President Donald Trump has been quietly trying to eliminate a major tax break used by billionaire sports teams owners to save big bucks.
In what Axios has described as an “under-the-radar fight,” Trump has been pushing for the “Big, Beautiful Bill” to contain a provision that’d reduce a decades-old tax break for sports teams by at least half.
The tax break allows sports team owners to write off all “intangible assets” such as player contracts, media rights, and sponsorships for 15 years.
Under the president’s proposal, owners would only be able to write off half of their “intangible assets.” This would cost them all close to an estimated $1 billion minimum total over 10 years, according to The New York Times.
🏛️ Proposed Tax Bill Targets Sports Team Owners
President Trump’s newly approved tax bill proposes cutting in half the tax deduction sports team owners can utilize for intangible assets like player contracts and sponsorships.
This change, projected to generate $991 million in… pic.twitter.com/ujiGhila3E
— The Playbook Digest (@tpbdigest) May 28, 2025
The bad news for sports team owners was that the provision made it into the House version of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed last month. According to Axios, however, the Senate has since stripped the provision from the bill.
In addition, NFL team owners in particular were reportedly instructed during a meeting last week to call the senators in their home state and pressure them not to include the provision in the bill’s final version.
“One team president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared potential fallout from the president, said that the provision ‘felt punitive,’” according to the Times. “President Trump, he and others said, wants leverage over the owners.”
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White House spokesperson Harrison Fields disputed this framing.
“The president is committed to ensuring that sports teams overcharging ticketholders do not receive favorable tax treatment,” he told the Times. “His focus is on fairness for fans, not team ownership.”
Mark Weinstein, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells, told the Times that this would make sense if the provision were, as it would appear, aimed at all sports teams, not just the NFL.
“If it was just the NFL, then it leads to the conclusion it is punitive, right?” he said. “If it’s all sports leagues, maybe there’s some wiggle room. It’s classic Trump, if you think about it, in that he might intend it to be punitive, but he presents it in a way — maybe it is, maybe it is not.”
The president has been targeting the NFL’s tax breaks since at least 2017, around the time the “take the knee” protests erupted.
President Trump calls for tax law changes to end the NFL’s “massive tax breaks” pic.twitter.com/zZtMKV3k3J
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) October 10, 2017
According to Axios, a number of prominent sports team owners have been “pushing” for Congress to not include the provision in the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” including Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, Denver Broncos owner Rob Walton, and the owners of the Boston Celtics.
The one major catch is that the provision “would only affect future team owners, not current ones,” as noted by Axios.
“But lobbyists for the NFL and other leagues say it would reduce team valuations and limit the amount that franchises could be sold for, possibly resulting in higher costs for fans,” the outlet reported.
Senators meanwhile were told by Trump-affiliated pollster David Lee during a lunch last week that polling data showed that 71 percent of voters favored eliminating the tax break.
Axios reported that the senators “most receptive” to arguments being made by sports teams owners were Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Steve Daines of Montana.
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