Pro Football Rumors
NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell is under fire after a report by ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kalher that he has been working as a consultant for The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm approved by the league to pursue a minority ownership stake in an NFL team.
Howell began working at Carlyle in a part-time capacity in March 2023; three months later, he was hired by the NFLPA as the union’s principal administrative officer and chief player representative. In August 2024, Carlyle received league approval to invest in an NFL team via a minority stake worth up to 10%. Despite a internal concerns by a senior union lawyer regarding a potential conflict of interest, Howell continued to work for Carlyle and received $3.4MM from the firm last year.
With the matter coming into the public eye, Howell will come under even more scrutiny amid criticism regarding the NFLPA’s handling of their collusion grievance against the league and an internal investigation of Howell’s leadership of the union. (The NFLPA has appealed the ruling on the collusion grievance after it, too, was made public.) According to Pablo Torre of Pablo Finds Out, a Change.org petition calling for Howell’s resignation has been circulating among NFL players and NFLPA staff in the wake of today’s revelations. The NFLPA allows their player reps to remove the executive director with a two-thirds majority vote at a meeting with a two-thirds quorum, per Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio.
A Carlyle spokesperson insisted that Howell had no access in the firm’s activities related to the NFL and said that Howell had disclosed his work at the NFLPA to the firm but not the request by union lawyers for him to resign.
In addition to his compensation from Carlyle, Howell also received almost $700k from board positions at GE HealthCare and Moody’s, per ESPN. His pay for sitting on the board of ManTech, a company privately owned by Carlyle, is unknown.
Former NFLPA lead outside counsel Jim Quinn told ESPN that the union’s previous executive directors held neither outside jobs nor paid board seats during their tenure. Quinn characterized Howell’s position at Carlyle as an “outrageous conflict” and said that he would have expected Howell to resign upon being hired by the NFLPA.
NFL players have yet to publicly react to the latest news about Howell. Multiple members of the executive committee decline to comment on the collusion grievance confidentiality agreement, with Cameron Heyward calling the situation at the union “dicey.”
