The Browns origins date to 1944, when taxi cab magnate Arthur B. “Mickey” McBride secured the rights to a Cleveland franchise in the newly formed All-America Football Conference. The AAFC was to compete with the dominant National Football League once it began operations at the end of World War II, which had forced many professional teams to curtail activity, merge or go on hiatus as their players served in the U.S. military. The name of the team was at first left up to Paul Brown, who rejected calls for it to be christened the Browns. The franchise then held a naming contest to publicize the team, promising a $1,000 war bond to the winner. In June 1945, a committee selected “Panthers” as the new team’s name. McBride, however, changed it to the Browns two months later, the result of another naming contest that suggested Browns, not after Paul Brown himself, but as a shortened version of Brown Bombers, a reference to the nickname of boxer Joe Louis. Some sources say McBride was asked for thousands of dollars in compensation from a businessman who owned the rights to the name Cleveland Panthers, an earlier failed football team.

Art Modell, a 35-year-old advertising executive from Brooklyn, purchased the team in 1961 from a group of shareholders led by National Insurance Company. The beginnings of a power struggle between Paul Brown and Art Modell took its toll. Journalist D.L. Stewart recounted in Jeff Miller’s book on the AFL, Going Long, “As you well can imagine, Jimmy Brown and Paul were not thick. The buzz was that Jimmy had Modell working for him, and Paul took exception to that.” The season otherwise was typical: a fifth consecutive league-leading season from Jim Brown and a half-decent performance in the standings, but again, at 8–5–1, they were two games out of a berth in the championship.

Modell announced on November 6, 1995, that he had signed a deal to relocate the Browns to Baltimore in 1996 a move which would return the NFL to Baltimore for the first time since the Colts relocated to Indianapolis after the 1983 season. The very next day, on November 7, 1995, Cleveland voters overwhelmingly approved an issue that had been placed on the ballot at Modell’s request, before he made his decision to move the franchise, which provided $175 million in tax dollars to refurbish the outmoded and declining Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Modell’s plan was later scrapped and taxpayers ultimately paid close to $300 million to demolish the old stadium and construct a new stadium for the Browns on the site of Municipal Stadium.

In February 1996, the NFL announced that the Browns would be ‘deactivated’ for three years, and that a new stadium would be built for a new Browns team, as either an expansion team or a team moved from another city, that would begin play in 1999. Modell would in turn be granted a new franchise, the NFL’s 31st, for Baltimore, the Baltimore Ravens, retaining the current contracts of players and personnel. The Browns ceased play at the end of the 1995 season when Modell relocated the organization to Baltimore. The Browns franchise was then reactivated, and its roster restocked via an expansion draft before resuming play in the 1999 season. There would be a new team, but the Browns’ name, colors, history, records, awards and archives would all remain in Cleveland. The move fueled a proliferation of 12 new stadiums throughout the NFL. Using the NFL–City of Cleveland agreement’s promise to supply a team to Cleveland by 1999, several NFL franchises used the threat of relocation to coerce their respective cities to build new stadiums with public funds.

Cleveland returned to the NFL in 1999 with high hopes and expectations, featuring deep-pocketed ownership in Al Lerner. When his father, Al Lerner, died in October 2002 – four years to the day after he was awarded the new Browns franchise – the ownership of the team passed on to Randy Lerner. Randy Lerner served as a member of the National Football League’s Business Ventures Committee. In 2012, Lerner sold the team to businessman Jimmy Haslam.

In July 2012, owner Randy Lerner announced that he planned to sell the Browns to businessman Jimmy Haslam. The sale was finalized on August 2, 2012 in excess of $1 Billion (USD). Haslam officially was approved as the new owner on October 16, 2012 at the NFL owners’ meetings, and the very next day former Eagles president Joe Banner was named as the Browns new CEO.