Written by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell boldly declared back in 2010 that the league, which had earned a bit more than $8 billion in annual revenue the prior year, would generate $25 billion annually by 2027. The league seems on pace to hit that goal, even after Covid slowed growth a tiny bit over two seasons. On the strength of its live television viewership dominance, the NFL earned about $18 Billion in 2021. It’s new distribution deals completed last year lock in $113 billion over the next 11 years. This is all before a single ticket or jersey is sold and doesn’t even take into account what had been one of the most valuable pieces of the NFL’s media catalog, its “Sunday Ticket,” the ability to watch all out-of-market games live both in homes and in restaurants and bars goes back to out to bid this year.
This dual prosperity and popularity are reflected in team values which have again hit record highs, with the recent sale of the Denver Broncos for more than $4.6 billion, and 75 of the top 100 most watched shows of 2021 being NFL games, and 2021 included a presidential inauguration and an Olympic Games. Only President Biden managed to puncture the NFL’s vice grip on the top 30 most watched shows twice with his inauguration in January and first address to Congress in April and those were carried on virtually every network and cable platform.
So why then write about the NFL’s problems with women? It is because to keep growing and hit that revenue projection the NFL, by Goodell’s own calculus, needs 200 million domestic fans to watch, consume, attend, bet on, and purchase NFL products and there are only about 165 million men in America. The NFL must attract and retain a sizeable percentage of female fans to hit and sustain that threshold. We can break the bad news to Commissioner Goodell and his owners now, not all those 165 million men are football fans or ever will be. For the NFL to keep its own growth on target and hit that 200 million fan threshold it will need an audience that includes approximately 80-90 million women, or not quite every other woman out of the 167 million in the country.
But this was an off-season that gave women a reason to look away or just wince at times. The actions of Cleveland Browns quarterback DeShaun Watson, the league’s highest paid player, in seeking sex acts from women working in massage parlors; of Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder perpetuating a climate of mistreatment and discrimination of women around his franchise and his failures in being accountable to correct that climate; and now revelations that the Buffalo Bills, a feel-good Super Bowl contender, did not know about allegations that their newly-drafted punter, Kyle Araiza, was alleged to have participated in a sexual assault on a seventeen year-old, have all put the league and its compact with and treatment of women front and center.
Reports of the NFL’s demise have been exaggerated before. CTE, bad post-retirement outcomes for players, and player misconduct all have been known for some time and had little effect on the fundamentals of the league’s business model. But if a sport as widely popular and economically dominant as the NFL currently is loses popularity, it is more likely to come through a thousand smaller cuts, as Culture in Sports contributor Sam Marchiano recently postulated. Which is why a league wanting 80 million women to be more than just fans and become active consumers needs to give women a reason to want to be.
The NFL has been here before under Goodell’s leadership. When video of Baltimore Ravens’ running back Ray Rice violently assaulting his then fiancée in an Atlantic City elevator in 2014, for which he received a paltry two-game suspension, surfaced the beginning of a new season was effectively hijacked and the rest of that year and the next the NFL struggled against a wave of domestic violence.
But this time around at least where Watson is concerned the NFL’s process, positioning, and timing has been better. Watson will receive a substantial suspension and fine and must meet conditions of treatment and conduct to rejoin the league and he stipulated to it so there will be no protracted appeal. It was Goodell and the league that pressed for this outcome even after an initial arbitration found only a 6-game penalty was the maximum proportionate penalty for non-violent violation of the league’s personal conduct policy. Goodell has even managed to raise that proportionate maximum penalty now for egregious non-violent conduct. The Bills also swiftly cut ties with that punter although some questions remain about why they weren’t aware of these allegations sooner.
Snyder and the Washington situation may be more intractable. He’s a billionaire, and the length and cost of the league trying to take the franchise from him might not be tenable for Goodell and the owners. But more people within the NFL, starting with the commissioner, recognize that for the league to meet its goals it needs women, who will also account for a greater share of wealth in this country with each passing year, have reasons to turn toward and not away from the NFL.