Gayle Benson.The owner of the New Orleans Pelicans has officially announced his decision to sell the team due to…
The New Orleans Pelicans and NFL’s New Orleans Saints are owned by Gayle Benson, who declared on Wednesday that the teams will be sold after her passing and the money raised will go to local charities.
Executives are attempting to guarantee that the successful bidder will keep both teams in New Orleans, according to Benson, 74, who spoke with Jeff Duncan of the Times-Picayune. Tom, her spouse, passed away in 2018.
“When Tom bought this team, he didn’t have a lot of money,” she explained. “He had to give up everything in order to keep the team. He put a lot of effort into getting the Pelicans here. He made many sacrifices. I want to guarantee that the teams remain here. I wish they would never leave New Orleans.”
Benson possesses no heirs, so team executives are supposed to handle the sale according to the succession plan. Dennis Lauscha, the president of the Saints, will manage the process and act as executor of her estate.
“It is acceptable to the league,” Lauscha informed Duncan. “Every year the NFL requires that teams submit what their succession plans are going to be, and we’ve been filing ours since the league mandated it a handful of years ago.”
The current, 2025-to-2025 lease between the Saints and New Orleans to use the Caesars Superdome is in question. The most frequent time that rumors of small-market teams moving to a larger market surface is when a lease is about to expire. The Buffalo Bills have been associated with Austin, Texas; their lease expires in 2023.
attempting to complete construction of a new stadium in New York with state and local officials.
Benson stated that she is making every effort to prevent that from becoming a problem for the Saints.
“That’s going to be one of our stipulations when we sell the team—that it stays here,” she stated to Duncan. “Dennis won’t sell it to another person who wants to take it away.”
“We’re a small market, but we don’t feel like we take a back seat to anybody,” Lauscha continued. We aim to be the best at everything we do.”
The Pelicans’ lease at the Smoothie King Center expires in2024, and according to sources that John Hollinger of The Athletic reported in June, “New Orleans is consistently mentioned as the most Probably in the next ten years, the team will look to relocate.”
“Our intent is absolutely to structure the deals in a way so that both teams can be here for a very long time,” Lauscha stated. “We want to make sure that if a new owner is coming into this market, not only do they see that this market is viable, but they can also see that financially it makes sense.”
In the event that both teams become available, the president of the Saints stated that he “regularly receives calls from interested suitors.”.
After her husband passed away in 2017, Benson, a native of New Orleans, took over as the team’s primary owner. He had previously settled a legal dispute with his daughter from a previous marriage and her kids in 2017.
