Screen grabs from the “Let’s Buy the Seahawks” initiative showing the proposal, center, and a receipt for a share. (LetsBuytheSeahawks.org)
A new proposal to buy the Seattle Seahawks has been launched by a fan of the team who thinks such a community treasure should be owned by all of the 12s rather than one super rich billionaire.
Abel Charrow‘s “Let’s Buy the Seahawks” website is a fun little distraction for any fans still nursing a Super Bowl hangover or lamenting the loss of some key players in this week’s free agency transactions.
Charrow is a Seattle-based partner at Extra Good Studio, a collective of creatives that operates as a branding studio. As a longtime fan of the Seahawks, he was looking for a way to spark some interest in alternative ownership models now that the Paul Allen estate has put the team up for sale.
But Charrow admits the effort is more tongue in cheek than it is a serious bid to become NFL franchise owners, even if he finds the shareholder model of the Green Bay Packers attractive.
“Without being too on the nose, it’s sort of a criticism of billionaires and just how absolutely insane an amount of money it requires to buy something of that size,” Charrow told GeekWire during a phone interview Tuesday. “On some level, that’s what I wanted to highlight.”
The site proposal calls on fans to raise a $12 billion bid, which is not an unrealistic price tag but maybe a few billion more than the Hawks will eventually command. At one share per person, everyone gets an equal stake. If all 780,995 residents of Seattle pitch in, that’s $15,365.02 each. The cost would drop as more fans across Washington state, the Pacific Northwest and beyond contribute.
On Tuesday afternoon, 153 share-Hawks had been spoken for, including one by me. That put my investment at the time at around $79 million. I received a digital “receipt of intent,” but, sorry, I’m not good for that kind of money.
Abel Charrow, left, is joined by his friends and fellow Seattle Seahawks fans Thomas Wicker-Fetzer, center, and Bryce Wilson at the team’s Super Bowl celebration at Lumen Field on Feb. 11. (Photo courtesy of Abel Charrow)
Charrow lived in New Mexico as a kid without a pro sports team to root for. When he moved to Seattle it was a big deal to become a Seahawks fan. And when he moved again to L.A. to attend USC, he was there during the Pete Carroll era. Again he ended up back in Seattle, at the same time Carroll became the Hawks head coach and won the team’s first Super Bowl championship.
This year, Charrow was equally excited cheering on USC alum Sam Darnold, the Seahawks’ newest Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
Charrow doesn’t consider himself a technically proficient person. He got an MBA in technology management from the University of Washington last year because he felt the need to “skill up.”
“In a way, it was a big experiment in vibe coding, to use a popular word these days,” Charrow said of the Hawks site he built. He explored a few different programs including Cursor, Replit, and Codex, and said Claude Code is next.
There are a few easter eggs built into the site if fans bother to click around. Clicking on the Space Needle triggers a “Beast Quake” and clicking on a dangling football launches a Jason Myers simulator that lets fans kick field goals.
The idea of community ownership has been kicked around since the estate of Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, announced that the team was being sold in accordance with his wishes. Seattle-based tech startup Arrived is gauging fan interest in acting as a collective that would hold a private equity stake in the Seahawks. More than 12,000 fans have shown $113 million worth of potential interest.
Beyond that, most fans and sports prognosticators expect another billionaire to eventually step up. The list of such people who also have ties to Seattle includes a who’s who of tech, including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates has said that he’s not interested.
Charrow isn’t keeping track of names or contact information of fans who actually signal their interest in owning a share of the team, admitting that it’s “mostly an art project.”
“If people are serious about it, they can subscribe and I’ll keep them posted on the progress,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll start some conversation and maybe people will get this idea of … ‘why not?’”
