The National Football League can’t lose. Its schedule runs from September through February, from preseason to the Super Bowl, but it dominates headlines year-round, giving life to an entire ecosystem of niche media outlets and personalities. It dwarfs competitors stateside and abroad, emerging unscathed from waves of economic and political upheaval. How did professional football so thoroughly conquer the sports world?
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1958
Arguably the year football displaced baseball as America’s true national pastime thanks to “the greatest game ever played” — Baltimore Colts vs. New York Giants in the NFL Championship at Yankee Stadium. Nine years before the first Super Bowl, Johnny Unitas led the Colts to victory in sudden-death overtime as some 45 million people watched from home. By the 1970s Americans regularly ranked football as their favorite sport. That hasn’t changed since 1983.
84 of the top 100 broadcasts
Twice as many viewers watched Super Bowl LIX than 2025’s second-place broadcast. The big game commands about $8 million per 30-second ad — over $266,000 per second. Only the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, World Series Game 7 and President Donald J. Trump (twice) joined the NFL in the top 50. Current broadcast and streaming deals total $110 billion over 11 years, or roughly half of the league’s $23 billion in annual revenue — double that of Major League Baseball.
Thanksgiving Eve
A new holiday? That’s the NFL’s plan for Wednesday night, November 25, 2026. The league has games scheduled on six days of the week and all the major holidays, including New Year’s Eve, Black Friday and Valentine’s Day. Perhaps the league’s first invented holiday came in 2000, when Baltimore Ravens coaches banned the word “playoffs”; players started calling them “Festivus” instead — an homage to the NBC sitcom “Seinfeld.”
The National Football League isn’t just a sports league — it’s an economic and commercial empire. NFL games dominate television ratings, team valuations are skyrocketing, and the league’s global expansion shows no signs of slowing down.
— Mark Conrad, Fordham University Professor of Law and Ethics
100,024
The seating capacity at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where the NFL held its first regular-season game in Australia on September 11. That’s 17,524 more seats than the league’s largest: MetLife Stadium, home to the New York Jets and Giants, 14 time zones away. Games in London, Paris, Munich, Madrid, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro this fall are an ambitious departure from the struggles of NFL Europe, a developmental league that endured from 1991 to 2007, including a two-year hiatus.
150 million
Copies of the “Madden NFL” video game series sold 1998-2021. It’s named after legendary coach and commentator John Madden, whose video “tele-strations” and bro-y stories made football’s complex tactics accessible to millions of casual fans. The game reflects that approach, as do fantasy football (50 million players worldwide), the NFL draft (13.2 million opening-night viewers in 2026), NFL RedZone and HBO’s “Hard Knocks” — products that keep the league relevant year-round.
$9.6 billion
The amount venture capitalist Vinod Khosla paid for the Seattle Seahawks in July, setting a new NFL record. The league’s most valuable franchise, meanwhile, is the Dallas Cowboys. Purchased by current owner Jerry Jones in 1989 for a then-record sum of $140 million, Forbes values “America’s team” at $13 billion today — a 9,000 percent return on investment. The Green Bay Packers are the only team in the NFL — and the United States — owned by fans, whose “shares” are mostly ceremonial.
$20 million
The annual salary of Kansas City Chiefs head coach and BYU alum Andy Reid, America’s highest-paid coach in any sport. His quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, earns $64 million per year as the NFL’s highest-paid player. The minimum rookie salary is $885,000. Each team can pay their roster up to $301.2 million under the salary cap. The average playing career lasts 3.3 years. One study found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease, in 345 of 376 former players.
This story appears in the October 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “The greatest show on turf.” Learn more about how to subscribe.
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