NFL Players Association executive director Lloyd Howell Jr. is facing a new round of scrutiny after ESPN reported on Thursday that he is working as a paid, part-time consultant for one of the league-approved equity firms looking to take a minority stake in an NFL team. 

Howell has been working with The Carlyle Group since March 2023, three months before he was hired as the NFLPA executive director, the report said.

A senior lawyer for the players union reportedly had asked Howell to consider resigning from the private equity firm to avoid any conflict of interest, though part of that is being disputed in a separate report from The Athletic.

The alleged conversation between Howell and the union lawyer occurred a month after the NFL had given The Carlyle Group approval to pursue minority ownership of an NFL team last August. 

Howell declined to step down from his role, according to the report; however, The Athletic cited five sources that disputed that he was ever advised to step down by an NFLPA attorney.

One NFLPA source told the outlet that they challenged the characterization that Howell refused to follow the union attorney’s request, and three other sources told The Athletic that they weren’t aware of any NFLPA lawyer approaching Howell about the issue.

The Athletic report also indicated that Howell had met with lawyers from the NFLPA and The Carlyle Group, with both agreeing that his role in the aerospace and defense division was enough separation from the sector that would work with the NFL.

“He had no access to information about the NFL and Carlyle process beyond public news reports due to strict Carlyle information barriers in place,” a spokesperson for the firm said in a statement to ESPN. “Carlyle was not aware of the request from union lawyers for Lloyd to resign from Carlyle.”

A separate source told ESPN that Howell had only remembered that any concerns were brought up by a “union employee,” and he responded that he would “do his due diligence” before making any decision regarding his involvement with The Carlyle Group. 

Howell declined to comment to ESPN.

The NFLPA executive already had been under the microscope after it was reported that the union had struck a confidential agreement with the NFL to keep details of a January arbitration ruling from the players. 

The arbitrator didn’t find sufficient evidence that there had been collusion by league owners after Deshaun Watson signed a fully guaranteed, $230 million deal in 2022.

But it noted in the 61-page ruling that the NFLPA had shown “by a clear preponderance of the evidence” that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and league general counsel Jeff Pash impressed upon owners to restrict guaranteed money in player contracts. 

Beyond that, the NFLPA hired lawyer Ronald Machen of the law firm WilmerHale last month to work with a group of players to look over Howell’s activities as executive director following reports in May that the federal investigators were probing the union’s financial dealings.