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Troy Aikman built his legacy on the football field, but for a stretch of his post-playing career he also held a stake in Major League Baseball. That chapter recently came to a close, and few people noticed.
The timing turned out to matter more than most fans realized. Aikman addressed his baseball investment this week, and the explanation shows how ownership deals can fall apart even for a Hall of Famer.
Troy Aikman explains why he sold his Padres stake
Aikman confirmed on a recent podcast that he sold his stake in the San Diego Padres, ending an ownership run that began back in 2009.
Jeff Moorad’s group first agreed to buy the Padres from John Moores in 2009, acquiring an initial 35 percent stake before increasing it to 49 percent within a year. Moorad, a former sports agent who had previously run the Arizona Diamondbacks, valued the full purchase at roughly $500 million.
Moorad had a five year window to complete the full purchase, but Major League Baseball's owners refused to approve him as the team's managing general partner, and the sale collapsed. Moores ultimately sold the franchise for $800 million in 2012 to a group led by Ron Fowler instead.
Aikman explained the situation plainly on the Your Dark Companion podcast. "No, I'm done," Aikman said. "I was involved with them for about three years."
He then walked through exactly how the deal unraveled. “What happened is, when our ownership group took over majority interest, we were slowly buying out Mr. Moores,” Aikman said. “But once we gained majority interest, we had to be approved by baseball, and Jeff Moorad did not get approved. So we then sold the team.”
The deal's collapse meant Aikman quietly exited baseball ownership around 2012, the same year Ron Fowler's group completed their $800 million purchase of the franchise. At the time, it was a clean break with little fanfare. What nobody could have known then was how dramatically the Padres' value would climb in the years that followed.
How the Padres later became baseball’s most valuable franchise
After Fowler's group took over in 2012, the franchise that Aikman quietly exited began a slow transformation. Much of the credit belongs to Peter Seidler, who became the team's primary owner in 2020 and spent aggressively to make the Padres a contender, handing out nine-figure contracts to Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., Xander Bogaerts, and others.
The spending worked. The Padres made the playoffs in four of six seasons, a first in franchise history, and fans responded in kind. Attendance climbed from roughly 2.2 million in 2021 to a franchise-record 3.4 million in 2025, second only to the Dodgers. Petco Park became one of the best atmospheres in baseball. Seidler died in November 2023, but the franchise he rebuilt was by then one of the sport's most coveted assets.
That $3.9 billion sale shattered the previous MLB record of $2.4 billion, set when Steve Cohen purchased the New York Mets in 2020. The new ownership group is led by José E. Feliciano and his wife Kwanza Jones, who also co-own English soccer club Chelsea.
Aikman has moved on from baseball ownership, but his early belief in the Padres briefly put him on the ground floor of one of the sport's most valuable franchises. The record sale closed without him.
English (US)