With a concluding note on how some of the economics work
Theodore Roosevelt politicalized football and off we went!
11 February 2023 – Since the nineteen-sixties, football has been the most popular American sport, and the Super Bowl is the most highly rated television program of the year. And the highest earning. This year’s championship game (tomorrow night) will generate roughly $14.6 billion (the total revenue across the NFL season is estimated to be $20 billion). Advertising Age estimates advertising revenue from the Super Bowl alone this year will be more than $900 million. Fox has set the cost of a 30-second ad at $7 million.
Frankly, I never saw the fascination with football. I have never been a fan, even as a kid. I always saw it as the NFL/collegiate powers’ mercenary marriage of patriotism, military, violence and unquestioned loyalty. With its military-like strategy on the field and its culture of conflict and male solidarity. An American “cultural thing” that permeates living rooms and language, and even the holidays. I have never seen it as a “sport”. Too much religious, quasi messianic tonalities, resonant with awe, horror, and excess.
But hey, that’s just me. I have not watched a game in over 20 years. Probably been in Europe for too long. Maybe I am missing something.
Oh, yes, I am missing the carnage. Last month a player suffered cardiac arrest mid-game, suddenly collapsing on the field following a tackle during a game. He was given CPR in front of a stunned crowd that included his parents. He is on the mend.
But that all seems rather quaint next to the NFL’s primary existential threat: the near guarantee that football causes lasting brain damage. Not too long ago, a headline-grabbing study of the brains of 111 deceased NFL players found signs of CTE, a degenerative brain condition brought on by repeated strikes to the head, in 110 of them.
NOTE: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive head trauma, was first revealed in U.S. football players. Since the initial discovery of the disease and what it does to the brain scientists have discovered that linebackers, who engage in a series of smaller collisions during every play, do worse than other players who may take harder, but fewer hits during the average game. But U.S. football is not the only contact sport where repeated head trauma is common. Neurologists are stating the trauma sustained by European football players (soccer, for my U.S. readers) may rival U.S. football’s impact on the brain. It does not matter how head contact/impact comes about, but that it is done repeatedly.
A handful of U.S. players have retired early citing concern for their brain health. Participation in high school football is down 2.5% this year. That’s to say nothing of the untold number of parents now steering younger kids into other sports. Fans, too, have begun to question the ethics of supporting a sport they know harms players.
And it has certainly infused American politics. What post-World War II President has dared to question it? Dwight Eisenhower played at West Point and injured his knee tackling Jim Thorpe. Gerald Ford entertained offers from the Lions and the Packers before settling on Yale Law School. Ronald Reagan was a real-life guard for the Eureka College Golden Tornadoes and a make-believe halfback in “Knute Rockne: All American.” Hunter S. Thompson considered Richard Nixon a weirdo and a crook, but he warmed to him when he discovered that the President was a “goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.”
Yet there is a streak of official reformism when it comes to football. And it all began with Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States and commonly referred to as “T.R.” He simple loved the game. In a 1903 interview he said:
“I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal. My motto: “Hit the line hard.”
Donald Trump (more of a soft-palmed indoorsman) once said he’d like to join T.R. on Mt. Machismo someday.
But alas, death stalked. In a clipping I found in The Chicago Tribune on-line archives a reporter noted the football season of 1905 was a “death harvest.” The game, with its battering-ram formations and minimal equipment, saw nineteen deaths, a hundred and thirty-seven serious injuries, and countless broken bones. The administrators at Northwestern, Columbia, and Duke dumped the sport, Stanford switched to rugby, and Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, declared that football was “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting, or bullfighting.”
T.R., fearing that Eliot would “emasculate” the game, if not ban it, summoned officials from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House, and implored them to find ways of ratcheting back the carnage or risk the end of football. The next year, college officials outlawed the most punishing formations, instituted the forward pass, and created a “neutral zone” between the defense and the offense.
But, as the players grew bigger and faster, as the equipment “needed to become more combat ready” (as legendary football tackler Alex Karras once noted) and incentives to “take out” an opposing player grew with the financial rewards, the T.R.-era reforms and subsequent tweaks to the rules and the equipment failed to keep up. In 1994, Paul Tagliabue, the league commissioner, dismissed widespread reports about debilitating head injuries as a “pack-journalism issue” … while sitting on reports contradicting those very words. Obviously taking his cue from the tobacco industry PR machine. His successor, Roger Goodell, faced with overwhelming evidence of the toll on players, still acts with the stealthy instincts of “a coal-company executive charged with keeping terrible secrets” (David Remnick in a recent story about American football in The New Yorker).
The N.F.L.’s leverage against reform is not limited to its fantastically profitable deals with the networks and the advertisers. If you can believe it, up until recently, the NFL was tax exempt. Basically, said an NFL spokesman, the economic value of the exemption wasn’t worth the political and PR headaches that it created. In a memo to the league’s teams and members of Congress, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell called the tax-exemption a “distraction,” and said it has “been mischaracterized repeatedly in recent years.”
Yep. Political threats to revoke the tax-exemption of pro sports organizations held populist appeal. After all, how can commercial outfits that sell expensive tickets and generate millions of dollars for owners and players be considered non-profit organizations – and thus exempt from paying taxes? The NFL is no charity.
So how did the NFL obtain tax-exempt in the first place? Well, due to politics and corruption – the staples of American life.
The NFL had historically filed as a 501 (c)(6) non-profit, which provides tax-exemptions for “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real estate boards, boards of trade, and professional football leagues.” This legislative quirk dates back to the 1966 NFL-AFL merger. “Professional football leagues” were added to the tax code that year to ensure that the merger could go forward “without fear of an anti-trust challenge under either the Clayton Antitrust Act or the Federal Trade Commissions Act,” and to ensure that “a professional football league’s exemption would not be jeopardized because it administered a players’ pension fund”, according to the Internal Revenue Service.
In return for this favorable treatment of the merger – which was pushed hard and managed hard by two Democratic lawmakers, Louisiana Senator Russell Long, chairman of the Finance Committee, and Louisiana representative Hale Boggs, House majority whip – New Orleans was awarded the NFL’s next expansion franchise. Ta-da!! Legislation passed!!
So a tax windfall to the American public who has subsidized the NFL all this time? Hardly. Somehow, despite the billions earned, the NFL was only able to generate $16 million in income during the 2020 tax year. So repealing the NFL’s tax exemption is not creating the windfall politicians predicted.
The game itself is undeniably alluring. At its best, football is a uniquely American spectacle: fast, brutal, complex, colorful.
But the modern football fan might … might … be slowly finding out he is in possession of a conscience and a reasonable knowledge of the horrific statistics about injuries suffered by players. The riposte? “Hey. Caveat emptor. These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?” When parents don’t want their kids to play a sport anymore – which largely became the case with boxing – that sport either dies or shifts to the margins.
But it is very hard to imagine football losing its place in the culture anytime soon, with billions of $$$$ to be made, with ratings for games (college and pro) remaining so high, and – most importantly – when so many young people — not least young black Americans and rural whites who make up 87% of the players in the NFL and see it as their only financial resource — continue to play it.
Yet as the N.F.L. takes half-measures and pressures its critics, the better to safeguard its gold mine, each day brings another player who challenges its fandom. A few years ago Antwaan Randle El, considered to be a brilliant all-around player for the Steelers, had told a reporter that he has trouble walking down stairs and that, though he was only thirty-six years old at the time, his memory is failing. “I ask my wife things over and over again, and she’s, like, ‘I just told you that'”. It brought out similar stories from scores of ex-players.
And it was only after his death that we found out football legend Ken Stabler had Stage 3 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, nearly the highest severity of the brain disease. The stage includes decision-making dysfunction and cognitive impairment. Boston University researchers say it was due to ramifications of a life in a collision sport.
The violent nature of the game — the focus of our guilty pleasure — is the same thing that breaks spines, shatters bones, renders middle-aged men demented. But there will never be adequate reform. There was none after the horror of Sandy Hook. And now you want it for a simple “sport”? Boy, you don’t get how the U.S. works.
No, ain’t gonna happen. As I have mentioned in previous posts, corporate oligarchs have seized all institutional systems of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, sports, along with nearly all forms of communication, are in corporate hands. American “democracy” … with those faux debates between two corporate parties … is meaningless political theater.
So go ahead. Grab a few beers and enjoy the carnage. And ignore the men behind the curtain.
A brief word on some of the economics
Apple is paying the NFL $250 million over 5 years to sponsor the Super Bowl halftime show. But here’s the craziest part: Rihanna (who heads the halftime show) won’t be paid a dime for this year’s show, and performers often spend millions of dollars of their own money on production costs.
In fact, the NFL has convinced some of the world’s most prominent artists to perform at the Super Bowl for free:
• Prince
• Michael Jackson
• Bruce Springsteen
• Beyonce
• Justin Timberlake
• The Rolling Stones
• Shakira
• Jennifer Lopez
Here’s how the financials work:
• NFL signs a $50M sponsorship deal (some higher)
• Artists get a $10M to $15M production budget
This budget covers 2,000 to 3,000 part-time workers, including set design, security, dancers, and marketing. But artists don’t get any of the money. In fact, some artists end up spending millions of dollars of their own money on the performance.
For example, The Weeknd spent $7 million of personal cash on his show at Super Bowl 55, and Dr. Dre reportedly spent a similar amount last year.
So why do they do it?
Exposure.
The Super Bowl is watched by 200 million people globally. So while brands spend $7 million for 30-second commercials during this year’s game, Rihanna will receive a 15-minute commercial for free. That is much more valuable than her performance fee. And the data backs it up. Just a few bits from a data stream from AdAge, AdWeek, StubHub, Variety plus a few other sources:
• Justin Timberlake saw a 534% increase in music sales after Super Bowl 52.
• Travis Scott’s performance fee went from $500k to $1M after Super Bowl 53.
• Jennifer Lopez & Shakira gained 3M followers after Super Bowl 54.
And it’s even better when artists time it up with a tour:
• The Weeknd sold 1 million concert tickets a week after Super Bowl 55.
• The Rolling Stones set a record with $558M in revenue for their tour after their show at Super Bowl 40.
And StubHub says artists usually see a 50% increase in concert ticket searches after each Super Bowl.
Rihanna hasn’t released an album since 2016 and doesn’t have an upcoming tour scheduled. But she still has plenty of ways to make money. For example, Apple TV is paying her several million dollars for a documentary about her Super Bowl performance.
But not everyone is as fortunate. The NFL previously asked professional dancers to volunteer during halftime at the Super Bowl. The dancers were required to attend 72 hours of rehearsals across 9 days leading up to the game. But after a leaked contract went viral last year, the NFL now pays dancers $15/hour.
Still, the bottom line is clear:
• The NFL makes millions off the Super Bowl halftime show and can afford to pay talent their fee.
• But given the promise of 200 million viewers and billions of impressions on social media, plenty of people are willing to do it for free.