the rebranding, not Snyder Communications, not Six Flags Entertainment Corp., not Johnny Rockets, not Dick Clark Productions, not the movie business, the sports talk radio business. All of that will be superseded by “Dan Snyder, the former Commanders owner forced out of the NFL.”
“Toxic workplaces are harmful to workers — to their mental health, and it turns out, to their physical health as well,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in the report, “Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being.”
He might as well have put a picture of Dan Snyder on the cover.
You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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