Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner the Hall of Fame keeps turning away

Robert Kraft

Photo: Office of Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts (Joshua Qualls/Governor’s Press Office) Joshua Qualls in his capacity as director of photography for the Office of Gov. Maura Healey and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 3, 1869 Leipzig
Occupation	Writer
Awards	Genesis Prize

Robert Kraft has six Lombardi Trophies, a stadium that FIFA renamed for a summer, and one Super Bowl ring that ended up in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. What the owner of the New England Patriots cannot get is a bronze bust in Canton, Ohio. The Pro Football Hall of Fame finally sent his name to the last round of voting as a contributor, and the room said no.

The refusal fits a pattern the dynasty never shook. Kraft took a team that had been a regional joke and a stadium nobody else wanted and turned them into the most consistent winner American sport has produced this century. Around the league, the same story is told with a footnote about methods, penalties and the two men who did the winning on the field. Kraft has spent three decades insisting the footnote is smaller than the story. Lately his own stadium keeps arguing back.

He grew up in Brookline, the Boston suburb where he was born in June 1941, the son of Harry Kraft, a dress manufacturer, and Sarah Webber, who came from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was class president at Columbia University and took an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1965. Two years earlier he had married Myra Hiatt, and he went to work at Rand-Whitney, the Worcester packaging company run by her father, Jacob Hiatt. In 1968 he took control of it through a leveraged buyout.

Paper made the money. Kraft founded International Forest Products in 1972 to trade pulp and paper across borders, and the cardboard business remained the quiet engine under everything that followed; the holding company he formed in 1998, the Kraft Group, still carries it alongside the teams. Football was the obsession. He had held Patriots season tickets since 1971, and he bought into the sport the way a packaging man buys into a market: through the least glamorous asset available.

That asset was Foxboro Stadium. In 1988 Kraft bought it out of bankruptcy court for 22 million dollars, and with it came a lease that tied the Patriots to the building. When the team’s owner, James Orthwein, explored moving the franchise to his home city of St. Louis, the lease stood in the way. In 1994 Kraft paid 172 million dollars for the club outright. It was a stadium deal that happened to include a football team.

The team became a machine after he made two decisions in 2000. He gave the New York Jets a first-round draft pick to hire Bill Belichick, and the club took a quarterback from Michigan named Tom Brady with the 199th pick. Six championships followed, in Super Bowls XXXVI, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XLIX, LI and LIII. Gillette Stadium opened in 2002 at a cost of about 350 million dollars, largely privately financed, with a shopping and entertainment district, Patriot Place, later built around it. In the league office Kraft became one of the owners who mattered, chairing the broadcast committee and helping end the 2011 lockout days after Myra died of ovarian cancer on July 20 of that year. The image of the players’ representative Jeff Saturday embracing him at the announcement became the most human moment of that negotiation.

The critical reading of Kraft starts with the penalties. In 2007 the league fined the club 250,000 dollars and took a first-round pick for videotaping opponents’ signals, the case known as Spygate. In 2015 Deflategate cost a one-million-dollar fine, two draft picks and a four-game suspension for Brady; Kraft accepted the punishment while saying he disagreed with it. In 2019 he was charged in Florida with soliciting prostitution at a day spa in Jupiter; a court ruled the police video had been obtained unconstitutionally and prosecutors dropped the charges. Then came the question no owner wants asked out loud: who built the dynasty? Brady left and won a Super Bowl in Tampa. Belichick left in 2024. The Hall of Fame vote reads as the league’s answer, and Kraft does not like it.

His other public life is the fight against antisemitism. After receiving the Genesis Prize in 2019 he pledged 20 million dollars to found the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, launched the blue square campaign in 2023, put its ads into Super Bowl broadcasts and, in 2025, renamed it the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. He has spent more than 100 million dollars on it, and in 2024 he stopped supporting Columbia, his alma mater, over its treatment of Jewish students during campus protests. In September 2026 that mission collided with the stadium business. Kraft barred the rapper Macklemore from performing at Gillette on Ed Sheeran‘s tour, saying the venue would “not provide a platform for hate speech” and citing “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery”. Macklemore was dropped; Finneas, Lukas Graham and Sheeran’s other openers walked out in protest, and Sheeran apologized for being caught in the middle. Weeks later Zach Bryan played the same stadium in a “Free Palestine” T-shirt. An owner can decide who stands on his stage. He has far less say over what the crowd hears about it.

On the field, the Patriots under Mike Vrabel went 14-3 in 2025 and reached Super Bowl LX, losing 29-13 to the Seattle Seahawks on February 8, 2026. It was Kraft’s eleventh Super Bowl as owner. Days earlier the Hall of Fame’s selectors had left him out of the Class of 2026, the first year he had reached the final ballot; Belichick, judged in the same session, missed out too. That summer Gillette, branded Boston Stadium, hosted seven World Cup matches, including a quarterfinal on July 9. The 2026 season began badly, with Drake Maye throwing six interceptions in the first three games.

Kraft’s sons run much of the empire now. Jonathan Kraft is president of the Kraft Group, alongside his brothers Daniel, Joshua and David. In 2022 Robert married Dana Blumberg, a New York ophthalmologist. And the ring? He handed it to Putin in St Petersburg in 2005 to look at, and Putin kept it; Kraft later said the statement calling it a gift was issued under pressure from the White House.

What comes next depends on other people saying yes, an unusual position for him. The Kraft Group signed agreements with Everett and Boston at the end of 2025 for a 24,000-seat Revolution stadium on a decommissioned power-plant site along the Mystic River, and his case will return to the Hall of Fame selectors with the next contributor ballot.

Tags: NFL, business, ceos, business leaders, Gillette Stadium, New England Patriots, tom brady, Robert Kraft