Robert Kraft

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Robert Kraft, 2017.

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Robert Kraft is an American industrialist, sportsman, founder (1998) of the Kraft Group (a holding company for a wide range of companies), and owner of the New England Patriots gridiron football team. Under Kraft’s ownership, the Patriots became the most consistently successful franchise in the National Football League (NFL).

Kraft’s father ran a small business in the clothing trade. After the younger Kraft earned a bachelor’s degree (1963) at Columbia University and an M.B.A. (1965) at Harvard Business School, he went to work at Rand-Whitney, a manufacturer of paper packaging that was controlled by his father-in-law, Jacob Hiatt. Kraft bought out half of Hiatt’s interest in 1968 and took complete control in 1972. In 1972 he founded International Forest Products to trade in wood, pulp, and paper products. He created the Kraft Group in 1998 as a holding company for Rand-Whitney, International Forest Products, and his family’s other interests, most notably in the field of sports.

Kraft’s first sports-related venture was the Boston Lobsters, a team in Billie Jean King’s World Team Tennis (WTT) league. He bought the Lobsters with several partners in 1975, but the tennis team folded in 1978, when the original WTT disbanded. In 1985 he leased, with an option to buy, a large tract of land in suburban Foxborough, Massachusetts, that surrounded Sullivan Stadium (later Foxboro Stadium), the home of the New England Patriots. In 1988, together with a partner whose interest he later bought out, he purchased the stadium. He finally acquired the team in January 1994, paying $172 million, the highest price for an NFL team up to that time. The seller, James Busch Orthwein, had bought the Patriots in 1992 with the intention of moving them to St. Louis but was thwarted when Kraft refused to allow him to buy the team out of its stadium lease.

The Patriots improved dramatically in the 1994 season, qualifying for the playoffs for the first time in eight years. Two years later the team played in the Super Bowl for only the second time in its history. In 2000 Kraft hired Bill Belichick as head coach, and the move helped transform the Patriots into one of the NFL’s dominant teams, winning six Super Bowls (2002, 2004, 2005, 2015, 2017, and 2019). With team revenues increasing, Kraft was encouraged to replace Foxboro Stadium with Gillette Stadium, which he built on an adjoining site in 2002. Most NFL stadium construction was heavily subsidized by the government, but Kraft built Gillette Stadium with 83 percent private funding. He later developed Patriot Place, a hotel, retail, dining, and entertainment complex adjacent to the new stadium.

In 1996 Kraft and his family also founded the New England Revolution, which played in the Major League Soccer league. The Revolution used the same stadiums as the Patriots but were less successful on the field.

In February 2019 Kraft was charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution, but the charges were dropped the following year.