So we have the money. We do own part of T-Mobile, and it would be great to give T-Mobile a real face lift if an NBA team were to come in.
NHL Team Owner Bill Foley wants to bring an NBA team to Las Vegas. That's this week on Nevada Week.
Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt. Welcome to Nevada Week. I'm Amber Renee Dixon. Bill Foley brought Las Vegas its first ever major league pro sports team, and now the owner of the NHL's Vegas Golden Knights wants to bring an NBA team here. What plans are in place, his current level of commitment to the Golden Knights now that he owns multiple international soccer teams, the economy, and his support of President-elect Donald Trump... I recently asked the billionaire businessman and founder of Fidelity National Financial about all that and more.
So, Bill, the last time that we spoke was at your ranch in Montana in 2020, and that was where you were holding the virtual draft for the Golden Knights. It was that first year of COVID. Since then, you have heavily invested in soccer. Football clubs.
You have a Premier League team in England, a team in the A-Leagues that is the top league in Australia and New Zealand, and then ownership stakes in a French football club and a Scottish football club. There are so many teams you are now involved in. Which is your priority?
Vegas Golden Knights. We live here, so we're here October to, you know, until we win the Stanley Cup, if we're fortunate enough to win the Stanley Cup. We're here during that whole period, but I can still make trips. And I go to UK usually three times a year for about two weeks at a time. I won't go to-- I don't really go to travel to Lorient. It's inconvenient, and it's a minority ownership.
Is that also a reason, perhaps, that you don't go there because they kind of protested your ownership stake?
I think, I think I'm okay now. You know, they were irritated because we bought one of their players, Dango Ouattara, who's one of our wingers, and they felt like they were selling that player and didn't want to sell him. But really, the team, in football, a team has to sell players to stay within financial fair play. You've got to show profitability by-- you do that by selling players.
Well, and that particular player went to your English Premier League team.
He did, and at that time we owned 40% of Lorient. And so in my mind, we paid, I think, 20 million euros for Dango. But we really paid ourselves eight, so it was a cheap deal.
So the opposition, as I understand it, is that, yeah, you're taking our players, you're buying all these different clubs, these football clubs, and then you're cherry picking players. What do you say to that? I mean, these are teams that have had rich histories, may be family owned, and they're saying, Who is this guy coming in and making this almost like a minor league system?
Well, you know, really, the players want to move on. And we lose players at Bournemouth because we're a small team. We just sold our striker from last year, and we got-- we sold him for 85 million pounds, so it's a lot of money. That gets us back into financial fair play, and then we have to buy a striker. If we have a series of teams that are developing players that can play at Bournemouth, they want to move up. They want to play at Bournemouth. So people understand it. Some don't like it, but people understand it.
How involved are you in recruiting or scouting players in soccer, football, versus-- because you've been very hands on with the Vegas Golden Knights and the NHL.
Yeah, I go to all the scouting meetings with the Vegas Golden Knights. I spend days--
Yeah, I spend days at a time with the pro scouts and the amateur scouts, because we have three or four scouting sessions a year. On the football side, we have some-- we have great analytics, and we have scouts, but we don't have the level of scouting that you have in hockey. Hockey, it's a lot of eyes on. So our-- we have a really robust, analytical system that spits out players from around the world. And so if we're looking for a winger with certain characteristics, a left-footed winger, for example, they'll give us a whole bunch of examples. And then there might be 50, and then we go through those and call it down to maybe three or four that we're interested in. Then we go watch that player. So it's kind of the analytics first and then observation second.
Is that part of the reason why you do prioritize the Vegas Golden Knights? I asked you which one you prioritize. You said the Golden Knights. Then you said, We live here. But you know, you could prioritize these other teams that you just barely are getting involved in.
Well, I love hockey. I played hockey as a kid. And I love what the Golden Knights are to this community, what we've done for the community. You know, we're really part of the fabric. We were the first major league sports team that came to Las Vegas, and we're proud of that. And we've stayed local. If you go to our games, you won't see that many opposing fans, of opposing jerseys. You'll see our jerseys, and that's the way I like it.
Yeah. And you do that methodically. You have a method to make sure that opposing teams' fans are distributed somehow?
Absolutely. We know who they are. We know where the tickets are being bought. So we have a rule that they're generally down in Section, I think, 210. And we allow four to sit together, and then more fans. At least one free row must be separating them, and they must be offset. Well, I think it's irritating, you know? I don't want them cheering for their team. It really works in the playoffs. The playoffs, it's really important not to let these guys from Edmonton buy half our tickets.
All right. As we speak, we're about two months into the Golden Knights' season, eighth season. Right now they are in first place in the Pacific Division. There were some concerns going into the season, rebuilding the offense for example.
Yeah. We lost some players, but we knew we'd probably lose players. It's just inevitable. You have players you really like and you want them around, but hockey players are a little bit fungible, and they get older and they get slower and they stop playing good defense. And these guys, like Marchy and Stephenson, Carrier, a few of the other guys had contracts coming up, and this was kind of their last contract. So they were looking for a payday, and I can't blame them. But we made, we made fair deals with all of them, offered them a fair transaction. But in the meantime, we knew some of them were going to leave, so we took action at the trade deadline and we brought in Hanifin as a D-man. He's a really good D-man, a great skater. And we needed help on the power play, and so we brought in Hertl, who wanted to come play for us, and he's on a long contract.
What do you think about the Knights' playoff chances this year?
They say if you're in a playoff position at Thanksgiving, you've got a better than 90% chance of making the playoffs. I believe we'll be in the playoffs, and I believe we can win the Stanley Cup this year.
There were some media outlets that said this might be a rebuilding season, but I thought, knowing Bill Foley, does he even believe in rebuilding seasons?
I don't believe in rebuilding. If you're rebuilding, you're losing, and we don't want to lose. So we'll-- we build our team, or maintain, maintain what our team can do really by hiring, by trading for vets, trading for someone who's got a long career ahead of them, like Jack Eichel. We got him when he was 24 or 25, and he'll be with us until he's 35 or 36. So we try and get that elite player. What the guys tell me is that if we have an elite winger, an elite centerman, and an elite forward and a good goalie, we can win. And we have every one of those things.
You also have a pretty good defense.
We have a great defense, probably the best defense in the league.
I'm not being modest either.
I want to clarify on Jonathan Marchessault, because he was 33 looking for a five-year deal. It was reported that this was about contract length versus money, but you did say some of these guys were looking for a payday. Was that different for him, though? Was his more about contract length?
He wanted, he wanted a long contract. And we offered him-- I think we finally got to the point where it was a three-year contract, which is a pretty good contract for a forward who's 33. And if he played well, he'd get another contract and another contract. And I know he wanted to stay here, and so the money was about the same. We had another problem. We had cap problems. So in hockey, we operate within a very strict cap. If we go over that cap, then we're in trouble; we don't play a player. And we offered him a transaction where there was some deferral. It was going to be the same money he got going to Nashville, but part of it be deferred until after he retired, and he didn't really want that, which I can understand.
Now I know what he means by when he said, That was intriguing, but I'm not interested.
Yeah. You bring up the salary cap. What do you think about the current state of the salary cap? It could potentially change with this upcoming new collective bargaining agreement.
I have confidence our commissioner is going to maintain a salary cap for us. It's one of the things that makes the NHL so different. We have hockey related revenue, which is about half of our, half of our revenue, but we're limited to spend it to a certain amount of money, but we have to spend a minimum amount of money. Now, we always spend to the cap. And if you have someone on LT, a long-term injury reserve, that comes off your cap. See, people get mad at us because they say, Well, you spent 110 million. You're only supposed to spend 87. Well, we had people that were hurt, you know? But we're going to play within the rules, but we're going to play within the rules, period.
I thought you might have almost said something a little different. Well, how do you explain that to people? I guess it's part of the rules.
You can have someone on injured reserve, and that doesn't count.
Robin Lehner is on injured reserve. So he's on a-- he has an insurance policy. We bought an insurance policy, so I think we pay 20% of his salary. So he's on a $5 million a year payday. The insurance company is paying 4, and we're paying a million. So you can, you can actually afford it.
And any thoughts on Robin Lehner, you bringing him up, what a unique kind of strange story it's been with him as far as bankruptcy and a reptile farm? Bankruptcy related to that?
I don't know his personal life. I know that he has, he has some mental health problems, which I'm sure he's trying to work on. So it's too bad, because he's a very, very talented person. And I doubt he'll ever play hockey again.
Are there any learning lessons from that?
Well, you think you can learn something, but then it, sometimes you get in the, you get in the moment, and you think you need this person no matter what, and you bend a little bit. We try and be very careful about our players. We try and make sure we have players that are first, they're first or team-first. They want to play for the team. They have to be high character. The first time we did our initial meeting with our scouts, they had about six criteria that we look for. It's like skating ability and how they handle the puck and how they do certain things. And I, at that time, I said, there's the number one, number one criteria for our players has to be character, men of character. And remember, it's team first--first goal, first, really winning--then team, then it's management and everybody else. And that doesn't matter.
I do remember early on you telling me that, All of my players, people are going to be okay with their daughters dating.
They are. And they have dated a lot of daughters, and they've married a lot of local daughters. I mean Karly did that, and now-- and they are a prolific group. They have, they all have like, 3, 4, or 5 kids. It's unbelievable.
But all of them? I mean, what about Ryan Reaves? Do you think that fathers of local daughters wanted them dating him?
He's a pretty good guy. He's really-- he's a fun guy. I hate to see Reavo go, but, again, he's gotten to that age point, and we just couldn't make a deal with him. And I'm glad he went to, he went to the Rangers. And now he's up in Toronto, so he's got survivability.
Who has been the most difficult player watch leave?
Yeah, it's probably two, two or three for me. Schmidty was really tough. It was early on. He was part of the-- I think he was part of the Stone transaction, and I hated to see him go. The guy I really liked and liked his family was Marc-Andre Fleury. He was such a good guy. I still think we made a mistake. We should have kept Fleury, and we could have given him a couple more years in the starting position, and we went the other direction with Lehner. So now he was a favorite. And Marchy. Who cannot like Marchy? He is, he is so-- he's very egotistical, but it's in a really good way. It's in a way to motivate and to generate interest in the team. So he's always been a favorite of mine.
Back to the collective bargaining agreement. That will be in place in 2026. What do you want from that?
I leave that to the commissioner. He's a very smart guy, and he will, he'll protect, he'll protect the league.
Okay. Because, if I understand it correctly, there has been a cap on the cap, the salary cap, of how much it can grow each year. Would you like to see it increase significantly?
If it increases significantly, the owners will be their own worst enemy, and we'll all spend to the cap. And we'll all lose a lot of money. So if we can keep a hard cap as it is now and grow it reasonably, that's the best thing that can happen for the league. It creates parity. The games are fairly even among all the teams, except those that are "rebuilding," which never works. I think Buffalo has been rebuilding for eight years.
So CNBC ranks the NHL teams each year based on their, how much they believe that they are worth moneywise. Recent valuations, CNBC estimated the Golden Knights to be worth 1.85 billion dollars, 14th out of all the leagues, 32 teams. But then you think about back in 2016, you paid for this team with $500 million. Where does this investment rank in terms of the many, many investments you've made?
Well, it's-- we didn't really. We paid 500, but we borrowed 250. So I really view it as we've now paid the 250 down to about 160, so we paid it down a bit. So that's a pretty good rate of return. It doesn't quite compare to CDAY, in which we made 80 times on our money, which is really good. But--
It's a stock. It's a stock that does human resource management, and it moved to the cloud, and it really reinvented itself.
We just sold our last million shares.
