The Major League Baseball (MLB) They are about to enter another dimension. The San Diego Padres They can change owners. An operation that would open the doors to first Latino franchise owner. And all with a record sale price: 3.9 billion dollars, according to reports The Wall Street Journal.
José E. Feliciano He would be the new owner of the MLB team with his wife Kwanza Jones. It is the largest purchase of a franchise seen to date. It far exceeds the 2.4 billion that Steve Cohen spent to buy the New York Mets in 2020. Feliciano He was part of an investment group that bought Chelsea in 2022, and Los Angeles Dodgers minority owner Todd Boehly became the club’s president.
In November 2025, The Seidler family reported their intention to open the door to a possible sale of the San Diego Padres. An announcement that came two years after the death of Peter Seidler, the family patriarch who was part of the group that acquired the San Diego Padres in 2012. In 2020 he acquired the majority shares of Ron Fowler to take over.
Seidler opted to increase spending on transfers that started with the arrival of Eric Hosmer in 2018 for 144 millionthe most expensive hire in franchise history at the time. The following year, Manny Machado arrived with a historic decade-long, $300 million contract.
Now the club can change hands without losing its financial muscle. Feliciano has a personal fortune of $3.9 billion, according to Forbes. He is the co-founder, together to his partner Behdad Eghbali, of the private equity group Clearlake Capital, which manages assets worth more than $90 billion and which Chelsea acquired in May 2022 for more than 4,882 million euros.
His purchase proposal would have been the one chosen by the Seidler family to the detriment of the one presented by the owner of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA, Joe Lacob, and businessman Dan Friedkin (Everton duel), among others that exceeded 3.5 billion.
