NFL Ecosystem Changing Economics – 7 Key Opportunities & Risks for Public and Private Investors for the Next Decade: Meeting Summary & Transcript

We hosted an investor-focused meeting on the NFL economic ecosystem last week. We highlight 7 key opportunities and risks for public and private investors to consider.

Summary: (1) media rights are the most durable leg; networks treat football as a near-mandatory loss leader (CBS’s Sunday schedule collapsed after it lost the package to Fox in the early 90s and it returned at roughly twice the price), and Goodell is reportedly seeking a +40-50% increase into the next cycle; (2) Viewing has shifted to streaming, now past broadcast, favoring the deep-pocketed platforms Goodell is courting (Amazon, Netflix, YouTube); (3) Minority-stake access (10% cap, 6-year hold, versus ~30% at peer leagues) could rise to 15-20%, turning franchises into a supply-expanding asset; (4) Sports betting is risky as an NFL growth driver: the league captures none of the handle, monetizing only data and patches on a ~$25bn business; (5) International is a story, not yet a number (the Chiefs spent ~€3mm to earn ~€1.5mm in one market); (6) Key risk: a slowing U.S. birth rate and attention compression across all live sports. (7) 62% of NFL revenue is national (media plus national sponsorship), split 32 ways and shared ~50/50 with players, so the league’s largest cost (labor) is more or less covered by national revenue.

Labor and Revenue Mix: Why Every NFL Team Makes Money

Roughly 62% of NFL revenue is national (media plus national sponsorship), split evenly across all 32 teams, and that pool essentially covers the salary cap. Only ~19% of NFL revenue comes from the high-cost ticketing and seating business, versus ~32% from tickets and suites at MLB (where national TV is only ~25%) and ~40% national at the NBA. That mix is the reason the NFL is the only major league where every franchise is profitable, and it is why the cash-flow profile resembles a recurring-revenue media business more than a gate-driven sports team. A flat ~17-18mm average viewership per game (Thursday plus primetime Sunday windows that reach 25-30mm) has held; a recent World Series Game 7 drew ~25mm, i.e. one good NFL Sunday. Investor read-through: the durable, low-cost, contractually-locked revenue line is national media, and that is where the franchise economics are most defensible.

Media Rights: The Most Durable Leg, and It Reprices Higher

Our top takeaway: media is the most durable asset in the building. When CBS lost the package to Fox in the early 90s, its Sunday schedule collapsed, and it returned four years later at roughly twice the price. Nobody wants to be that network, so carriage has become a near-must-have loss leader (Fox, which doesn’t want to pay more, bought Roku to get into streaming). Goodell is reportedly pushing for a +40-50% increase into the next cycle (the prior round already roughly doubled), arguing the NFL is more valuable than the NBA deal the networks paid up for. The current deals exclude YouTube’s Sunday Ticket (~$2bn/yr) and expanding Netflix carve-outs, so the addressable pie is larger than the headline. Investor read-through: the beneficiaries are the deep-pocketed streamers (Amazon, Netflix, YouTube); the pressure lands on the legacy broadcasters (NBC, CBS, Fox) carrying football below margin.

Streaming Surpasses Broadcast: Follow the Capital

Time spent on streaming has now passed broadcast, and Goodell’s “fish where the fish are” line is a capital-allocation signal. He is spending more time courting the big streamers, as many viewers have already moved to these platforms. The risk here is bundling fatigue, with fans needing subscriptions to Peacock, Amazon, and others to watch games. Investor read-through: the marginal rights dollar increasingly accrues to the streaming platforms.

Private Equity: From Trophy to Asset

The NFL still permits only a 10% passive minority stake with a 6-year hold, well below the ~30% peer leagues allow, but the ceiling could rise toward 15-20%. Roughly half of deals so far fund stadiums and real estate (e.g., Jimmy Haslam in Cleveland; Terry Pegula in Buffalo, the latter also tapping Canadian capital to grow cross-border fandom) rather than estate or tax planning. Several of the strongest franchises may never need outside money (the Jaguars under Shad Khan, who is self-financing a stadium; the Chiefs), which underscores how robust the underlying economics are. Investor read-through: a rising cap converts franchises into a genuine, supply-expanding asset class with durable cash flow.

International and Betting: The Two Growth Stories the Market Conflates

On international, the economics are often times still a work in progress: the Chiefs (Super Bowl perennials) spent ~€3mm in marketing to generate ~€1.5mm of revenue in a single overseas market. The real prize may be a future global streaming package (perhaps ~$1bn), but it is years out and split 32 ways and with players. On betting, the contrarian flag is sharper: the NFL captures almost none of the handle, monetizing only game data (it can charge more if the handle on DraftKings rises). The remaining large states (CA, FL, TX) without sports gambling could drive a bump, but then plateau as the novelty fades and finite discretionary wallets rotate spend. Investor read-through: the league-level betting tailwind is risky; the data-pricing lever is real but small relative to the league’s size.

Structural Risks: Birth Rate, Streaming, & Attention Spans

A slowing U.S. birth rate (fewer kids, fewer athletes, eventually fewer fans), streaming’s alienation of older viewers, and a culture that has compressed from albums to tracks to short-form video are all structural risks for not just the NFL but for sports leagues at large.

Three Eras, One Trajectory: Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Broadway

Ken narrated the league’s arc from Rozelle, who popularized the game and put it in primetime, to Tagliabue, who brokered the early-90s labor peace (salary cap, free agency, and a roughly 50/50 revenue split) that remains the blueprint today, to Goodell, who runs the NFL less as a sports league than as a media company whose product is football. The quote on where Goodell wants the league positioned (alongside two of the most recognizable institutions in the world in Disney and the Vatican) is the line we keep coming back to.

Three Questions for Sports Investors to Consider

1. What is the path to sustainable and profitable international growth? An overseas game is currently by and large a marketing event. Even the Chiefs spent roughly €3mm to earn roughly €1.5mm in one market. Separate one-off event revenue from recurring local demand. Treat event-driven hype with caution until recurring local demand proves out.
2. How many subscriptions do fans now need, and what does that do to retention? A broadcast rating is not a strategy now that streaming has passed broadcast. Fans already juggle Peacock, Amazon, and others for a single NFL season. Weigh whether bundling fatigue could impact viewership.
3. What happens to sports betting growth when the novelty plateaus? The NFL captures almost none of the handle, monetizing only data and patches, and possible growth in states like California, Florida, and Texas could deliver a bump but then are at risk of leveling off. Watch the handle trend in the oldest legal states for signs of stagnation.

MEETING TRANSCRIPT

David Katzman (Optimal Vice President)

Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for being here. Today I’m honored to be joined by New York Times journalist Ken Belson, author of Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural and Economic Juggernaut.

Ken is an incredibly accomplished writer in the sports and sports business spaces, focusing on issues including finances, stadiums, medical issues, lawsuits, and more. He’s also covered New York City transportation, economics, and energy, and prior to that he was a business reporter covering media and telecommunications, after spending time covering the Japanese economy in Tokyo. In 2011, he was part of a team of finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for their coverage of the Japanese tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster. How are you doing this morning, Ken?

Ken Belson (New York Times Journalist and Author of “Every Day is Sunday”)

Great, great, thanks for having me on. Something more uplifting than a nuclear disaster.

David Katzman

Thank you for coming on. Before we get started, I wanted to mention that I read Ken’s phenomenal book while I was on vacation, and it was very difficult to force myself to put it down and actually do the itinerary for the trip. So I highly recommend the book for anyone at all interested in the NFL, or the recent history of the NFL, or anything along those lines. I’ll now turn it over to Ken to provide some background on his book, and then we’ll do some Q&A afterwards.

Ken Belson

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining me and David. Let me boot up this relatively brief presentation so we can run through a few things quickly and set the stage for some of the questions that will follow.

The first slide is the title of the book, which came out last October and is still on sale, hint hint. A little bit about me: I grew up in New York. I was mercifully not a Jets fan, I was a Dolphins fan, although in retrospect I’m not sure it mattered. I’ve been a business writer for a number of organizations, most recently with The Times, but I started at Bloomberg, Reuters, and Businessweek. For the last 15 years or so I’ve covered the business of sports. It’s not an area that’s widely covered in any structured way, so it’s been a great beat. That’s what morphed into this book. I’d been covering the NFL as a business full-time since 2013, I had a ton of material, and I thought there was a compelling business story to tell.

This slide is from the beginning of the book and gives a sense of the historical arc of the NFL as a business. It’s a quote from Bob LaMonte, perhaps the best-known agent for representing coaches in the NFL. His historical analogy was that the NFL under Pete Rozelle was Madison Avenue. Rozelle was commissioner from 1960 through 1989 and really popularized the game in a mass-market way. Three data points from his tenure: the Super Bowl turned into the most-watched programming of all time; NFL Films became a very sophisticated content operation, beautiful videography and storytelling well ahead of its time; and Monday Night Football, launched in 1970, was the first regularly scheduled primetime sports broadcast. For comparison, the first nighttime World Series game wasn’t until 1973, which happened when the Mets were in the World Series, partly why I remember it. So the NFL was ahead of the curve in getting into people’s living rooms in a way the other sports had not.

His successor, Paul Tagliabue, was Wall Street. He helped broker labor peace in the early 90s. A lot of attention goes to the salary cap and free agency, which is what the players were most interested in, but the third piece of that monumental labor deal was revenue sharing, which created a roughly 50-50 split. Gene Upshaw, the union chief at the time, came out of the final labor deal in early 1993 and said, “We are now partners.” That is not a traditional labor stance, but it incentivized the players to let the owners try to make more money, knowing it was a 50-50 split. The heat was off the players, they got the free agency they wanted, and it gave the owners the template to supersize the league: a raft of teams moving to bigger markets, a wave of new stadiums, bigger TV deals, and exclusive sponsorship deals. The NFL used to have around 10 apparel deals, then decided to strike a single exclusive deal with, say, Reebok or Nike, getting far more for that exclusivity. That’s the Wall Street analogy.

The third is Roger Goodell. He’s taken the popularity and financial stability and turned the NFL into Broadway, or Hollywood. It’s a media company now with a product known as football. There’s a quote in the book about Roger’s mindset: he is less interested in beating the NBA or MLB for its own sake, although he is very competitive. He wants the NFL to be seen in the same light as Disney and the Vatican: Disney meaning 24-hour family-friendly entertainment, and the Vatican as a cultural institution. That’s where his head is, a media company that is part of the American fabric, not so much a sports league that has to be the biggest.

Another data point: in 1989, roughly when I start the book and when Tagliabue takes over, the league was less than a billion dollars. TV revenue was more or less flat, there was a recession in 1990 and 1991 because of the Gulf War, and player costs were rising. There was no labor deal; the union was in federal court with the NFL, which was very expensive and time-consuming. It was to Tagliabue’s credit that he took control of labor negotiations personally, away from some of the hardline owners, which paved the way for a lasting settlement that is still the blueprint of the league today.

I focused on Goodell, and of course Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft. They’re the two best-known owners and have two of the most valuable teams, but both started rather humbly. Their fathers were small businessmen. They grew up in very different parts of the country, were entrepreneurial, started or wanted to buy teams early in their lives, failed, and later came back to buy NFL teams. In both cases, the Cowboys and the Patriots were in deep financial trouble. Jerry Jones has said many times he was losing about a million dollars a month back in the late 80s when he took over, during the savings and loan crisis in Texas. Season ticket holders were leaving, the team wasn’t very good, and the stadium was falling apart.

The Patriots were for a very long time the worst-run franchise in the NFL, and Kraft bought it in pieces: first the parking lot, then the concessions, and eventually the team itself. He stabilized it, put new money into it, eventually built Gillette Stadium, and turned Foxborough into a destination. He was one of the first owners to use his stadium as a real estate magnet, with Patriot Place built around it, and many other teams are now doing the same. Last point: both gentlemen are in their 80s. Their children have been very involved with the teams from the outset. Charlotte Jones, Stephen Jones, and Jerry Jr., and the four Kraft sons have all worked in various ways with their fathers, so they are poised to take over when both exit. They show no sign of slowing down, but they are very much in their 80s.

This is a snapshot I took of Jerry. He’s the only owner left who talks to the media after every single game, win or lose. This photo was taken outside the Cowboys’ locker room after, as you can tell by his smile, a pretty good victory. Footnote: it was against the Jets, so maybe it was only half a victory. Jerry is a salesman. He feels he should be in front of the media; he is a brand himself. He’ll talk your ear off and stay 20, 30, 40 minutes, while most owners might talk for three to five minutes at most. He is a charmer, in business, with his fellow owners, and with the media.

This is a picture of me with Robert Kraft. He has a little hardware store next door to his office, and he loves to take people inside to see the trophies he tends to show off. He’s a very hands-on owner even at this age, though not running the team the way he used to. His son Jonathan does a lot of the day-to-day now. But Robert is very involved with NFL business, particularly the media side, working with Goodell and acting as a broker with NBC, CBS, Fox, and so forth. He is still the chairman of the NFL Owners Media Committee, so he’s very much in the middle of the media deals they’re renegotiating.

This is a quote in the book from Shad Khan, the owner of the Jaguars. It’s telling because it describes the owners’ approach: the NFL is so big now they don’t need to be early adopters. In some people’s minds the NFL is innovative, but frankly they are often late to the party. Think of international expansion, or the interest in gambling, or the acceptance of private equity money, all things the other leagues embraced earlier, the NFL by something like five years in the case of private equity. His analogy: the NFL is like letting the first wave of Marines hit the beaches and take the losses, then coming in later when everything is safe.

I hope you can see this graph. It shows pie charts of the five major leagues and where they make their money. The most instructive portion is the top left: 62% of the NFL’s revenue is national revenue, meaning media contracts and national sponsorship deals like Verizon, PepsiCo, and Progressive. So two-thirds of their money is divided 32 ways and then split 50% with the players. Since that national revenue is split with the players, it essentially covers the salary cap. The league’s biggest cost, labor, is more or less covered out of national revenue, with other sources like tickets and sponsorships on top. The NFL is the only league that can say every team makes money. You cannot say that in the other leagues. In MLB, only 25% is national TV revenue, while 32% comes from tickets, suites, and seats, and that ticket business carries high costs: marketing, customer service, food and beverage, and so on. There is almost no cost to the media money after the initial negotiation; the money is baked in for a decade. In the NFL’s case, only 19% comes from those more expensive portions, so they are far less reliant on them. For the NBA, 40% is national revenue, but nobody comes close to the NFL’s mix.

This is a brief history of their media deals; forgive the small font. You can see the Amazon deal in the latest round of 10-year deals they’re in the middle of. The media deals shown were roughly double the previous round. This doesn’t include YouTube’s Sunday Ticket deal, worth somewhere in the order of $2 billion a year, or the Netflix carve-outs, which started with a few games and keeps expanding. So, the NFL is getting more aggressive in carving up this pie, and it’s probably even bigger than this graph represents.

Viewership does bounce around year to year. They had a very good 2025, which I didn’t incorporate here. If you look back at 2016 and 2017, you’ll see a couple of down years during the Colin Kaepernick protests, when some viewers were turned off, but the numbers bounced back. Across the chart, average viewership runs a roughly straight line of 17 to 18 million per game. That’s an extraordinary number, because it includes Thursday night games, which aren’t always great, alongside primetime Sunday night games that can draw 25 to 30 million. No other sport comes near that. To give a data point, Game 7 of last year’s World Series between the Blue Jays and Dodgers drew about 25 million, which is like a good Sunday NFL game. So even though aggregate numbers have come down, the NFL remains the most-watched programming on television.

This is the future. There’s a lot of attention in Washington right now, with hearings the other day about the NFL and its broadcast rights. On the top right you can see that streaming has now surpassed broadcast television in time spent watching, and that is the future. People complain about needing subscriptions to Peacock, Amazon, and others to watch games, but as Goodell has said, you have to fish where the fish are, and the fish are streamers. It’s not just that Netflix and Amazon have deeper pockets; it’s where viewers are going. He sees the future, which is why he’s spending more time courting the big streaming companies.

This is another way of saying the same thing. NFL viewership bounces around but averages roughly 17 to 18 million, and then you can look at basically everything else. By 2005, Seinfeld had gone off the air and Friends was ending; the 90s era of appointment TV was starting to fracture. Netflix came in, streaming became popular, and yet after all that the NFL continues to remain very popular.

This expresses the earlier point differently. The salary cap is basically the players’ 50% share of revenue. Most people don’t know that the players choose how to divide it between salary for current players and benefits for retired players. The owners don’t contribute in any substantive way; it’s the players who decide what retiree benefits should be. They’ve increased that share, and what’s left is the current payroll, which is the salary cap. You can see it rising far faster than in the NBA and NHL. MLB isn’t here because they don’t have a salary cap. The TV money has just exploded; there’s one dip during COVID, but it rebounded very quickly.

A couple more slides. We don’t have a lot of financial information from the teams; they’re almost all privately held, except for the Green Bay Packers. From their disclosures we get insight into the share of national revenue: it was $432 million in 2024, the same amount that goes to all 32 teams. Local revenue is the big differentiator. Playing at Lambeau Field in a small market, with lower ticket prices, local revenue was about $286 million, which is pretty modest. By contrast, Jerry Jones brings in six or seven hundred million at AT&T Stadium, and the Jets, Giants, and Patriots are in that range. It’s not about selling out; it’s about the amount of ticket and suite revenue, and you don’t have the corporate sponsors in Green Bay. Even so, their net income, though down, was still pretty healthy.

Looking ahead, two last slides, and we can dig into these in Q&A. On health and safety and demographics: our country’s birth rate is slowing, which affects all sports, since fewer kids means fewer athletes and ultimately could mean fewer fans. There’s the overseas market, which we’ll discuss. Streaming is alienating some older viewers, probably not to the point that they stop watching, but it’s a careful balance. And there are many legal risks, including issues around arbitration and other matters that are a bit esoteric. I’ll leave you with one last slide on the state of our culture. This is a challenge not just for the NFL but for all sports leagues, and all entertainment: how to get new fans and viewers. You can see the transition from a slower culture to a faster, more fractured media landscape. Video has gone from film and television to short reels on YouTube and TikTok. I grew up with albums, then we got tracks, and now it’s TikTok. Relationships, everything, has sped up and become more fractured. The way I used to watch football, sitting from one to four o’clock for a single game with almost no other information, is something of a relic. All of the leagues have to consider these big issues. That’s the end of my slideshow. Thank you very much, and I’m happy to take David’s questions.

David Katzman

Thank you so much for that great introduction, Ken. Next, I wanted to get your opinion on some of the conversations we’ve been having around the NFL and the sports ecosystem as a whole. My first question: of all the businesses operating around the NFL that you’ve watched up close, media rights holders, betting operators, apparel, ticketing, the teams themselves, which do you think has the most durable economics over the next decade, and which looks structurally weaker than the current hype suggests?

Ken Belson

I would very much say media is their best and most durable product. As that chart on the drop in primetime and broadcast viewership showed, nothing attracts eyeballs quite like the NFL, and everybody knows it. The complaints in Washington about the high price of watching football are really driven, in at least one specific case, by Fox, which doesn’t want to pay even more. They appear to be buying Roku, so they’re getting into the streaming game, but it’s costing the networks quite a bit. Football is turning into a heavy-duty loss leader, yet they can’t do without it. Back in the early 90s, when Fox outbid CBS, CBS’s Sunday programming just plummeted; all that free promotion you’d hear from Pat Summerall and John Madden for the evening lineup went away, and it was a disaster. CBS came back four years later at twice the price. Nobody wants to be that network, so they’ll all be paying up, which is music to Goodell’s ears.

How hard he pushes them is another matter. I’ve heard he wants to increase media rights by 40 to 50%. He feels the NBA has been overpaid for its rights deal, and that from a banker’s perspective he has a more valuable product and should be paid more. He has a lot of leverage but doesn’t want to bleed his partners dry; he knows they have businesses to run. At the same time, he works for 32 shareholders who want more money, and his pay package is incentivized accordingly. So I’d expect a nice big jump in all of their media deals by the end of this season.

As for the riskiest, I actually think gambling may be it. The NFL makes nothing from the cut on gambling. It makes money from selling NFL game data, which you can’t operate without, but it’s a fairly static cost, plus sponsorships and advertising in stadiums and patches on uniforms. In the grand scheme, that’s not a ton of money, at least yet. They do have ways to benefit from increases in gambling; they can charge more for their data if they see the handle on DraftKings going up, and they can renegotiate. But for a $25 billion business, it’s not really moving the needle. I also think the novelty of gambling will wear off. Decades ago you had to go to the track to place a bet, then off-track betting was the newest thing, and after a while people got used to it and it plateaued. There’s been a big surge in cell phone gambling, understandably, and each new state adds to the overall take. We don’t have sports gambling in California, Florida, or Texas, three huge states, except in some tribal casinos. So there’s a lot of opportunity, but once those states eventually change their laws there’ll be a two- or three-year bump and then it’ll level off. Ultimately people have only so much money to spend, and it’s replacing other discretionary spending, so five or ten years out I’m not sure it’s growing nearly as fast.

David Katzman

Got it, that’s very interesting. I wanted to shift gears to private equity. As you discuss in the book, private equity is now allowed to hold minority stakes in NFL franchises. Having watched ownership culture for years, do you think outside capital changes how these teams are run, and does it make a franchise stake a genuine investment, or is it still mostly a trophy for ultra-rich individuals?

Ken Belson

A couple of things are embedded in that. First, the NFL only allows 10% ownership, it’s passive, and you have to hold the stake for five years, maybe six. That’s a pretty conservative approach; the other leagues are generally up to around 30%. Second, a handful of teams have sold stakes of up to 10% just to settle family estate or tax issues. One example is the Los Angeles Chargers: Dean Spanos is the principal owner and has three siblings, and his sister wanted out, holding something like 8% of the team. He sold a stake to pay her off, so now someone holds 6 to 10% of the team, has to hold onto it, doesn’t necessarily have a board seat, probably has Dean Spanos’s cell number, but has no particular vote. That’s the best of both worlds if you’re an NFL owner.

Other owners have been more aggressive, using it to fund stadiums and real estate development, like Jimmy Haslam in Cleveland. Terry Pegula is doing something similar in Buffalo, and he’s also brought in Canadian money to help popularize the Bills in Canada, so it has an international component. So in some cases, probably half or more, they’re using it strategically, and in others it’s for estate planning. It’s not every team. Quite a few have no reason to sell to private equity; they don’t need the money. The Jacksonville Jaguars are 100% owned by Shad Khan, who is self-financing his stadium development. The Chiefs, for the moment, are not looking at private equity. So there are teams that may never need it, and that’s fine. But over time I expect more teams to test the waters, and I suspect the limit will probably rise to 15 to 20% at some point.

David Katzman

Oh really? That’s getting up there in the ownership percentage. The last thing I wanted to ask, combining two questions: first, how do you think the league’s international growth push will look in the coming few years, with all the international games they’ve had and continue to have? And second, outside the NFL, what other sports are you seeing on a similar trajectory, or maybe not quite that scale but growing quite rapidly?

Ken Belson

I’ll answer the second part first. The NBA in particular has done a very good job marketing itself internationally. They have a huge advantage because basketball is played so widely, with professional leagues in Croatia, Turkey, Israel, Italy, France, and China, so they have built-in audiences. Now they’re in the midst of selling franchises in a new European league they’re creating. They’ve done the best at monetizing it and probably have the best international media profile. I know people who lived in China who would wake up at 9 a.m. to watch Yao Ming play. The NBA is a true global sport, and they’ve been relatively thoughtful. The New York Knicks had an Abu Dhabi patch on their uniform, which is probably not an accident; the Middle East is interested in the NBA, and games are played in those countries.

Second would be MLB with the World Baseball Classic. It’s more labor-intensive in terms of the money to put it on, but it is wildly popular. I don’t think Americans appreciate how interested other countries are. I go to Japan and Korea frequently and have covered the event abroad. Maybe not Europe as much, but in the baseball countries and the Caribbean it is very popular. It’s the baseball version of the World Cup. The value is there, but how much TV money are you getting out of the Dominican Republic or Aruba? Not huge piles. The people who bankroll the World Baseball Classic are in Japan; about half of the big sponsors are Japanese, like Bridgestone. They’ve done very well rolling it out, but the problem is it’s only every two or three years, so it lacks the regularity the NBA has.

Going back to the NFL, the biggest problem is that most people don’t play football outside North America. There’s some played in Germany and a semi-pro league in Japan, but it lacks a natural constituency of fans. So they not only have to reach fans and play games, they have to teach fans how it’s played. Flag football has been a tool to get kids to at least know how to throw a ball and understand what a quarterback is, really basic stuff. All the NFL teams have picked different markets where they teach the game in elementary schools, but that’s a long road, and in almost all of these countries you’re going up against soccer, rugby, and many other sports, so football is fifth, sixth, or seventh down the list.

So yes, we’re watching more NFL games played overseas, and that’s fine, but in many cases the fandom isn’t as sticky; it’s more event-driven. One example: the Chiefs are one of the most popular teams, and one of their markets is Germany. They played in Frankfurt a few years ago, with a big push to sell merchandise and sponsorships from German companies. Their president told me they made in the neighborhood of 1.5 million euros in revenue. I said, congratulations, you’re finally making money over there, and he said, yes, but I’ve spent 3 million on marketing. And he added, we’re the Chiefs, Super Bowl perennials, and we’re not getting anywhere close to break-even, so I can’t imagine what the other clubs are like. It’s a long way to making money. I think the NFL ultimately sees an international television package it can sell to Netflix or YouTube on a global platform, selling 8-game or 16-game packages, hopefully bringing in a billion dollars or so, split 32 ways and with the players. It’s money in their pocket, but not the gusher of revenue they get domestically from the big networks and streamers.

David Katzman

Got it. The internationalization is such a fascinating piece; I wanted to go to the Commanders game in Madrid last year but didn’t end up making it out. It’s such a fascinating part of the story. Thank you so much, Ken, I really appreciate you coming on. As I said, I highly recommend Ken’s book. And thank you, everyone, for joining us.