Rooney's Sale of Steelers Nearly Done

It's taken quite a while to get it completed, but the sale of the Steelers that will help four of the Rooney brothers to Dan Rooney and his son Art will be wrapped up in the near future. According to the Post-Gazette, all of the paperwork has been signed, now it's just a matter of holding the closing to complete the deal.

To get an idea of how complicated this was, consider that the NFL approved the sale more than seven months ago.
Under the agreement, two of the Rooney brothers will give up all of their shares of the Steelers, while two others will cut their shares from 16 percent to eight percent. Under the old deal, the Steelers were actually in violation of the NFL's requirements that each team have a primary owner and that owners can't have direct involvement with gambling enterprises--the Rooneys also own a dog track. But since they were the Steelers, and Dan Rooney is so respected, the NFL seemed willing to look the other way for quite a while.

To buy up the other brothers' shares which were expected to run $128 million each, Dan Rooney had to bring in some outside investors. It initially looked like Pittsburgh billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller was going to be the outside investor, but he backed out. The new group seems more willing to stay in the background while Dan and Art Rooney continue to run the team both in the front office and as the public face of the franchise.