America's $37B Money Machine

I know a lot of you will be getting your NFL on this weekend. Regular season started last month and its only natural to be interested in the league that has turned into an absolute beast:

• Revenue hit $23B in 2025 (top among all sports leagues)

• It has the highest average sports franchise value at $7B (vs. NBA at $4B, MLB at $3B, English Premier League at $2B and my pick-up basketball league of whoever is at the court on Saturday around 10am at $0).

• Over 90 of the 100 most-watched TV broadcasts in America are NFL games

• 30 million people play NFL fantasy football and a projected $30B will be bet on the sport in 2025

But these numbers don't capture what the NFL actually is.

(Remember my intro a second ago)… Commissioner Roger Goodell once said he wants the NFL mentioned alongside Disney and the Vatican. The Disney comparison is obvious it's entertainment. The Vatican part? That's where it gets interesting. The NFL hasn't just built a successful sports league. It's constructed something closer to a civic religion, and that explains everything else: the economic power, the institutional capture we're about to see.

The Perfect Ritual

American football is just the perfect media asset in the age of the internet. But more than that, it's the perfect ritual for an age that's lost most of its rituals.

There are only 17 weekly regular-season games for each team. So, every game is scarce and it's a shared event because everyone knows everyone else is watching. Relative to other leagues, it's a smaller time commitment and the individual games are higher stakes (I'm looking at you, MLB). The game is very strategic as countless Madden fiends will know. Since the game is snap-by-snap, there is a lot of time for replays and commentary to explain the plays and suck people further into the footyball lore.

This isn't accidental design, it's near-optimal for creating communal viewing. The once-a-week schedule mirrors religious services. The snap-by-snap structure allows for constant commercial breaks, but it also creates natural pauses for discussion, explanation, and bonding. You can watch football with casual fans and explain plays in real-time. Try that with hockey or soccer.

Scandals Are a Test of Faith (longevity baby)

Now here's where the religious framing gets uncomfortable. The NFL's multi-decade growth has continued through revelations that the sport causes chronic traumatic encephalopathy—permanent brain damage—in the majority of players who play for years. Through domestic violence scandals. Through the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick for protesting police violence.

These aren't scandals the league 'survived'… they're evidence of its institutional power. The NFL has known about CTE risks since at least the 1990s. That's not ancient history; that's a multi-decade active choice to downplay and deny the risks while players' brains get smooshed and deteriorate. What kind of institution can maintain and grow its following while openly producing brain damage in its workforce? (UFC does the same thing and I still watch that, so...)

The Catholic Church maintained power through far worse. That's not even a cheap comparison it's the accurate one. When your cultural position is strong enough, scandal becomes a test of faith rather than a reason to leave. The people who stayed NFL fans through CTE news didn't leave because the NFL provides something deeper than entertainment: community, identity, ritual, belonging. You don't abandon those things easily.

90 million people watched the last Super Bowl. They knew about CTE. They watched anyway. I'll probably watch this year's Super Bowl too. That's not a business success story at all, that's cultural power.

Ritual vs. Celebrity

Either way, the NFL's ability to monetize scarce attention is unparalleled.

Writer Derek Thompson brought up a great point earlier in the year regarding the dichotomy between how people watch the NFL and NBA:

It's an observing ritual. NBA fans consume content about the sport; NFL fans participate in the sport's weekly ceremony. You don't need to watch LeBron play to care about LeBron's career. But if you're not watching the actual NFL game on Sunday, you're excluded from the communal experience. You missed church.

The NFL has successfully positioned itself as a shared civic event in the same way church services or town halls once were. You have to be there, or you miss the collective experience. That's why 90 of the top 100 TV broadcasts are NFL games. It's one of the last thing Americans reliably do together.

The NBA Cinematic Universe (social media drama, podcasts, individual star brands) is largely off-court and isn't monetized that well by the NBA. It's celebrity culture. Conversely, the NFL product is milked to the highest degree with multiple game packages sold to the highest bidders with massive audiences (Sunday, Sunday Night, Monday Night, Thursday Night). It's evidence that the NFL controls the actual gathering, not just the gossip about it.

Media Rights and the Future

Even though the NFL is not very popular outside of North America—while basketball is the second-most popular sport in the world (after soccer…sorry, “football”)—the comparison with the NBA suggests there is even more revenue to be squeezed.

Beginning in 2025, the NBA's newly signed rights deal is valued at $77B over 11 years. That's a 2.5x increase compared to the NBA's previous deal and stacks up relatively well to the $111B over 11 years that the NFL signed for in 2021.

Based on their cultural cachet, the NBA at $7B per year suggests that the NFL should be making a lot more than $10B per year on the media rights side. Clearly, NBA commissioner Adam Silver is a very strong negotiator. But the win for the NBA will end up being a win for the NFL because a new floor has been set.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell took on the role in 2006. In 2010, he predicted that the NFL would hit revenue of $25B by 2025. He basically called his shot and looks to be positioning the league for its next deal that could be $15-20B a year just on media rights.

He's doing this even as the cable TV industry—which the NFL is almost entirely propping up—continues to wither.

One reason is that the league has all its digital chips in place. The upcoming season is the first one in NFL history when every game is offered over-the-top. This is driven by the launch of the new-and-improved ESPN and Fox One streaming apps.

In fact, the NFL recently struck a deal with "The Worldwide Leader In Sports" to further strengthen its hand: it took a 10% stake in ESPN in exchange for giving the ABC-owned sports network top-tier NFL media assets including cable (NFL Network, NFL RedZone) and digital (NFL Fantasy).

By beefing up ESPN and its parent Disney, the NFL ensures there's a strong legacy bidder for its media rights. With cable TV players getting clapped, the NFL doesn't want Big Tech—Amazon already has Thursday Night and YouTube has NFL Sunday Ticket (and Netflix did the Christmas Games)—to be the only people bidding.

The College Football Money Machine

The NFL isn't the only football money machine in America.

If the NFL is America's civic religion, college football is how that religion captured the education system itself.

American Football is also a beast at the US college sports level (US College Game Day dominates on Saturday while NFL obviously goes hard AF on Sunday).

Sports-league revenue for NCAA reached $19B in 2024, which is more than any global sport league besides the NFL. College football makes up 3/4 of that figure (the remaining 1/4 is for men's basketball), which works out to ~$14B and is more than either the MLB or NBA (~$13B each).

Before Europeans yell at me, the combined revenue for top five European football leagues is ~$21.5B:

• English Premier League: $8B

• La Liga in Spain: $4.5B

• Bundesliga in Germany: $4B

• Series A in Italy: $3B

• Ligue 1 in France: $2B

But each individually is smaller than aforementioned American leagues and the total value is still less than the NFL.

Combined, the NFL and College Football did $37B of revenue in 2024.

For comparison's sake, $37B is more revenue than everyone's favourite maker of semiconductor machines (ASML, $35.4B), Spiced Pumpkin Lattes (Starbucks, $36.6B) and interest-rate rigging scandals (Barclays, $36.6B).

I actually don't know if that's too low based on football's mindshare in America.

I'll leave it for you to decide by listing a random mix of companies with higher revenue including Salesforce ($39B), Visa ($39B), Nike ($46B) and Coca-Cola ($47B).

The football revenue is in the ballpark with the world's largest media players: Warner Bros. Discovery ($39B), Netflix ($42B), YouTube ads and subscriptions (~$50B) or Disney ex-theme parks and cruises (~$60B).

To be clear: America's education-based football generates more revenue than Salesforce, Visa, or Starbucks. Let that sink in for a moment before we look at where that money actually goes.

Institutional Capture

Back to the lucrative business of college sports. They've systematically captured it. Here's what institutional capture actually looks like, per The Economist:

• In 43 of 50 states, the highest paid public employee is a college football or basketball coach

• 60% of athletic department spending goes to just three categories: facilities, coaching salaries, and athletic staff pay—while barely 10% goes to scholarships

• 70% of top-tier sporting public universities use academic funds to prop up their athletic programs

• Over the past 20 years, athletic-department spending has grown by 244%, compared with a 113% rise in academic spending

Think about what this actually means. In 43 states, the person deemed most valuable to public institutions isn't a cancer researcher, climate scientist, or educator training the next generation. It's a football coach. Public universities—institutions theoretically designed to advance human knowledge—are systematically starving their academic missions to fund their football programs. Athletic spending is growing at more than double the rate of academic spending.

This isn't a warp. It's a systematic transfer of public education resources to entertainment infrastructure. And it's all happening while students drown in debt and adjunct professors need food stamps.

Tax-Exempt Status: Football as Religious Institution

As with most sports leagues, college sports make money from media rights, ticketing, sponsorship and merch.

There are two notable differences, though both of which reveal how football has achieved religious-institution status in American law.

First, college sports operates as non-profits. Not only does it shield the NCAA and major college leagues from certain taxes, but its partners can deduct fees paid from their own taxes. Here's The Washington Post explaining the scheme:

Let's be clear about what this means: Churches and educational institutions get tax exemptions because they supposedly serve the public good. The NCAA generates billions in revenue, pays coaches multi-million dollar salaries, and has successfully maintained the same tax treatment as organizations feeding the homeless or advancing scientific research. Football has literally achieved religious-institution status in the tax code.

The End of Free Labor

Second, the schools never paid the student athletes…until now.

After being eligible to monetize their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) in 2021—Arch Manning currently tops the NIL list at ~$7m—this year will be the first time schools will pay student athletes. Each school will have a $20.5m salary cap.

The allowance of salaries came after a class action lawsuit against the NCAA from former student athletes. Over the next decade, the NCAA will pay $2.8B to eligible college players who had played any time since 2016 (the payout is 75% for football, 15% men's basketball, 5% women's basketball, 5% remainder).

To be clear: the NCAA and its member schools ran a cartel that extracted billions in free labor from athletes for decades, all while operating as tax-exempt nonprofits. They only started paying players after losing in court. Without the free labor, schools will really have to figure out the balance between academic and athletic budgeting. Their non-profit status may soon be challenged too.

But here's the thing: none of this will meaningfully slow college football down. That's the power of civic religion, you don't question the institutions that provide your community and identity. You defend them.

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The Tithing System

And like any religion, the NFL has its tithing system. A projected $30B will be bet on football in 2025. In other words… nearly $100 per American, $1,000+ per serious fan. Sports betting was illegal in most states until 2018; its explosion tracks nearly perfectly with the decline in traditional religious giving and church attendance.

Americans are spending less at church, more on parlays. The NFL isn't just accepting this shift It's actively monetizing it through partnerships with betting companies, in-broadcast odds discussion, and real-time prop bet integration. The league has transformed gambling from vice to participation, from sin to sacrament. You're not just watching the service anymore…you're making offerings.

Cultural Power

However that shakes out, America's overall obsession with football is unlikely to diminish. And that brings us back to Roger Goodell's quote.

"Roger doesn't view the other leagues as competition," an NFL executive says in Ken Belson's new book "Every Day Is Sunday." "He wants to be mentioned with Disney and the Vatican, these massive institutions."

When Goodell said that, he wasn't being grandiose—he was being accurate. Disney makes entertainment people consume. The Vatican provides community, ritual, shared identity, and collective meaning.

The NFL does both.

It's built a $23B-per-year enterprise by filling the vacuum left by declining civic institutions—churches, unions, town halls, local newspapers, shared national experiences. It provides weekly ritual (Sunday, Monday Night, Thursday Night), tribal identity (your team), communal gathering (watch parties, tailgates, sports bars), and a shared calendar of holy days (Wild Card Weekend, Conference Championships, the Super Bowl).

That it produces brain damage in its players, captures educational institutions, operates tax-exempt while generating billions, and monetizes gambling addiction at scale? That's not a bug in the system—that's proof the system works exactly as designed.

You don't question the institutions that provide your community, identity, and meaning. You defend them. You make excuses for them. You keep showing up.

90 million people will watch the Super Bowl knowing everything in this article. They'll watch anyway. So will I, probably with money on Taylor Swift prop bets and a Jerome Bettis jersey in my closet from 2006.

This is not a business success story. It’s cultural power. That's what it looks like when entertainment becomes religion and religion captures the state.

And the NFL is just getting started.

Stay curious 🙂 

- John.