For now, the answers aren’t clear. Chairman George McCaskey — the face of ownership since 2011 and one of Virginia’s nine living children — has been direct over the years when asked about the family’s future intentions. In a 2019 interview, he repeated a refrain that the McCaskeys “want to own the Bears until the second coming.”

“And we have every intention of carrying that out,” he said at the time. “We don’t know what circumstances are going to bring us to challenge that. But that’s the goal.”

While the family has been intentionally opaque about sharing details of its ownership structure, some of the contours found their way into the public record during a lengthy court battle more than three decades ago over the estate of Virginia’s brother, George “Mugs” Halas. That information, along with changes to NFL ownership rules in recent years, lay out some of the factors now in play as the McCaskeys sort out the future of a team that industry publication Sportico estimated last year to be worth $6.3 billion.

Here is some of what is known about what’s ahead from court records, sources and reporting from Crain’s and others:

• The McCaskey family has grown substantially, as the Bears laid out in their announcement of Virginia’s death. In addition to her nine living children, she is survived by 21 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. Some members of that disparate group are reportedly keen to sell the stakes they are due to inherit from Virginia, according to previous Crain’s reporting.

“They’ve always been a close-knit family, so it could very well be that that continues, and maybe there are some financial considerations to keep it all together,” sports business consultant Marc Ganis said in an interview with Crain’s following news of Virginia’s death. “That’s something that George, I’m sure, will deal with at the appropriate time.”