Jonathan Kraft Opens Up About Evolution Of The Patriots And Future Of The NFL

Things got a lot different since the moment Patriots president Jonathan Kraft and his family first came at Schaefer Stadium in 1971. Jonathan Kraft is one of Robert Kraft’s four sons, and he remembers how his father brought the first package of Patriots season tickets when he was seven.

These tickets inspired Robert to buy the Patriots for $172 million in 1994, and it was the highest price paid for a team in the league at the time. “Occasionally, we’d travel around the country and go to NFL games in other cities when the Patriots were playing. We saw it be so different in other places. We thought if we ever had the opportunity to [buy the team], we would try to jump at it and we did,” Jonathan Kraft said at the Forbes’ “Under 30 Summit.”

Things didn’t look too bright in Foxborough before 1994. The team had the worst win-loss record over the past decade, and 35,000 people attended the games at a stadium with 60,000-plus capacity.

The team wasn’t making much money, but the Kraft family were confident about their efforts. “Why we were willing to pay up so much for a business that was negative $6 million in EBITA and didn’t have a lot going for it was because we loved the competition of the National Football League. We believed that with a hard salary cap, the teams that we’re going to be successful were teams that understood how to evaluate talent, sign it up under the rules of the cap, and then coach it well,” Kraft said.

The family was introducing changes, and the sellouts said it all. In the 1994 season, all eight home games were sellouts, and it was something that happened for the first time in the team’s history. “Fortunately, we’ve won some games more than we’ve lost, and we’ve turned the EBITA from negative to positive,” Robert Kraft’s son added.

The Patriots’ EBITA stands at $200 at the moment, and the team is ranked as the second-most valuable NFL franchise. It’s total value is $3.7 billion.