The Las Vegas Raiders have been rocked by a mass exodus of front office leaders amid financial irregularities and dire management blunders like overpaying taxes and underpaying certain employees for years.
The latest upheaval came last week with the ouster of the team’s interim team president. That executive, Dan Ventrelle, responded by accusing the owner, Mark Davis, whose family has run the team for more than 50 years, of creating a hostile work environment, without giving specifics.
It was one of many examples of a workplace racked by years of dysfunction, and the latest sign of an N.F.L. franchise with troubled inner workings. Since the Raiders moved to Las Vegas from Oakland, Calif., in 2020, with high hopes in a growing market, six of the team’s eight top executives have quit or been fired with little explanation, either publicly or internally.
In interviews with The New York Times, more than a dozen former employees, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they signed agreements with the team prohibiting them from discussing their employment publicly, described numerous problems large and small. There were, they said, lax controls over how money was spent and how people were paid and even the bungling of the payment of its taxes over several years. Not long after its move, the team missed a payment for the electric bill in its temporary office, forcing the lights to be shut off.
Nobody has asserted the financial disorder amounts to any crimes, but erroneous information on company ledgers can generally lead to problems with creditors, regulators, the league and others.
Employees who raised concerns over the team’s operations were often ignored or pushed out and given settlements and nondisclosure agreements to keep them quiet.
“If anyone complained, they were let go,” said Nicole Adams, who worked in the human resources department for almost five years. She was pushed out in late 2020 and declined to sign a severance agreement that she said would have prevented her from speaking about her tenure at the team. She said that Ventrelle, then the team’s general counsel, “joked he would be ready to settle if anyone came forward with a charge.”
Ventrelle did not answer requests for comment, but he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal shortly after he left that he had been making an effort to clean things up and had informed league officials of written complaints from employees of alleged misconduct.
The Raiders did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The N.F.L. declined to comment on Friday. After Ventrelle’s claims last week about a hostile work environment on the team, an N.F.L. spokesman, Brian McCarthy, said the league would look into the matter.
“We recently became aware of these allegations and take them very seriously,” McCarthy said.
The decimation of the front office staff is the latest in a series of setbacks for the Raiders. In October, Coach Jon Gruden resigned after The Times detailed emails in which he had made homophobic and misogynistic remarks before he was in his second stint with the team. Two players from his tenure have been accused of felony crimes.
The team’s troubles come at a time when the N.F.L., more popular than ever with fans, grapples with serious questions around the way the league and some teams are run. The league has been stung by a scandal at the Washington Commanders, where dozens of female employees accused team owner Daniel Snyder and top executives of harassment. The team last year was fined $10 million and has replaced many executives and rebranded itself. A congressional committee and attorneys general in Virginia and the District of Columbia are investigating some of the accusations, including mismanagement of the team’s finances.
Women who worked at N.F.L. headquarters have also complained about an office culture that marginalized them, allegations that prompted attorneys general from New York and five other states to threaten to…
Read More: Las Vegas Raiders Franchise Riddled With Dysfunction and Executive Departures