Consider the curious case of the National Football League: It’s the largest single entertainment property in the U.S., a $14 billion per year attention-sucking machine with a steady hold on the lives of tens of millions. And its future is now in widespread doubt.
Ratings for regular-season games fell 17 percent over the past two years, according to Nielsen, and after one week of play in the new season, viewership has been flat. February marked the third-straight year of audience decline for the Super Bowl and the smallest audience since 2009. Youth participation in tackle football, meanwhile, has declined by nearly 22 percent since 2012 in the face of an emerging scientific consensus that the game destroys the brains of its players. Once a straightforward Sunday diversion, the NFL has become a daily exercise in cognitive dissonance for fans and a hotly contested front in a culture war that no longer leaves space for non-combatants.
To many outside observers, this looks like the end of an era. “The NFL probably peaked two years ago,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College who specializes in the business of sports. “It’s basically treading water.”
Yet even a middling franchise, the Carolina Panthers, sold in May for a league record $2.3 billion. Advertisers spent a record $4.6 billion for spots during NFL games last season, as well as an all-time high $5.24 million per 30 seconds of Super Bowl time. The reason is clear: In 2017, 37 of the top 50 broadcasts on U.S. television were NFL games, including four of the top five.
The Green Bay Packers, the only NFL team that shares financial statements with the public, has posted revenue increases for 15 straight seasons. Leaguewide revenue has grown more than 47 percent since 2012. Commissioner Roger Goodell’s official target is $25 billion in revenue by 2027, or roughly 6 percent annual growth.
“The business of the NFL is very strong and continues to get stronger,” says Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd., and an unofficial surrogate for league owners. “It’s a great time to own an NFL franchise,” says Atlanta Falcons owner and Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank.
The dominant sport in America has become Schrödinger’s league, both doomed and doing better than ever at the same time. This is a guide to how the NFL reached its remarkable moment of contradiction.
Early in August, during an otherwise unremarkable day of training camp for the Minnesota Vikings, a safety for the team put on a black baseball cap with a message across the front: “Make football violent again.” Andrew Sendejo, who plays one of the game’s most violent positions with exceptional violence, was protesting a new NFL rule that bans players from initiating contact with their helmets. When asked what he thought of the new rule, Sendejo replied, “I don’t.”
Until two years ago, the NFL officially denied any link between football and increased risk of degenerative brain disease. That changed when Jeff Miller, the league’s senior vice president for health and safety, told members of Congress that there is “certainly” a link between the sport and diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which has been found in the brains of more than 100 former NFL players and is linked to mood swings, depression, impulsiveness, memory loss, and in a handful of cases, suicide. “I think the broader point, and the one that your question gets to, is what that necessarily means—and where do we go from here with that information,” Miller said in response to a question from a congresswoman.
The question now is whether football can be played safely and still be football. In the short run, the NFL has to worry about ruining the fun for the group of people, including Trump, who see football as a vital tool in forging American manhood. As far as they’re concerned, any effort to subtract violence from the game and improve safety is a threat to the country.
“If we lose football, we lose a lot in America. I don’t know if America can survive,” David Baker, president of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, said in January. A few months later, North Carolina’s head football coach Larry Fedora echoed his sentiments: “I fear that the game will be pushed so far from what we know that we won’t recognize it 10 years from now. And if it does, our country will go down, too.”
In the long run, though, the NFL also has to worry that the widespread, lasting damage to players will alienate fans. “The CTE issue is the biggest challenge facing the NFL,” says Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard University football player and professional wrestler who started the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “If they don’t change—and change soon—their legends will keep being diagnosed with the disease and it will turn people off.”
At the moment, CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem, by slicing into brain tissue. Researchers at Boston University, working with brains donated by families, have found that at least 10 percent of deceased NFL players suffered from the disease. Once scientists find a way to diagnose CTE in the living, which researchers expect to have in fewer than five years, Nowinski believes that this number is bound to double or triple: “If some day you knew that half the players you are watching on the field already have this disease, would you be comfortable watching?”
This year the Concussion Legacy Foundation launched a campaign called “Flag Football Under 14,” based on the research that shows one of the biggest predictors of CTE is the number of years spent playing tackle football. Parents, by the looks of it, were already getting the message. Since 2012, according to annual data compiled by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), the number of children aged 6 to 17 playing tackle football dropped 22 percent, to just above 3 million. In a study published in JAMA Pediatrics this year, researchers found that the fall in participation coincides closely with the rise of media coverage of football’s links to traumatic brain injuries.
The attention to brain injury risks turning football playing into a regional pursuit. In New England, according to SFIA data, the number of players has decreased by 61 percent in the past decade.
Bob Broderick, co-founder of football pad company Xtech, says he has spoken to nearly 2,000 high schools in the past few years and the appetite for youth football remains undiminished in Texas and the rest of the Southeast. “Whether you want to call it a religion, culture, or way of life, that’s the way it is down there,” he says. His most common problem is parents who want pads in smaller sizes for younger kids. “I bet you, in the last month, I’ve turned away 300 kids because we don’t make a product that’s small enough.”
It’s not clear that youth football’s shrinking footprint matters much for the health of the NFL. “The vast majority of people who watch the NFL have never played tackle football in their lives,” says Ganis. As long as elite players keep coming through the college ranks, he says, the league will be fine. And if the next generation’s Tom Brady opts to play baseball, who’s going to notice?
“The reality is that football is such a fun game for fans and a good game for TV,” says Nowinski, the anti-concussion activist, “that even if the quality was slightly worse, it would still be a massively popular enterprise.”
Jerry Richardson, the 82-year-old fast-food magnate who had owned the Carolina Panthers for a quarter century, was forced to sell the team earlier this year following revelations that he had sexually harassed team employees. Richardson, who had been one of the NFL’s most powerful owners, was a prime example of the old boys’ club that runs the league. The ownership ranks include the CEO of a truck-stop chain that has been accused by federal prosecutors of cheating customers out of fuel rebates, the scion of a heating and air conditioning fortune with a DUI on his record, and several heirs to oil money. They are not necessarily the group one would choose to steer an enterprise into the chaotic future of sports and entertainment in America.
But there’s no shortage of new economy billionaires lining up to replace them, just as hedge fund chief David Tepper did with his $2.3 billion takeover the Panthers. The fury that now surrounds these men, and they are mostly men, is both a test of their power and a testament to it. As much as they might long for the days before CTE was a household term, Kaepernick was a civil rights hero, and Trump was president, they’re happy to be in the middle of the conversation. It’s proof that they still matter.
by Ira Boudway and Eben Novy-Williams, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Getty
Ratings for regular-season games fell 17 percent over the past two years, according to Nielsen, and after one week of play in the new season, viewership has been flat. February marked the third-straight year of audience decline for the Super Bowl and the smallest audience since 2009. Youth participation in tackle football, meanwhile, has declined by nearly 22 percent since 2012 in the face of an emerging scientific consensus that the game destroys the brains of its players. Once a straightforward Sunday diversion, the NFL has become a daily exercise in cognitive dissonance for fans and a hotly contested front in a culture war that no longer leaves space for non-combatants.
To many outside observers, this looks like the end of an era. “The NFL probably peaked two years ago,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College who specializes in the business of sports. “It’s basically treading water.”
Yet even a middling franchise, the Carolina Panthers, sold in May for a league record $2.3 billion. Advertisers spent a record $4.6 billion for spots during NFL games last season, as well as an all-time high $5.24 million per 30 seconds of Super Bowl time. The reason is clear: In 2017, 37 of the top 50 broadcasts on U.S. television were NFL games, including four of the top five.The Green Bay Packers, the only NFL team that shares financial statements with the public, has posted revenue increases for 15 straight seasons. Leaguewide revenue has grown more than 47 percent since 2012. Commissioner Roger Goodell’s official target is $25 billion in revenue by 2027, or roughly 6 percent annual growth.
“The business of the NFL is very strong and continues to get stronger,” says Marc Ganis, president of the consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd., and an unofficial surrogate for league owners. “It’s a great time to own an NFL franchise,” says Atlanta Falcons owner and Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank.
The dominant sport in America has become Schrödinger’s league, both doomed and doing better than ever at the same time. This is a guide to how the NFL reached its remarkable moment of contradiction.
Early in August, during an otherwise unremarkable day of training camp for the Minnesota Vikings, a safety for the team put on a black baseball cap with a message across the front: “Make football violent again.” Andrew Sendejo, who plays one of the game’s most violent positions with exceptional violence, was protesting a new NFL rule that bans players from initiating contact with their helmets. When asked what he thought of the new rule, Sendejo replied, “I don’t.”
Until two years ago, the NFL officially denied any link between football and increased risk of degenerative brain disease. That changed when Jeff Miller, the league’s senior vice president for health and safety, told members of Congress that there is “certainly” a link between the sport and diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which has been found in the brains of more than 100 former NFL players and is linked to mood swings, depression, impulsiveness, memory loss, and in a handful of cases, suicide. “I think the broader point, and the one that your question gets to, is what that necessarily means—and where do we go from here with that information,” Miller said in response to a question from a congresswoman.
The question now is whether football can be played safely and still be football. In the short run, the NFL has to worry about ruining the fun for the group of people, including Trump, who see football as a vital tool in forging American manhood. As far as they’re concerned, any effort to subtract violence from the game and improve safety is a threat to the country.
“If we lose football, we lose a lot in America. I don’t know if America can survive,” David Baker, president of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, said in January. A few months later, North Carolina’s head football coach Larry Fedora echoed his sentiments: “I fear that the game will be pushed so far from what we know that we won’t recognize it 10 years from now. And if it does, our country will go down, too.”
In the long run, though, the NFL also has to worry that the widespread, lasting damage to players will alienate fans. “The CTE issue is the biggest challenge facing the NFL,” says Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard University football player and professional wrestler who started the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “If they don’t change—and change soon—their legends will keep being diagnosed with the disease and it will turn people off.”
At the moment, CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem, by slicing into brain tissue. Researchers at Boston University, working with brains donated by families, have found that at least 10 percent of deceased NFL players suffered from the disease. Once scientists find a way to diagnose CTE in the living, which researchers expect to have in fewer than five years, Nowinski believes that this number is bound to double or triple: “If some day you knew that half the players you are watching on the field already have this disease, would you be comfortable watching?”
This year the Concussion Legacy Foundation launched a campaign called “Flag Football Under 14,” based on the research that shows one of the biggest predictors of CTE is the number of years spent playing tackle football. Parents, by the looks of it, were already getting the message. Since 2012, according to annual data compiled by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), the number of children aged 6 to 17 playing tackle football dropped 22 percent, to just above 3 million. In a study published in JAMA Pediatrics this year, researchers found that the fall in participation coincides closely with the rise of media coverage of football’s links to traumatic brain injuries.
The attention to brain injury risks turning football playing into a regional pursuit. In New England, according to SFIA data, the number of players has decreased by 61 percent in the past decade.
Bob Broderick, co-founder of football pad company Xtech, says he has spoken to nearly 2,000 high schools in the past few years and the appetite for youth football remains undiminished in Texas and the rest of the Southeast. “Whether you want to call it a religion, culture, or way of life, that’s the way it is down there,” he says. His most common problem is parents who want pads in smaller sizes for younger kids. “I bet you, in the last month, I’ve turned away 300 kids because we don’t make a product that’s small enough.”
It’s not clear that youth football’s shrinking footprint matters much for the health of the NFL. “The vast majority of people who watch the NFL have never played tackle football in their lives,” says Ganis. As long as elite players keep coming through the college ranks, he says, the league will be fine. And if the next generation’s Tom Brady opts to play baseball, who’s going to notice?
“The reality is that football is such a fun game for fans and a good game for TV,” says Nowinski, the anti-concussion activist, “that even if the quality was slightly worse, it would still be a massively popular enterprise.”
Jerry Richardson, the 82-year-old fast-food magnate who had owned the Carolina Panthers for a quarter century, was forced to sell the team earlier this year following revelations that he had sexually harassed team employees. Richardson, who had been one of the NFL’s most powerful owners, was a prime example of the old boys’ club that runs the league. The ownership ranks include the CEO of a truck-stop chain that has been accused by federal prosecutors of cheating customers out of fuel rebates, the scion of a heating and air conditioning fortune with a DUI on his record, and several heirs to oil money. They are not necessarily the group one would choose to steer an enterprise into the chaotic future of sports and entertainment in America.
But there’s no shortage of new economy billionaires lining up to replace them, just as hedge fund chief David Tepper did with his $2.3 billion takeover the Panthers. The fury that now surrounds these men, and they are mostly men, is both a test of their power and a testament to it. As much as they might long for the days before CTE was a household term, Kaepernick was a civil rights hero, and Trump was president, they’re happy to be in the middle of the conversation. It’s proof that they still matter.
by Ira Boudway and Eben Novy-Williams, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Getty
